Kiswahili’s Renewed Campaign by AU and UNESCO

The Kiswahili language has grown in Africa and beyond. The language has an estimate of over 200million speakers globally.

Due to its growth, it has had a lot of international recognition. At the beginning of the year, African Union (AU) declared the language as an official working language. In addition, in November, UNESCO declared 7th July as World Kiswahili Language Day.

The AU and UNESCO have renewed the push for Kiswahili to be a lingua franca in Africa. The campaign is said to benefit both the African continent and the world.

It is however critical to understand that there are other languages that are ‘languages of power’, according to Prof Chege Githora, “English and other foreign languages, like French and Portuguese, are referred to as ‘languages of power.’”

In Africa there are other regions like North Africa where Arabic is paramount and the west where they have their own indigenous language. Therefore, for Kiswahili to gain acceptance and develop in such regions, adequate resources and political goodwill — including financial and economic inputs — are imperative to ensure it will serve people as well as, if not better than, the languages they speak today.

It should be noted that for the language to have roots as deep as other foreign languages, there are some challenges that it will have to overcome for it confers substantial educational, trade, tourism, cultural, diplomatic and political benefits to the continent. Therefore, for Kiswahili to be viable in diplomacy, diplomats should be able to understand the language.

In this regard, it was recommended that since Africa is multicultural and most Africans are born potentially multilingual hence leniency is advised and terminologies and words from local languages have to be allowed to be infused, giving the locals a sense of belonging and ownership of the language.

In addition, AU should constitute a special committee or body mandated to educate all countries about the importance of making Kiswahili the language of Africa for Africa and the committee could lobby African countries to support the idea and reach out to stakeholders, beyond Africa, to gain goodwill and funding for Kiswahili advocacy programs.

 Africa is a large continent, and few people can traverse it to spread Kiswahili therefore, adequate funding, could support training for teachers in Kiswahili and enable research to be conducted by scholar who then could devise recommendations on how best to promote the virtues of Kiswahili.

Read related article