Book review : Kiswahili marries Luganda, with English as midwife

Title: Wesomese Oluswahili n’Olungereza (Luganda, Kiswahili and English)

Authors: Pacifique Malonga and James Wasula

Publisher: Luminary Publishers, Kampala

Reviewer: David Sseppuuya

You have heard, and probably grown weary, of the saying about Kiswahili’s lifespan growing up in the respective countries of Eastern Africa.

 Do bear with it yet again, for it has a profound bearing on a very credible effort by two champions of the vernacular as far as Uganda’s language scene goes. Local legend has it that: “Kiswahili was born in Zanzibar, grew up in Tanzania, fell sick in Kenya, died in Congo, and (was) buried in Uganda.”

 In this 180-page offering, Pacifique Malonga and James Wasula show that the regional language can be resurrected from its Ugandan deathbed with a book that draws on English, the official language, Luganda, a national lingua franca leaning on its close relationship with Kiswahili, nominally ‘the’ national language, albeit still stranded on the fringes of mainstream society.

What the book has going for it is the use of Bantu phonetics, common to Luganda and Kiswahili, and the fact that the two languages share hundreds of words for meaning. For instance, this festive season many will be shopping for nyama and, making orders in Kiswahili or Luganda (or any other of dozens of Ugandan Bantu dialects), confident of not being misunderstood.

Why, then, has there been such resistance to Kiswahili in Uganda? It certainly is not a case of incomprehensible foreign words, terminology or phraseology. Ugandans wouldn’t reckon with Polish or the click sounds of South African Xhosa speech instead, would they?

Kiswahili is infinitely easier to master for the millions of Ugandan Bantu language speakers, who spread from the mountains of the deep southwest to the Midwest, fanning out eastwards across the central region, onto the plains of eastern Uganda to the Kiswahili agreeable border with Kenya, easily four-fifths of the country’s population.

It is not a technical issue; many will know (and quietly profess) that it is an emotive one. Reasons range from its supposed foreignness (how much more than English?) to a spurious argument of its repulsive use by coercive elements (criminals and abrasive security forces) to the protection of indigenous languages. Is that sufficient to reject a regional lingua franca?

How about the practical benefits like trade and cross-ethnic communication? How about Kiswahili’s relative advancement as a language that adequately expresses scientific and technological concepts? Would Uganda infi nitely be an island in a geographical sea where a half dozen countries and their millions of citizens patronise Kiswahili? Malonga and Wasula clearly think that Kiswahili is compatible to Ugandan interests and, by compiling a three-language handbook, anyone keen to expand their language profile is fairly well-served.

Easy to read, it is arranged in such a way that one can organise systematic study: basic words to learn; grammar; and reading, comprehension and common expressions. There have been various efforts to popularise Kiswahili: 100 years ago, the British colonial authorities, in proposing Kiswahili to be the official language of their East African territories — Uganda, Tanganyika, Zanzibar and Kenya — issued a memorandum, ‘The Development of Ki-Swahili as an Educational and Administrative Language in the Uganda Protectorate’. It met opposition in Uganda.

 Latterly, the East African Community has, unsurprisingly, pushed for greater use of the language regionally, requiring nations to teach it in schools: an article of the EAC Treaty provides for development of indigenous languages, especially Swahili as the lingua franca in the region. And, of course, the East African anthem, sung/played at national events, is in Kiswahili.

These are top-down efforts. Appreciated, though they are, they lack the emotional appeal, a key requirement for the embrace of languages. What Wesomese Oluswahili does is on the other end of the emotional spectrum — appealing to the heart, bringing it down to ordinary sentiments by marrying it with a local language such that the two — Kiswahili and Luganda, with English as the midwife — do not look like competitors. They are presented as complementary, which is how it should be. dsseppuuya@yahoo.com