Msahau mila ni mtumwa: Swahili

"If you forsake your culture, you become a slave." Shrewd insight from a people who have known both cultural dominance and commercial slavery. Their story, like their language, is a case study in sustained cultural vitality.

In 1000CE, the Arabs were the team to beat. Driven by religious and entrepreneurial fervour, possessed of advanced mathematical navigation techniques, they established maritime trade routes as far as China and Western Europe. East Africa, which the Arabs called al Zanji ("The Blacks"), was the crux of their empire. Ideally located for commerce, Mombasa, Zanzibar, and other Islamic city states sprang up all along the coast to meet the challenge. The Bantu-speaking natives blended Arabic and Persian influences into a new culture. Ever-laconic, the Arabs labelled this cosmopolitan society Sawahili, or Coast People. (For a comprehensive overview of Swahili history, see Ali Hassan's excellent summary.)

Essentially Arabic and Persian vocabulary grafted onto Bantu rootstock, Swahili is by some calculations the world's twelfth-most-spoken tongue. Sometimes called Kiswahili (ki- means language), this lively, evocative usage tradition expresses the hopes and fears of 50 million souls in Central and East Africa. Native speakers are most numerous in Tanzania, Kenya, and Uganda, but second language speakers outnumber them worldwide; Swahili is the auxiliary of choice throughout the region, and an important agent of national unity.

The fact that non-native speakers exercise a controlling interest contributes in no small way to the ebullient chaos of Swahili history and culture. The language necessarily flexes as it passes from Maasai to Hutu to Somali to Zulu. Varying levels of proficiency play havoc with grammar and pronunciation, but the ever-changing flow of images has kept Swahili fresh, young, and relevant for nearly a millennium.

Apart from a sprinkling of English, French, Portuguese, and Hindi root words, Swahili bears virtually no resemblance to Indo-Aryan languages. It has typical Bantu agglomerative structure , in which concepts that require entire sentences in English are expressed in a single word. In the word-sentence ninakula, for example, ni- means "I," and -na- imparts the present progressive to the verb root -kula, "eat," giving "I am eating."

Like Asian or Slavic languages, Swahili obliges Western learners to reinitialise a portion of their brains, to borrow a computer metaphor. For example, agglomerates do not distinguish between male and female subjects. "He" and "she" are each expressed by the prefix a-, as in atulipa, "he/she gave us." Swahili nouns fall into different classes according to subject (people, trees, fruits, tools) and whether they are single or plural. Eighteen of these nominal classes govern sentence structure.

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