Makwaia wa Kuhenga’s recent call to use plain Kiswahili deserves our attention, not least because of its goodwill. However, the road to hell, as they say, is paved with good intentions.

My conscience is particularly pricked by Makwaia’s assertion that ‘Kiswahili is being bastardised’, as in being ‘creolised’, notwithstanding his good intentions. This claim ignores the very definition and history of Kiswahili. It also works against his defence of cultural autonomy.

Kiswahili, as my secondary school teacher correctly taught me, is neither Pidgin nor Creole. It is plainly a Bantu language. This definition might seem contradictory when one counts the large number of words that Kiswahili has taken from Arabic, Hindi, English, German and Portuguese.

So, what makes it distinctly Bantu and thus strongly resistance to creolisation? It is the fact that throughout its history, it has managed to maintain its Bantu grammatical and literary structure. In other words, it has managed to take as many words as possible from other languages without losing its basic way of constructing and intonating sentences. This is a sign of cultural resistance.

Even the two examples Makwaia employs to prove his assertion actually affirms this structural consistency:

‘Jana si ulini-call?’
‘Wewe umesema mambo ambayo yame-insult intelligence yangu.’

What Makwaia misses is that through ‘Bantusation’/‘Kiswahilisation’ ultimately the ‘ulini-call becomes ‘ulinikoli’ and ‘yame-insult intelligence’ becomes ‘yameinsalti intelijensi.’

That is how Kiswahili evolves. One can now construct such a sentence:

‘Nilipobatizwa nilienda shuleni kuhesabiwa kisha nikala chakula mezani na kupanda gari kwenda hotelini.’

A quick look at it reveals that it is made up of words from at least seven languages: Baptise (English/Greek), Schule (German), Hisab (Arabic), Meza (Portuguese), Gari (Hindi) and Hotel (English/French).

Hence what Makwaia is erroneously lamenting as the transformation of Kiswahili to ‘something that one may call Kiswa-English’ is nothing more than Kiswahili under further construction. It is another phase of expanding Kiswahili’s rich vocabulary by incorporating new synonyms. By the way, synonyms (known as ‘Visawe’ in Kiswahili) are words with more or less similar meanings.

To use Makwaia’s example again, one can assert that the term ‘intelijensi’ is in the process of being adapted into Kiswahili as another synonym of ‘Akili,’ other being ‘ufahamu’, ‘ujuzi’ and ‘uelewa’. Similarly, ‘insalti’ would simply turn into a synonym of ‘kejeli’, ‘dharau’ and ‘kebehi.’

It is in this regard I rhetorically argued elsewhere that ‘Kiswanglishi’ should be a national language. Why? Simply because the majority of Tanzanians are increasingly using it, and it is, in fact, Kiswahili. If we allow students to freely use it in examinations, they will explain things better.

By Kiswanglishi, I don’t mean English that throws in one or two Kiswahili words. I mean Kiswahili that incorporates words we are adapting through cultural encounters within a highly globalising world. Here I am thinking of words like ‘kompyuta’, ‘televisheni’ and ‘selula’.

This is not cultural synchronisation, which Makwaia claims is happening with our beloved Kiswahili. It is cultural synthesis. After all cultural liberty is the ability to choose what suits you.

If there is one single proof of cultural resistance then it is Kiswahili. It has survived slavery and colonialism. Its structure is still intact even after the onslaught of neo-liberalism and imperialism.

Makwaia’s prediction that ‘very soon this country will lose even the little it could have kept for the people of this country – cultural autonomy’ (The Citizen 5 April 2010) as far as Kiswahili is concerned is thus farfetched. What we should lament is the fact that we are not bold enough to replicate Kiswahili’s form of cultural autonomy in our political and economic decision-making.

It might appear to the Makwaias that English is taking over. But, as Shabaan Robert foresaw, this will be temporal as Africans won’t be content. Ultimately, and as usual, Kiswahili will prevail.

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* This article first appeared on UDADISI: Rethinking in Action © Chambi Chachage
* Chambi Chachage is co-editor of 'Africa's Liberation: the Legacy of Nyerere', forthcoming from Pambazuka Press.
* Please send comments to [email protected] or comment online at Pambazuka News.