Hakuna Matata in the streets of Germany

• Ties that bind: It is not by coincidence that learning Kiswahili is relatively easy to Germans compared to other Europeans. The drafting of the language’s first grammar was heavily influenced by the called “First German Ambassador” to East Africa, Dr Johannes Ludwig Krapf

Long before the phrase hakuna matata was made popular by the Hollywood animation blockbuster Lion King, Kiswahili had already started making inroads into the West through the East African Diaspora and tourism.

This ignited curiosity and interest among Western academics, which then led to the rapid rise of the language’s popularity in the northern hemisphere.

Germany, a country with a strong historical connection to Tanzania, is one of the fastest growing Kiswahili hotspots in Europe.

“Mambo vipi?” a group of young women exclaimed, to my amazement, after realising I’m Kenyan at an outdoor event in the streets of Berlin during a recent visit. “Hamna noma eh?”, they went on in a mixture of Kiswahili and Sheng phrases that, until then, I only expected to hear in the streets of Nairobi.

A few questions later, while still nursing my shock, I discovered that the two were sisters who spent their childhood in Tanzania during their father’s tour of duty in the late ’80s. Although Nina, the eldest, had to re-orient herself with the language when she travelled to Dar-es-Salaam last year, her passion for Kiswahili is evident

“I love the language and the journey back to Tanzania was very exciting for me since it was an opportunity to practice my Kiswahili,” she explained. “Besides, being able to speak the language was very instrumental in my understanding of the local way of life”.

The 30-year-old who occasionally works in a Berlin kindergarten says she teaches children some Kiswahili phrases.

“One of my motivations for taking up Kiswahili is the fact that the language has very nice sounds, the grammar is understandable and I can pronounce it easily because it has the same letters and sounds as German,” Nina says.

It’s not by coincidence that learning Kiswahili is relatively easy to Germans compared to other Europeans. The drafting of the early Kiswahili grammar and linguistics was heavily influenced by the so-called “First German Ambassador” to East Africa, Dr Johannes Ludwig Krapf.

In a quest to build a communication bridge between sub-Saharan Africa and Europe, Dr Krapf also adopted the Roman script in written Kiswahili, which until then was using the Arabic alphabet.

The ambitious scholar also wrote the first comprehensive Kiswahili dictionary that laid the basis for later editions. For these milestone contributions towards the development of the language, Dr Krapf has been considered by many as the father of modern Kiswahili linguistics.

But German colonial masters embraced a philosophy of learning local languages in fear that, if Tanzanians were to learn German, they would develop revolutionary ideas and overthrow the colonisers. This, according to scholars, greatly hampered any further linguistic interactions between Kiswahili and German.

While shule and hela are the only German words in today’s Kiswahili, the Portuguese contributed pesa, meza and leso, while the English have shilingi, redio, and televisheni, among many others.

Despite these earlier hitches, the relationship between Tanzania and her former colonial master has been one of the forces behind the rise of the Kiswahili movement in Europe. Many foreign Kiswahili lecturers in German universities are Tanzanians.

However, these East African teachers play a peripheral role since most scholars behind the popularity of the language in this European country are natives.

“Many students in Europe and America prefer Kiswahili because it’s less intimidating. It is the only African language with the largest readership in the continent,” explains Dr Kristina Riedel, who worked as a linguist in Berlin before moving to the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where she teaches Kiswahili.

Although more than 15 universities, the highest number in the West, teach Kiswahili in Germany, the University of Humboldt in Berlin has the best programme that entails advanced grammar, linguistics and literature.

Strangely, just like in Kenya, the “disruptive” Sheng, the slang commonly spoken by Kenyan and Tanzanian urban youth, has started influencing the tongues of young German Swahili learners, most of whom are mesmerised by its dynamism and related music genres like Genge and Bongo Flavour.