A friendly tiff with one of my colleagues at work brought a humorous but complicated dilemma that East Africans are bound to meet. The cause of this tiff was simple. My colleague, having little knowledge of English, but a little more of French, and myself, , with little knowledge of French but more comfortable in English, naturally settle for the more common form of communication in Swahili. For some reason my colleague wanted to introduce a business prospect and naturally, I asked him what language this prospect was more comfortable in, to which he confidently replied, anajua kizungu (he knows the white man’s language).
A friendly tiff with one of my colleagues at work brought a humorous but complicated dilemma that East Africans are bound to meet.
The cause of this tiff was simple. My colleague, having little knowledge of English, but a little more of French, and myself, , with little knowledge of French but more comfortable in English, naturally settle for the more common form of communication in Swahili.
For some reason my colleague wanted to introduce a business prospect and naturally, I asked him what language this prospect was more comfortable in, to which he confidently replied, anajua kizungu (he knows the white man’s language).
Well knowing that communication was the least of my worries, I set an appointment through him and behold, when time came I learnt that the prospect had not the slightest knowledge of English, to my chagrin. Lakini uliniambai anaongea kizungu?” (But you told me she speaks the Whiteman’s language).
Yes, I told you but she can speak, he answered, a little bit confused. The prospect launched into a new tirade of complicated French to my amazement.
My patience again began to wear out, so I called my colleague aside to make one thing clear. Kizungu ni English, I insisted. Instead he ran amok. "Kizungu ni kifaransa (the white man’s language is French). Amidst this exchange of words I realized my folly.
In Kenya, Uganda or Tanzania, the word Kizungu has been made to pass English when the right word is actually Kingereza (English).
So my colleague was right because, the white man’s language for a long time has been French, not English for obvious reasons. Our business meeting then dissolved into a light humor when we all go on the right side of each other.
It is not surprising that Uganda’s and Rwanda’s state broadcasters have started to run Swahili news bulletins and language learning programs.
These two are perhaps the only countries where the language plays not a strong a role in public communication, with Kenyans quite comfortable wit it as their national language while Tanzania uses it as an official language.
Swahili is clearly set to play an important role in the East Africa community, especially in the commercial sense especially in the informal and small and middle enterprise sectors where English and French have traditionally played a diminished role in favor of more local dialect.
So as the various Swahili dialects gel across East Africa’s borders such pleasant and perhaps not so pleasant tiffs are expected to spring up every now and then.
For example the word for ‘to sell’ in the Swahili sanifu (standard Swahili) is kuuza while ‘to buy’ is kununua. But instead in the wider central Africa region the world kuuza actually refers to the phrase ‘to sell’.
So you can imagine a situation where a Kenyan will try to sell something to a Burundian who will instead think the good Kenyan wants to buy that thing for them!
These different Swahili dialects will sure cause some tiffs but not so serious ones. Whenever a Ugandan speaks Swahili in Kenya, they elicit laughter.
In fact president Museveni was until recently a very loved public figure in Kenya because very time he stood up to speak in public event in Swahili his ‘broken’ dialect and sense of humor always made him a darling.
During the 2002 swearing in ceremony for the then freshly elected President Mwai Kibaki, Museveni’s speech was recorded on audio tapes and sold on the streets of Nairobi for that reason, but in Uganda, Museveni is considered an authority of the language.
The Tanzanians cannot stand Kenyan Swahili because they think it is diluted while the fusion of the sanitized Tanzanian dialect with the Bantu languages in Rwanda and Burundi are just a different package all together.
All in all, this language dilemma is one of those things that will identify east Africa as just that, a community with common intention and a common language, with good effect.