How Kiswahili stopped being the language of soldiers and prostitutes

Kikuubo “free trade zone” in central Kampala, Uganda, has become a hub for regional trade and Kiswahili is the medium of trade. Photo/JOACHIM BUWEBO  NATION MEDIA GROUP

By JOACHIM BUWEMBO satnation@ke.nationmedia.com
Posted  Friday, April 26   2013

IN SUMMARY

• If you enjoyed the old Tanzanian joke of Kiswahili being born in Zanzibar, growing up in Tanganyika, dying in Kenya and being buried in Uganda with its ghost fleeing to Congo, you may soon have to revise it

For several decades until a few years ago, if you met a smart woman who spoke Kiswahili in Kampala, chances were that she was a lady of the night. They reputedly picked and mastered the language in Mombasa where they plied their trade.

Well, that was then. A smart girl who speaks Kiswahili in Kampala today is most likely a Kenyan or Tanzanian student. But surprise, surprise! she could as well be a Ugandan businesswoman who has never stepped out of the country.

Such is the power of the profit motive (what Adam Smith called the baker’s greed that guarantees us our dinner) that it has achieved what legislation and coercion could not do — making Ugandans voluntarily learn Kiswahili.

The regional evolution of trade has had a lot to do with the silent lingual revolution taking place in Kampala. A walk through the city’s bustling wholesale business hub called Kikuubo can be quite revealing.

Here, Kiswahili is used by all traders, and competes with Luganda for supremacy. Actually, in Kikuubo, Kiswahilli is more than a strong added advantage, it is a necessity.

Kikuubo means ‘alley’ in Luganda and that is what it started as during the days of economic hardship when the military government crushed the economy by expelling the Asian business class from the country in the 1970s.

It was the improvising Ugandan traders who started congregating in the alley adjacent to the main bus station and Nakivubo Stadium to buy and sell goods.

With return to normalcy and the subsequent modernisation of the economy, the supermarket lifestyle finally came to Kampala and has matured in the past decade or so.

Now almost all consumers get their groceries from the supermarket. And the supermarket in turn gets its supplies direct from different manufacturers. So the Kikuubo wholesale market was bound to die.

It didn’t. Instead it transformed and evolved into a very important regional trading centre. The alley has in recent years grown to cover several streets.

The growth has not only been in terms of area covered, but the shops therein have also been qualitatively styled up. (And thanks to the increase in electricity supply since last year after the commissioning of Bujagali Dam, the din of diesel generators that used to engulf Kikuubo is no more.)

The growing stability, improved infrastructure and revival of the East African trading bloc are helping Uganda to re-position from lamenting over its ‘landlockedness’ to capitalising on its ‘landlinkedness’, making Kikuubo Eastern Africa’s Dubai of sorts.

So traders in the original Kikuubo Lane and those operating in the adjacent William Street, the nearby Kisekka, Nakivubo and Shauri Yako markets buy merchandise from different EAC states and supply to markets in the region.

Cereals from Uganda attract buyers from the region to Nakivubo while hardware and manufactured domestic goods from Kenya are collected from Kikuubo by Rwandan, Congolese, South Sudanese and of course Ugandan dealers.

And the language that brings them all together is Kiswahili. So the thousands of Ugandans operating in Kikuubo have no option but to learn the language they previously despised.

If you enjoyed the old Tanzanian joke of Kiswahilli being born in Zanzibar, growing up in Tanganyika, dying in Kenya and being buried in Uganda with its ghost fleeing to Congo, you may soon have to revise it for Kiswahili is slowly but surely getting reborn in Uganda. Kampala could, in a decade, come be the resurrection site of Kiswahili.

In the past, Kiswahili in Uganda used to be a preserve of the armed forces. This is probably due to the fact that the Ugandan Army was born from the Kings African Rifles which was an East African colonial force, whose service language was Kiswahili. To date, it is the language of the army and some senior officers speak the language so well that even neighbours get impressed.

Many Tanzanians who hear the immediate former army spokesman, Colonel Felix Kulaigye on the BBC Kiswahilli Service wonder how a Ugandan can speak Kiswahili so well.But there are many who speak it like him, and since these are well-educated officers, the stigma that ordinary Ugandans used to direct at people who speak the language has waned. In the past, an armed person spoke Kiswahili to harass you.

So every Ugandan knew the terrible command like “Fungua mlango, kaa chini, piga magoti and ominously, piga risasi”. That was where the national/public Kiswahili vocabulary stopped.

For many years since the 1986 regime change, the only new addition to our Kiswahilli vocabulary was ‘chicken dropping’ (maavi ya kuku) contributed by popular soldier-minister Maj-Gen Kahinda Otafiire while describing an Asian business rival when their deals went sour. But today, many people in Kampala find the sympathy expression “pole sana” more cool than “sorry”.

Hearing any two people speaking Kiswahili in Kampala these days does not make any head turn, for the regional interaction has grown tremendously in recent years. A recent survey at the borders indicated that at least 2,000 people cross at Busia alone every day, a 1,000 moving in either direction.

That is on a ‘low’ day, otherwise it is 1,500 and more in each direction on some days like when schools are closing or opening. And these numbers are only for the documented travellers who carry passports and other formal travel documents.

And again, that is Busia alone, and many more cross at Malaba and Entebbe Airport, not to mention the small border posts. Three quarters of the people crossing at Busia are Kenyans. On the Tanzania border, Mutukula is also extremely busy and the recent construction of roads in Tanzania has made it even busier.

The ‘invisible export’ of Uganda’s education industry has also done a lot to promote the use of Kiswahili. A joke in Kampala goes that KIU (the acronym for Kampala International University) stands for Kenyans In Uganda.

The university has a big number of Kenyan students. There is also a huge number of Tanzanian kids studying at lower levels down to primary school, brought by parents who want them to have a strong English language foundation.

In Tanzania, the “English Medium” schools are private and quite expensive, compared to Uganda where every school teaches in English.

Besides the East African students, the Kampala elite circles have a growingly significant portion of Kenyans. Every other hotel manager and marketing manager in town is from Kenya.

Thus the presence of a Kiswahili speaking elite has also contributed to changing the bias against the language that was otherwise a preserve of functionally illiterate soldiers.

From the alleys to banks

But the people who have played the greatest part in popularising Kiswahili beyond just being a business medium are musicians. Several popular modern Ugandan artistes have had a stint in Kenya. And even those who were not based in Nairobi need to market their music to Kenya and Tanzania.

So they either mix Luganda with Kiswahili or make entire compositions in the language. Jose Chameleon is a case in point, and at any given time over the past 10 years he has had a Kiswahili hitsong in the Kampala market.

It is not always Kiswahili that finds Ugandans in Kampala. Many have also pursued the language where it comes from — in Kenya and Tanzania. In the past, Ugandans worked in Kenyan schools and hospitals. Today, many are teaching in Tanzania.

The children of these returning Ugandans often speak Kiswahili as a first language, and are not conscious about it. And except for a conservative few, the older Ugandans who stay in Kenya and Tanzania for a long while have also learnt to love the language.

But it is the traders who are doing much more than expatriates in spreading Kiswahili.

“Every trader in around here has to learn Kiswahili if they are to survive in business,” Betty Namusoke, who sells plastic products in Kikuubo told me recently. “Traders from neighbouring countries are big players here and that is the only language they speak.”

Officials at the Ministry of East African Community Affairs in Kampala say that a few years ago awareness of regional business opportunities in Uganda was quite low compared to Kenya and to an extent Rwanda, but a number of interventions including awareness campaigns are redressing the situation.

These have alerted Ugandan traders to the extent that some now buy maize from as far as Kibaigwa market in central Tanzania for sale to Sudanese buyers who collect it from Kikuubo. Inevitably, they have to master Kiswahili to carry out their transactions.

And it is not just those lifting sacks of produce that must speak the language in the trading world. As more people join the regional trade, the formal business sector is also following them for a piece of the action. All the major commercial banks in Uganda, for instance, have opened branches in Kikuubo in recent years, for that is where most money in the country is. So Kiswahili there is becoming as much a ‘corporate’ language as English.

And so the private sector is again winning where the state has been trying for nearly a century without success. From the colonial government, through the military government that decreed that Kiswahili becomes the national language, to the present government that used to plead with the people to learn it, none had managed to make Ugandans like Kiswahili, let alone try to learn it.

But the desire by musicians and the business community to profit from the opportunities of regional trade has achieved what even the brutal military government could not enforce.

buwembo@gmail.co
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