Swahili is Africa’s most spoken language?

Hyderabad: Once just an obscure island dialect of an African Bantu tongue, Swahili has evolved into Africa’s most internationally recognised language. Over the two millennia of Swahili’s growth and adaptation, immigrants from inland Africa, traders from Asia, Arab and European occupiers, European and Indian settlers, colonial rulers, and individuals from postcolonial nations – have used […]

Hyderabad: Once just an obscure island dialect of an African Bantu tongue, Swahili has evolved into Africa’s most internationally recognised language.

Over the two millennia of Swahili’s growth and adaptation, immigrants from inland Africa, traders from Asia, Arab and European occupiers, European and Indian settlers, colonial rulers, and individuals from postcolonial nations – have used Swahili and adapted it to their own purposes. They have taken it wherever they have gone to the west.

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Africa’s Swahili-speaking zone now extends across a full third of the continent.

The origins

The historical lands of Swahili are on East Africa’s Indian Ocean littoral. A 2,500-km chain of towns from Mogadishu, Somalia to Sofala, Mozambique as well as offshore islands as far away as the Comoros and Seychelles.

This coastal region has long served as an international crossroads of trade and human movement. People from Indonesia, Persia, the African Great Lakes, the United States and Europe all encountered one another. Hunter-gatherers, pastoralists, and farmers mingled with traders. Africans devoted to ancestors and the spirits of their lands met Muslims, Hindus, Portuguese Catholics, and British Anglicans. Workers (among them slaves, porters, and labourers), soldiers, rulers, and diplomats were mixed together from ancient days. Anyone who went to the East African littoral could choose to become Swahili, and many did.

African unity

The role of Swahili advocates includes intellectuals, freedom fighters, civil rights activists, political leaders, professional societies, entertainers, health workers, writers, poets, and artists.
The African Union’s decision to make Swahili an international language was striking given that the populations of its member States speak an estimated 2,000 languages. Swahili has a long history of integrating people across the continent of Africa.

A liberation language

During the decades leading up to the independence of Kenya, Uganda, and Tanzania in the 1960s, Swahili functioned as an international means of political collaboration. It enabled African freedom fighters to communicate their common aspirations even though their native languages varied.

The rise of Swahili, for some Africans, was a mark of true cultural and personal independence from the colonising Europeans. Uniquely among Africa’s independent nations, Tanzania’s government uses Swahili for all official business and in basic education.

Presidents Julius Nyerere of Tanzania (1962–85) and Jomo Kenyatta of Kenya (1964–78) promoted Swahili as integral to the region’s political and economic interests, security, and liberation. The political power of language was demonstrated by Ugandan dictator Idi Amin (1971–79), who used Swahili for his army and secret police operations.

Socialist overtones

Nyerere even made the term Swahili a referent to Tanzanian citizenship. Later, this label acquired socialist overtones in praising the common men and women of the nation. Ultimately, the term grew even further to encompass the poor of all races, of both African and non-African descent.

In 1966, activist Maulana Ron Karenga associated the black freedom movement with Swahili, choosing Swahili as its official language.

Today

Today, Swahili is the African language most widely recognised outside the continent. The global presence of Swahili in radio broadcasting and on the internet has no equal among sub-Saharan African languages.
Swahili is broadcast regularly in Burundi, the DRC, Kenya, Liberia, Nigeria, Rwanda, South Africa, Sudan, Swaziland, and Tanzania.

Swahili words and speech have been heard in hundreds of movies and television series, such as Star Trek, Out of Africa, The Lion King, and Lara Croft: Tomb Raider.

Swahili lacks the numbers of speakers, wealth, and political power associated with global languages such as Mandarin, English, or Spanish. However, by making it an official language, the people who were eventually designated Waswahili (Swahili people) created a niche for themselves.