Tilburg University State Ideology and Language in Tanzania Blommaert, Jan Publication date: 2013 Document Version Peer reviewed version Link to publication in Tilburg University Research Portal Citation for published version (APA): Blommaert, J. (2013). State Ideology and Language in Tanzania. (Tilburg Papers in Culture Studies; No. 80). 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Download date: 24. sep. 2021 Paper State Ideology and Language in Tanzania by Jan Blommaert© [email protected] © October 2013 State Ideology and Language in Tanzania Second and revised edition Jan Blommaert Preface to the second edition State Ideology and Language in Tanzania appeared in 1999 and summarized research done since 1985. That starting date is relevant: I was in Tanzania when Julius Nyerere stepped down voluntarily as President of Tanzania and handed the State House over to his successor, Ali Hassan Mwinyi. The new President promptly signed an agreement with the International Monetary Fund, thus terminating two decades of Ujamaa in his country and turning Tanzania into a free-market economy and, eventually, a nominal multiparty democracy. Nominal, because in both cases the post-1985 period showed continuity rather than discontinuity. While Tanzania became for a while a Bonanza for foreign investors, the social and economic structure of the country did not change much; and in politics, the ruling party of Nyerere’s one-party state, the Chama cha Mapinduzi (CCM), provided the supreme leadership of the country until the day of writing: Mwinyi was succeeded by Mkapa and then by Kikwete – all of them CCM. The book I wrote in 1999 was driven by a desire to document what I considered and still consider to be a curious but telling case of language planning. What happened in Tanzania since Independence, and certainly since the introduction of a formal model of Ujamaa in 1967, was an outstanding case of linguistic hegemony. It is a well-weathered sociolinguistic fact that Tanzania is exceptional in Africa because of the nationwide predominance of one language, Swahili. This fortuitous situation emerged because of reasons to be explained in this book, the most important of which was Ujamaa politics. Swahili became absorbed into the nation building drive caused by Ujamaa, and its emblematic role as the language that incorporated and articulated Independence and, later, the socialist revolution, pushed Swahili into the most remote parts of the country and made it – to varying degrees of skill and fluency – part of almost every Tanzanian’s repertoire. The story of Swahili is a story of an overwhelming political-ideological success. What is less well known in sociolinguistic circles is that this success was in actual fact not recognized in Tanzania itself. As I will describe in the chapters of this book, the overwhelming success of Swahili as a language of the nation-state was quite systematically accompanied by an elaborate culture of complaints, in which linguists, intellectuals and politicians alike presented the case for Swahili as a failure and a headache. As soon as I set foot in Tanzania and expressed an interest in the predicament of Swahili, I was deeply exposed to this discourse of failure, expressed by people whose language repertoires in the meantime displayed the deep and lasting traces of the success of Swahili. This curious paradox led me to investigate the phenomenon, and pretty soon I realized that the contradiction was a language-ideological effect. While the facts on the ground pointed towards massive success, the particular ideological imagination in which Swahili was captured – it ought to be the language of the socialist revolution – made assessments of success subject to impossible demands: the spread of a uniform language should have contributed to the construction of social, cultural and political homogeneity in the country. Evidently, this was not to happen – and this is why language planners never stopped proclaiming the failure of the political Swahili project. This was easy enough to observe. As I said, my arrival in Tanzania as a researcher coincided with the formal termination of Ujamaa, and in the following years I witnessed some of the changes in the country first-hand. I witnessed the birth of new political parties and movement, of new entrepreneurial classes and, eventually, a new middle class, of new forms of popular culture rejecting the mantras of socialism, of new forms of scholarship and debate. Well, all of this suddenly very visible sociocultural and political diversity expressed itself in Swahili – in a range of varieties of Swahili, many of them innovative and creative and all of them testifying to the intense dynamics of language, culture and society in the country. What was thus seen as evidence of the failure of Ujamaa in the field of language was in actual fact hard evidence of its lasting success. For me, Tanzania thus became a superb case by means of which some perennial problems of language planning could be exposed and explained, notably some of the language ideologies that tend to dominate language planning till this day: the assumption that linguistic engineering stands in a direct relation with social transformation, the assumption that ‘language’ was the key concept in all of 2 this, the assumption of ideally monolingual societies and so on – the chapters in this book will engage at length with these language-ideological assumptions. These assumptions obscured several critical processes in the reality of sociolinguistic life: that not ‘language’ but ‘register’ is the ‘stuff’, so to speak, of language in society; that language is only to a certain extend ‘makeable’, that as soon as a language is distributed throughout a large number of users it will tend to explode into numerous new sub-varieties, and so forth. Above all, the language-ideological fundamentals of language planning tend to obscure the duty of researchers to actually see and interpret what goes on – how real language is used by real people in real social environments. While the 1999 edition of this book was welcomed by scholars as a useful contribution to the historiography of Swahili in postcolonial Tanzania and as an example of perhaps wider relevance, elucidating some key points in the postcolonial story of languages elsewhere, I did not think the points made above were spelled out with adequate clarity. I therefore jumped at the opportunity offered to me by Edinburgh University Press to quite thoroughly revise the 1999 edition and incorporate both new theoretical and methodological observations and new empirical material extending the historical coverage of the book to include very recent phenomena. These recent phenomena were collected during a research stay in Dar es Salaam in September 2012, and I am immensely grateful to my old Tanzanian friends and colleagues – mentioned already in the preface to the 1999 edition – for welcoming me once again and bombarding me with reflections on the continuities and discontinuities in the Tanzanian sociolinguistic landscape. The fact that my good friend Koen Adam, Ambassador of Belgium in Tanzania, offered to host me provided the most generous, comfortable and effective working environment I have ever had there, and I am deeply grateful to Koen, Els, Maarten and Jonathan for their hospitality and care while I was doing my work there. While there I realized that my interest in the socio-political history of Swahili had, if anything, become even deeper and more intense than before. This is to a large extent the effect of activities over the past decade, always performed in collaboration with some exceptional scholars. I am thinking of Michael Silverstein, Susan Gal, Salikoko Mufwene and Rob Moore in Chicago; of Gunther Kress, David Block and Norbert Pachler in London; of Christopher Stroud, Mastin Prinsloo, Anna Deumert, Quentin Williams and Charlyn Dyers in Cape Town; of my friends in the Max Planck Sociolinguistic Diversity Working Group, Karel Arnaut, David Parkin, Steve Vertovec, Ben Rampton, Jens-Normann Jørgensen, Sirpa Leppanen, Adrian Blackledge, Angela Creese and their many stellar collaborators; and of people such as Alastair Pennycook, Piet Van Avermaet, Suresh Canagarajah, Stephen May, Gao Yihong, Lionel Wee, Christina Higgins, Sabrina Billings and many others on the circuit of conferences. My own team in Tilburg, of course, provided me with the most stimulating and creative environment, and I must thank Sjaak Kroon, Odile Heynders, Ad Backus, Jeanne Kurvers, Piia Varis, Max Spotti, Sanna Lehtonen, Fie Velghe, Dong Jie, Caixia Du, Xuan Wang, Jos Swanenberg, Kutlay Yağmur and the others for keeping me in good shape over the past number of years and for feeding me continuously with superb data and ideas from various parts of the world. Finally, I express my thanks and appreciation to Dr Rudiger Koeppe of Rudiger Koeppe Verlag, the publisher of the 1999 edition, for releasing the copyrights to the book and enabling me to engage with this subject in new ways – of which I hope that they will spark with my readers the fascination I have entertained for almost three decades with this subject matter. Jan Blommaert Antwerp and Dar es Salaam September 2012 3 Preface to the first edition This book came into being in a gradual way, and its current shape is the product of a long process that started in 1985, when I first visited Tanzania and became interested in the intriguing plethora of discourses about language in the country.