What does teaching Kiswahili in schools mean for Africa?

What does teaching Kiswahili in schools mean for Africa?

Otim Gama is the head of the education department at the Juba University, and one of the technical persons who were involved in the writing of the South Sudan curriculum in 2013, just two years after independence.

When Uganda Cabinet finally approved the adoption of Kiswahili as an official language on Tuesday and directed that it be made a compulsory subject in primary and secondary schools, Otim was not surprised.

“Ultimately we are going to see more and more African countries adopting Kiswahili as an official language, or first making it a compulsory subject in primary and secondary schools,” he says when we settle down for the interview.

Otim says the South Sudan curriculum has Kiswahili as a compulsory subject, particularly in secondary school.

“If you look at the South Sudan curriculum, Kiswahili is supposed to be an optional subject in primary school but should be compulsory in Senior I and Senior II. Those who wish to drop it can do so after Senior II. But because of human resource gaps and hurdles in the publication of relevant books are some of the reasons actualizing this has remained a pipe dream,” he says.

The government of Uganda set up the Uganda National Kiswahili Council in 2019 to guide the introduction of Kiswahili as the second national (official) language.

The Cabinet decision, Uganda said, is in line with the directive of the 21st East African Community (EAC) Summit held in February 2021 that directed the expedition of the implementation of Kiswahili, English and French as official languages in the bloc.

“Cabinet recommended that the teaching of Kiswahili language in primary and secondary should be made compulsory and examinable. It was also further agreed that training programmes for Parliament, Cabinet and the media be initiated,” a statement, released Tuesday, on the Cabinet resolutions read.

English has been Uganda’s only official language since independence in 1962. Kiswahili was proposed as the second official language in 2005 but is only taught as an optional subject in secondary schools since 2017.

The UN’s cultural organization, Unesco, recently designated 7 July as a world day for Kiswahili, which takes around 40% of its vocabulary directly from Arabic. It was initially spread by Arab traders along East Africa’s coast.

While Kiswahili is the region’s lingua franca, spoken extensively in Tanzania as both national and official language, it was adopted as the official language of the East African Community (EAC) in 2017. EAC member states are Tanzania, Kenya, Uganda, Rwanda, Burundi, South Sudan and most recently the Democratic Republic of Congo.

Making Kiswahili a language for Africa

Of the 54 countries on the continent, English is the official language in 27 and French is the official language in 21 countries—both are languages of former colonizers. Their continued use attracts funding and other benefits from these countries.

According to experts, supplanting them could create diplomatic challenges. Professor Obuchi Moseti, a Kiswahili linguist from Moi University, notes that these foreign languages are well established and strategically placed for international and global communication, diplomacy, and trade. To replace them with an African vernacular will not be easy. Success, he points out, hinges on political goodwill. 

Indigenous African languages represent another challenge. In North Africa, Arabic is the dominant language, while in Western Africa there are languages like Igbo, Hausa, and Yoruba that enjoy lingua franca status. According to Ethnologue, the Yoruba language is estimated to have about 50 million native speakers and about two million second-language speakers.

For Kiswahili to gain acceptance and develop in such regions, adequate resources and political goodwill — including financial and economic inputs — are imperative to ensure it will serve people as well as, if not better than, the languages they speak today.

Kiswahili has grown in Africa and beyond. It is estimated that there are more than 200 million Kiswahili speakers around the globe. Kiswahili is ranked among the 10 most widely spoken languages worldwide.

This recognition potentially confers substantial educational, diplomatic, trade, tourism, cultural, philosophical, and political benefits to the continent. Their realization requires widespread use of and proficiency in Kiswahili. For instance, Kiswahili will not be a viable language in tourism if tourists do not understand it.

But despite the teething problems, AU adopted Kiswahili as an official working language in February and there are indications that the future of the language in the continent could be brighter than some think.

This push for a Pan-African language is not new. Julius Nyerere, the first President of Tanzania, emphasized the need to have Kiswahili as a Pan-African language. The language proved successful in unifying Tanzanians under Ujamaa philosophy.

In 2020, South Africa became the first southern African country to offer Kiswahili as an optional subject in schools, raising hopes for the growth of the language considered the lingua franca of East Africa.

Kiswahili will is now taught along with French, German and Mandarin.

However, in making Kiswahili an optional subject in schools, South Africa was casting her net wide in dealing with other issues. The country hoped that the introduction of Kiswahili would promote cohesion and help to address xenophobia, which has resulted in over 600 attacks since 1994, leading to more than 300 deaths.

“We have had a lot of challenges when it comes to xenophobia and using derogatory terms when referring to other African people. That shows that we do not understand that we are actually of the same origins. If we want social harmony and cohesion, language is the best vehicle to do that,” Elijah Mhlanga, a spokesman for the Department of Education in South Africa, said in a media interview.

Chaired by Tanzania’s President John Magufuli, the Southern African Development Community (SADC) 2019 adopted Kiswahili as its fourth official language of communication in addition to English, Portuguese and French.

“Our vision for language planning stems from the intellectualization of indigenous languages on four spheres—provincial, national, regional and continental levels. Kiswahili is inevitably well-positioned to integrate the SADC region,” said David Maahlamela, the Pan South African Language Board chairman, following the announcement by SADC.

This strategic importance of Kiswahili in Africa is further compounded by research that shows that by 2050, 85 per cent of French speakers in the world will come from the continent. Currently, with 300 million French speakers in the world, 44 per cent of them live in Africa.

In a continent with over 2,000 different languages—the second most diverse in terms of language after Asia—the presence of Kiswahili, and its incremental reach beyond its East Africa home, has been lauded.

The language shares grammatical and sentence structures with Bantu, the most diverse language group in the 1.2-billion-people continent, and Arabic, the most spoken language in North Africa.

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