World Kiswahili day celebrated as the language spreads across Africa

Thursday marked the first ever world Kiswahili Language Day, a UN-organised celebration of an African language which has become one of the world’s 10 most spoken.

Kiswahili, which is also known as Swahili, encompasses more than a dozen main dialects with around 200 million speakers across the world, according to Unesco, the UN’s culture organisation. They are predominantly in east Africa, in countries including Somalia, Mozambique and western parts of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, though most are concentrated in Kenya and Tanzania.

Earlier this week Uganda adopted Swahili as an official language, recommending that the teaching of it becomes compulsory in primary and secondary schools. This followed a directive by the East African Community bloc of states aimed at easing communication between members. Rwanda adopted Swahili as an official language in 2017.

Swahili is also one of the six official working languages of the African Union, the others being English, French, Portuguese, Arabic and Spanish. In February it became one of the three working languages of the East African Community, along with French and English. South Africa and Botswana have both made announcements about offering Swahili in schools, while Ethiopia’s Addis Ababa University also said recently that it will teach the language.

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The UN established a Swahili radio unit back in the 1950s, while the BBC has run a Swahili service for 65 years.

Prominent writers in Swahili have included Kenya’s Ken Walibora, a journalist and professor who wrote dozens of books, some of which are used as set texts in Kenyan secondary schools. Popular musicians like Tanzania’s Diamond Platnumz and Kenyan band Sauti Sol have also helped the language spread further afield.

A Swahili-language version of William Shakespeare’s play The Merry Wives of Windsor was performed in the Globe Theatre in London in 2012.

Since 2014, there has been a $5,000 dollar (€4,900) Kiswahili literature prize, the Safal Cornell Kiswahili Prize for African Literature, with this year’s winners announced as Tanzanian novelist Halfani Sudy and Moh’d Omar Juma, who comes from Pemba, in Zanzibar — both of whom are in their 30s. Co-founder Lizzy Attree said in June that this is still the only global literary prize for African literature in an African language.

In an interview with the Africa Is A Country website, Attree called on publishers to “lobby the education departments of their governments and create a culture in which looking inward, rather than seeking external validation, underpins an investment in preserving African languages, before they are lost completely”.

It is common for Africans to speak three or more languages, including their tribal language, the former colonial language and other more broadly spoken languages, such as Swahili. Kenya has more than 60 languages, while neighbouring Tanzania has more than 100.

Various organisations posted on social media to celebrate the first world Kiswahili Language Day, including the Kenya National Library Service, and the Kenya Literature Bureau, which publishes schoolbooks in Swahili, said the language’s recognition by UNESCO is a “testimony of its potential not only as a unifying force, but also as a vehicle for conducting business, promoting information exchange, and building and cementing international relations”.