I, a street Mswahili, answer Evan Mwangi on Walibora

I am asking my friend, Prof Evan Mwangi, to allow me to share with you this long letter that I wrote to him in response to his reflections on our departed mutual friend, Ken Walibora.

Mpendwa Prof, I was touched to learn that Ken Walibora was your student in your UoN days.

I was also amused by your fury at the elderly student who mistook Ken Walibora for Swaleh Mdoe. I do not want to defend the old bureaucrat’s confusion about Mdoe and Walibora.

But I think his blunder was understandable, if you went by what the two then-young screen stars had in common, their mellifluous Kiswahili.

As far as our language, Kiswahili, is concerned, a Mswahili is a Mswahili, regardless of their ethnic or regional origins.

Indeed, this is the core of my urge to respond to the feelings and reflections that you and your dog, Sigmund, shared with us last week on the demise of our beloved Walibora.

You know, of course, that the matter is particularly personal for me. I regard myself as a Mswahili, having picked up the lingo from the streets of Dar es Salaam.

Even more importantly, I wish that you, Sigmund and all East Africans should realise that we are Waswahili.

This begins with our adoption and declaration of Kiswahili as our “national” and official language.

KISWAHILI DIALECT

This brings us to the core of Sigmund’s (and your) differences with Ken Walibora and others whom you call “upcountry” Kenyan writers.

The claims here are, I think, threefold. First, there is the suggestion that the writers try to imitate a Kiswahili “dialect” imposed upon us by colonialists and missionaries.

Secondly, there is the assumption that the use of some Arab-derived terminology is an ostentatious aspiration towards the “sanifu” (standard) variety of Kiswahili.

Thirdly, Sigmund and you imply that the “upcountry” writers’ subscription to a variety of Kiswahili spiced with “Arabisms” betrays an inferiority complex on the part of these writers.

A corollary to this is that their language use makes them sound as if they belong to a faith to which they do not subscribe.

This is quite a heavy and complex package and it needs careful unpacking. I will start with that “Arab” and faith hint because it is the most sensitive and yet the easiest to clarify. Two simple points help us to understand this.

The first is that, although Kiswahili is, structurally, a Bantu language, a significant percentage of its vocabulary is, for historical reasons, derived from Arabic.

English vocabulary, for example, has got a high proportion of Latin-derived words, and no one complains about that.

Mastering Kiswahili requires us to acquire a fair amount of its vocabulary; including those Arabic-derived terms accepted and incorporated in it its lexis. How and where we use them is a matter of style.

STANDARDISATION

Secondly, Arabic is a language and not a faith. It may be the official language of Islam, but speaking it, much less so speaking Kiswahili, does not imply subscribing to that faith.

Latin may be the official language of Catholicism, but speaking a Latin language does not make you a Catholic.

Regarding the “sanifu” (standard) snag, Sigmund is right about the concept and project having been pushed by outsiders, the missionaries and colonial administrators, up to the time of independence.

We note, however, that it was not abandoned in the post-colonial era. Indeed, it is nurtured by institutions like TATAKI (the Institute of Kiswahili Studies) at the University of Dar es Salam, the various National Kiswahili Councils and, more recently and comprehensively, the East African Kiswahili Commission.

This is because, in the case of a trans-boundary language like Kiswahili, some form of standardisation is necessary if we are going to maintain mutual intelligibility across the various dialects.

This means choosing one of the dialects, agreeing on it, and promoting it as the formal variety of the language to be used in education, communication and official contexts.

The missionaries and colonists might not have handled the Kiswahili standardisation process correctly.

Still, by suggesting a standard variety of Kiswahili, they were obeying a sociolinguistic imperative. Fortunately, standardisation is not a happening. It is a continuous process in a living language, like Kiswahili.

Incidentally, despite Sigmund’s impression that standard Kiswahili (sanifu) is coast-based, many coast dwellers, most of them native speakers of Kiswahili, do not have a particularly high opinion of it.

They derisively call it “Kiswahili cha shule” (school Kiswahili) and they hardly ever use it in their everyday interactions.

NATIVE SPEAKERS

That big disconnect resulted in the irony, which you and Sigmund remarked about in your sharing.

This was that coast candidates performed poorly in Kiswahili examinations while “upcountry” ones passed with flying colours.

The latter stuck to the “sanifu” rules while the coastal users expressed themselves in “unacceptable” native idiom.

This, however, takes us back to the now centuries-old fallacy of denying Swahili native identity.

Even today, you find some East Africans who do not know or believe that there are native Waswahili communities, such as the Waamu, Wamvita, Wapemba or Waunguja.

This is largely due to brainwashing by the colonists, who obstinately denied and suppressed the reality of indigenous native Waswahili.

It would be simple common sense for us to acknowledge these native speakers of Kiswahili and respect them as the primary sources of information about their language.

So there, you, Sigmund and I are agreed, that we should in all humility be involving knowledgeable and capable native Waswahili scholars, of whom there are many today, in our language study, teaching and promotion programmes.

That said, however, I stand out valiantly for “Ustadh Evan bin Mwangi al-Murang’a” and his colleagues. These are the so-called “upcountry” scholars, writers and other communicators who have accepted Kiswahili as their language.

We should value and evaluate them by the competence of their Kiswahili rather than the regions of their origin.

In honour of Ken Walibora, Ustadh, stick to his advice to you to keep writing in Kiswahili. I will do the same. Wasalaam.

Prof Bukenya is a leading East African scholar of English and literature; [email protected]