Kiswahili is growing in the region at a rate that pleases my heart

I promised you, dear reader, a chat about a few exciting things happening in the field of Kiswahili, our East African language. I was particularly thinking of the emphatic leadership role being effected by the East African Kiswahili Commission, based in Zanzibar and headed by the Masinde Muliro Swahili don, my friend Prof Inyani Simala, its founding Executive Director.

But wait a minute. Did I call you “dear reader”? The point is that I really mean it, and it has something to do with an anniversary that reminded me of how really precious you are. I will tell you about it in a jiffy, after our brief look at Kiswahili and our perennial language problem.

As I discovered at a two-day workshop in Kampala last week, the EA Kiswahili Commission is conducting a region-wide researched assessment of how Kiswahili is performing, on the ground, in all the East African Community states. This includes South Sudan, where Kiswahili is and will be increasingly used as that troubled but promising country gets fully integrated into the Jumuiya.

The workshop impressed me in two main ways. The first was the emerging evidence that there is no East African country that does not have problems with its use and promotion of Kiswahili. This includes Tanzania, which many outsiders think of as a paradise state for the language. The commission’s searching scrutiny is unmasking and revealing a lot of myths and assumptions about Kiswahili.

This brings me to my second and more heart-warming impression of the Kampala workshop.

The participants, about three dozen of them, conducted all their business in delightfully fluent and confident Kiswahili. Most of them are well-established Kiswahili lecturers and teachers and several are doctoral or pre-doctoral scholars at different universities all over East Africa.

Whoever said Kiswahili was not alive and well in Uganda? That assumption is disproved even before the detailed research takes off. But maybe I am not an entirely impartial judge.

After all, many of those participants were my students in the mid-1990s and the early 2000s. So, I own up to the temptation to justify my efforts and those of my colleagues, like Professors Ruth Mukama and Nsookwa Senkandwa, who nurtured the Kiswahili revival at Makerere in those heady days.

In any case, the language problems are far from over in that strikingly polyglot country. Only recently, we lost an internationally recognised linguist, Prof Livingstone Walusimbi, a strong advocate of the promotion of Luganda (Kiganda) and an avowed opponent of Kiswahili.

He was not alone among the acolytes of local languages, or the aggressive defenders of English as “the” appropriate language for Uganda.

I wonder if I should regard myself as caught up in a linguistic dilemma, or even “trilemma”, in this situation. As you know, I operate actively on all these three fronts. Trained as a teacher of English, I mostly earn my living through this language. But I also operate a lot in Luganda, my first language, and I write and publish in it, just as I do in Kiswahili, my adopted love and passion. The truth of the matter is that I do not agonise about my position. On the contrary, I thoroughly enjoy it, and I see no reason why any other East African should not do the same.

Incidentally, have you heard that Kiswahili has been officially recognised by Twitter as an official web language, with a passable translation “app”?    

DEAR READER

But I promised to talk about you, dear reader. “Dear reader” is a kind of joke among literary people. Alluding to the novelists of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, it satirises those narrators who are nervously self-conscious about their addressing their audiences through writing.

Today, however, dear reader, I am addressing you by this phrase in deep sincerity and profound gratitude.

Do you realise we are just two days away from entering the fifth year of these “conversations” of ours? I feel both humbled and elated that you have been lavishing on me your precious attention and interacting with me with surprisingly warm and intimate frankness, whether in agreement or difference with my ruminations.

Your responses have ranged from the friend who asked me to help him deal with a troublesome immigration official, when I wondered if corrupt officials should be hanged, to a Kenyan current student at the University of Stirling who corrected me when I slipped over the spelling of our Scottish alma mater. I had inadvertently called the august institution “Sterling”.  Anyway, Stirling men and women are people of sterling worth.

But I am constantly moved by not only those who sincerely tell me they have not missed a single contribution since we started, but also by those who simply tell me, “I like your column.” The latest of these plain, honest observations was from Walter, one of our security guards at Upper Hill, which made my heart go out to him. No writer worth the name should take his or her readers for granted, and for me, you, my reader, are my all in all.

Some writers claim to write for themselves, “just expressing themselves”, as they put it. They regard the reader as a mere eavesdropper on their thoughts.

I am not and I will never be such a writer. I write for my reader, and I write because of my reader. In other words, I write because you read.

I am, of course, passionate about issues, many of which you know from our now long acquaintance.

When I say gender equity, Kiswahili, East African unity, environmental responsibility and social decency (“deshenzinisation”), you know that is vintage Mwalimu. But ultimately, I am passionate about these and other matters, like education, youth unemployment, writing and literature, sport and our colourful history, because I believe that you are also passionate about them. My passion can thus be summed up in one word: You!

So, dear reader, keep reading, please. I will keep writing. Happy Mother’s Day, tomorrow!

Prof Bukenya is a leading East African scholar of English and Literature. [email protected]