Kiswahili’s Role as National Language in Kenyan and Tanzanian Nation-Building

• In Event: Poster Session: Comparative Politics of Developing Countries II, African Politics & Middle East and North Africa Politics
  In Poster Session: Poster Session: African Politics

Abstract

To what extent does state recognition and promotion of a common national language contribute to broader nation-building programs in ethnolinguistically diverse postcolonial states? Scholars of nations and nationalisms frequently identify a common language as an important factor in models of the nation derived from Western European history, but postcolonial African states have, with a few exceptions, continued colonial-era policies which privilege their former colonizers’ languages known by relatively few citizens. In this paper, I use archival, interview, and ethnographic evidence in a comparative case study of the place of the Kiswahili language, long used as a language of inter-ethnic communication in East Africa, in Kenyan and Tanzanian nation-building efforts. Faced with the task of governing newly independent and ethnolinguistically heterogeneous polities, founding fathers Julius Nyerere and Jomo Kenyatta believed that Kiswahili could contribute greatly to Tanganyikan (later Tanzanian) and Kenyan nation-building, respectively, and their governments recognized Kiswahili as each state’s sole national language, an ambiguous status distinct from being an official language. Under Nyerere, Tanzania actively promoted Kiswahili as a core component of its ujamaa socialist ideology far beyond the limited efforts Kenyatta’s government made, but Kiswahili-advocating nationalists in both countries suffered setbacks after making some advances in the 1960s and 1970s. While Kiswahili use remains more widespread generally and across a wider range of high-status domains (parliamentary debates, the language of instruction in primary education, etc.) in Tanzania than in Kenya, both countries have recently seen renewed government promotion of Kiswahili, on nationalist and nation-building grounds. Kenya’s 2010 constitution made Kiswahili an official language, alongside English, in the aftermath of the 2007-08 post-election violence. The Tanzanian Ministry of Education reopened the question of using Kiswahili as a medium of instruction, rejected in 1984, in its 2014 education policy, and President John Magufuli has emphasized Kiswahili in his nationalist vision, including promotion of the language as a key component of his foreign policy. After tracing the historical development of and debates around Kenyan and Tanzanian language policies, I examine differing understandings of the prestige and meaning of “national language” (lugha ya taifa) status between the two states and conclude by considering the nation-building prospects for Kenya’s recent Kiswahili promotion efforts.

Author

• Andrew Marshall, Georgetown University