Swahili Language and Culture

Swahili Culture and Language

This article is about the Swahili people, their culture and their language, Kiswahili. Kiswahili is mainly East African and is spoken in Spoken in: Tanzania, Kenya, Uganda, Rwanda, Burundi, Congo (DRC), Somalia, Comoros Islands and Mozambique.

Kiswahili, is spoken natively by many groups traditionally living within about 1,500 miles from the East African coast. The language evolved from the fusion of Arabic and Bantu. Swahili or Kiswahili derives from the Arabic word sawahil meaning "coast".

Swahili is primarily a Bantu language with some Arabic elements; it is written in the Arabic alphabet. The Swahili people (or Waswahili) inhabit long stretches of the Indian Ocean coastlines from southern Somalia as far south as Mozambique and, like the language, the Swahili culture is a mixture of the Bantu and Arabic cultures. The civilizations of the African east coast are referred to as "Swahili" to reflect this fusion. This area is know as the ‘Swahili Coast’.

The total number of Kiswahili speakers with Swahili as a first language is between 5-10 million and, with it as a second language there are around 80 million. Kiswahili is a Bantu language. It is the most widely spoken language of sub-Saharan Africa and has become an African lingua franca (a lingua franca is a secondary tongue that is a combination of two or more languages).

Swahili is now the only African language among the official languages of the African Union. Swahili is also taught in the major universities in the world including SOAS and many international media companies, such as the BBC, have Swahili programs.

Historically, the east coast of Africa changed significantly around the end of the first millenium AD. The Bantu-speaking tribes from the interior moved and settled the coast from Kenya to South Africa. Then traders from the Muslim world and India realised the significance of the east coast for commerce and began to settle there. From around 900 AD the east coast of Africa experienced an influx of Shirazi Arabs from the Persian Gulf and several small Indian villages. The Arabs called this remote region al-Zanj, "The Blacks". The coast slowly came under the control of Muslim traders from Arabia and Persia. Consequently by the 1300's, the major east African ports from Mombaza to Sofala had become Islamic cities.
The Swahili slowly expanded south reaching Kilwa and Zanzibar (from the Arabic word al-Zanj ). Later, Swahili civilization took over a small enclave further south around Sofala in Zimbabwe. As the northern cities remained localized they had very little influence on African culture inland from the coast, whereas the Sofalans went far inland and spread the word of Islam deep in African territory.

The Arabs and Persians were the major players in the growth of Swahili civilization. The cities were controlled by an upper class of nobility that was African in origin (maybe mixed blood). Under the nobility were the commoners and the resident foreigners who made up a large percentage of the citizens. Typically, as elsewhere in the Islamic World at that time, slavery was actively practiced. In fact it was not until the British ascendancy that this vile practice was finally stopped.

There were 8 major Swahili city-states (Mogadishu, Barawaa, Mombasa, Gedi, Pate, Malindi, Zanzibar, Kilwa, and Sofala) all were politically independent of one another. There was no Swahili empire around any of these city-states. They were more like competing companies or corporations each trying for the lion's share of the lucrative Ivory trade.

These city-states began to decline in the sixteenth century with the advent of Portugese trade. The consequent disruption of the old trade routes made the Swahili commercial cities obsolete. The Portugese wanted native Africans to have no share in African trade and set about conquering the Islamic city-states. They got their just deserts in the late seventeenth century when Oman subsequently conquered all the Portugese cities and the East African coast was under the Omani sultanate for two hundred years.

Now the Swahili people may be losing their ancestral culture under the pressures of Muslim scholars, who insist on the purification of local Islamic customs, and the influences of science and technology, secularism, and historical marerialism. So if you want to see some traditional Swahili culture the time to visit Tanzania is now or else it may be gone.

Visit Wild Things Tanzania Safaris for more information on visiting the Swahili Coast.

Roy J Hinde is a former biodiversity researcher who now operates http://www.wildthingsafaris.com.