Kiswahili and Decolonization

Andrew Marshall

2015

KISWAHILI AND DECOLONIZATION:

THE INTER-TERRITORIAL LANGUAGE COMMITTEE

AND SUCCESSOR ORGANIZATIONS, 1930-1970

By Andrew Marshall

ABSTRACT

Governments have long used language policy as a means of social control. As Frantz

Fanon and Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o have argued, language played a key role in supporting colonial rule across Africa and remains part of the colonial legacy. From the late 1920s through World

War II, the British colonial governments of Kenya, Tanganyika, Uganda, and Zanzibar promoted the Kiswahili language as a regional lingua franca, a policy facilitated by the Inter-Territorial

Language Committee for the East African Dependencies (ILC). I use published sources, archival records, and qualitative textual analysis of the ILC’s published journal to trace the Committee’s development from 1930 to 1970. Building on Ireri Mbaabu’s work, I argue that the British initially chose to promote and standardize Kiswahili as a way to make their subject societies more legible or, in other words, more efficiently governable but reversed course in the 1940s after realizing Kiswahili’s potential as a tool for anti-colonial organizing. The Committee adapted to the British language policy reversal by encouraging East African participation and switching its focus from social control to research. The Tanganyikan nationalists’ commitment to Kiswahili as a building block for a detribalized national identity allowed the Committee to survive the transition to independence and, as a research institute, continue to contribute to the study and promotion of Kiswahili in postcolonial Tanzania and beyond. My case study of the

ILC’s transformation affirms the importance of language control for the colonial project and the value of African languages in addressing the ongoing colonial legacy of cultural destruction.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I am grateful for all the people, both in the United States and Tanzania, who have supported and assisted me through my thesis-writing process. I would like to thank my thesis faculty readers, Dr. James Mittelman of the School of International Service (SIS) and Dr. Elke

Stockreiter of the College of the Arts of Sciences, for their encouragement, guidance, and flexibility. I am grateful for the support and encouragement of many other SIS faculty and staff, particularly Drs. Randolph Persaud, Carl LeVan, Michelle Egan, Gregory Fuller, and Neil

Shenai and my academic adviser Marisa Rivero. I would have never chosen this topic had I not worked as an English teacher with the Jesuit Volunteer Corps in Moshi, Tanzania, in 2011 and

2012, and I remain deeply indebted to all those who came alongside me during those two years, especially my students and colleagues at Majengo Secondary School, for their hospitality, friendship, and the many lessons they taught me. I owe special thanks to my Kiswahili instructors, Aldrini Kombe of Moshi’s Warmup Tuition Center and Lydiah Kiramba and Anne

Lutomia of the 2013 Summer Institute for the Languages of the Muslim World at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champagne. SIS generously awarded me a Graduate Research Grant toward my June 2014 archival research in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. I am grateful to everyone who assisted me before and during that trip, including Dr. Pamphil Mwaimu and Zaina

Ramadhani Mshana of the University of Dar es Salaam Library’s East Africana Collection;

Director Dr. Ernesta Mosha, former director Dr. David P.E. Massamba, Administrative Officer

Moses Mbinda, librarian Evelyn Mshighwa, and research assistant Magreth Massawe of the

Institute of Kiswahili Studies (IKS/TATAKI); and Elizabeth P. Kayanda, Modestus J. Sikada, and Cassian Hango of the Tanzania National Archives. I remain ever grateful to my family for their love and support. All errors and shortcomings in this thesis are mine alone.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

ABSTRACT ...... ii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ...... iii TABLE OF CONTENTS ...... iv LIST OF TABLES ...... v LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS ...... vi LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS ...... vii INTRODUCTION ...... 1 Language and the Colonial Project ...... 3 Language and the Decolonization Process ...... 10 THE CREATION OF THE INTER-TERRITORIAL LANGUAGE COMMITTEE ...... 15 Historical Context of Kiswahili in East Africa ...... 15 Pre-Standardization Colonial Language Policies ...... 19 The 1925 Dar es Salaam Conference ...... 28 Language Policy Developments between the Dar es Salaam and Mombasa Conferences ...... 38 1928 Mombasa conference...... 42 THE COMMITTEE FROM 1930 THROUGH WORLD WAR II ...... 48 Post-Mombasa Preparations for the Committee ...... 48 Opposition to Regional Integration and Kiswahili as Regional Lingua Franca ...... 49 The Committee’s Early Work (1930-39) ...... 52 The Dependencies’ Implementation of the Kiswahili Promotion Regime...... 58 ILC and World War II ...... 61 Analysis and Criticism of the ILC’s Work ...... 65 MARGINALIZATION AND TRANSFORMATION OF THE COMMITTEE (1945-1964)..... 69 Dependencies Turn Against Kiswahili ...... 71 Post-World War II Reorganization ...... 74 Binns Commission and the 1952 Cambridge Conference ...... 77 Kiswahili and East African Nationalism ...... 83 Committee’s Increased Engagement with East Africans and Shift toward research ...... 86 ANALYSIS OF THE COMMITTEE’s PERIODICAL (1933-1970) ...... 92 Basic Methodology ...... 94 Key Moments of Growing East African Influence in the Committee’s Publications ...... 98 CONCLUSION ...... 104 Analysis of the Committee’s Survival ...... 106 Significance of the Institute’s Africanization and Kiswahilization ...... 109 Future research and final thoughts ...... 112 ENDNOTES ...... 115 BIBLIOGRAPHY ...... 130

LIST OF TABLES

Table 1. Publications of the ILC and Successor Organizations ...... 94

Table 2. First Instances, 1939-1970 ...... 100

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

Figure 1. Proportion of Journal Items by Language, 1933-1970 ...... 97

Figure 2. Proportion of Journal Items by Author's Geographic Origin, 1933-1970 ...... 98

LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS

ASP Afro-Shirazi Party BAKITA Baraza la Kiswahili la Taifa (National Kiswahili Council, Tanzania) CMS Church Missionary Society EAC East African Community; East Africa Command EAAEC East Africa Army Education Corps EAHC East African High Commission EAISR East African Institute of Social Research EAKC East African Kiswahili Commission EALA East African Legislative Assembly EALB East African Literature Bureau EASC East African Swahili Committee IKR Institute of Kiswahili Research (TUKI in Kiswahili) IKS Institute of Kiswahili Studies (TATAKI in Kiswahili) ILC Inter-Territorial Language (Swahili) Committee to the East African Dependencies KAR King’s African Rifles TANU Tanganyika African National Union TATAKI Taasisi ya Taaluma za Kiswahili (IKS in English) TNA Tanzania National Archives TUKI Taasisi ya Uchunguzi wa Kiswahili (IKR in English) UDSM University of Dar es Salaam ZNP Zanzibar Nationalist Party ZPPP Zanzibar and Pemba People’s Party

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CHAPTER 1

INTRODUCTION

During the rapid decolonization of most of sub-Saharan African from the late 1950s through the 1960s, the departing colonial powers formally transferred colonial governmental institutions to the new states’ leaders. The coming of independence brought rapid changes within former colonial institutions, with regards to both who staffed them and who controlled them.

Outgoing colonial and incoming independent government officials adopted various strategies to navigate the transition from colonial to independent rule. The “wind of change,” as British

Prime Minister Harold Macmillan famously termed Africa’s growing anti-colonialism in his

1960 address to the apartheid-era South African Parliament, was much more than a changing of the institutional guard but rather a rising social and political consciousness among both the

African elites and masses with repercussions for all aspects of social life. Within the larger decolonization context, this thesis examines the development of British East Africa’s Inter-

Territorial Language Committee for the East African Dependencies (ILC). Although the ILC was a small organization, its history provides a valuable lens through which to examine the complex relationship between decolonization and language policy in East Africa.

The governments of Britain’s four East African colonial dependencies – Kenya,

Tanganyika (the mainland portion of present-day Tanzania), Uganda, and Zanzibar – founded the

ILC in 1930 to standardize and promote the Kiswahili language to facilitate more efficient and effective colonial administration. In keeping with common usage in the Kiswahili language, I use Kiswahili to refer to the language, as opposed to the singular and plural nouns Mswahili and

Waswahili, respectively, which in general usage signify the Swahili people who primarily live along the East African coast and speak Kiswahili as their mother tongue.1 Within 20 years, the

British colonial governments had largely abandoned their support for Kiswahili as a regional

1 language and reorganized the ILC as the weaker East African Swahili Committee (EASC). The

Committee, though politically marginalized within the very colonial order which had created it, survived the tumultuous decolonization period and transitioned to become a research institution at Tanzania’s University of Dar es Salaam (UDSM). The successor Institute of Kiswahili

Research (TUKI/IKR), reorganized as the Institute of Kiswahili Studies (TATAKI/IKS) in 2009, has built upon the Committee’s standardization efforts and linguistic research work and continued to produce and publicize important research on Kiswahili and the language’s role in

Tanzania and East Africa.

The ILC survived the decolonization process for three key reasons. First, the

Committee’s political marginalization in the final years of British colonial rule and its subsequent shift in focus from language control to linguistic and literary research made it much less an arena of contentious politics and the decolonization negotiations than more powerful and prominent government agencies. Second, the Committee’s institutional history of collaboration between

British and East African members and staff allowed for a relatively smooth and cooperative transition culminating in the first Tanzanian administrator’s appointment to its top post in 1969.

British officials had rhetorically and backhandedly acknowledged the importance of East African

Kiswahili speakers in developing the language since the standardization efforts began in the

1920s, but only after World War II did East Africans become prominent in the Committee, which became one of the first colonial institutions in the region to be chaired by an East African. Third, the ILC’s promotion of Kiswahili aligned with the objectives of Tanganyika’s new ruling party, the Tanganyika African National Union (TANU), and its efforts to make Kiswahili the new state’s national language. The TANU government gave the Committee, changed into a

2 permanent research institute, the base of support it had been seeking since the British retreat from

Kiswahili promotion.

The thesis proceeds as follows. The remainder of this introduction considers the role of language in colonial and post-colonial societies and introduces the concepts of consensual decolonization, legibility, and regime nesting and embedding. In the three subsequent chapters, I utilize both primary documents and existing scholarship to examine the historical background and bureaucratic maneuvering leading up to the ILC’s founding (Chapter 2), the Committee’s activities from 1930 through World War II (Chapter 3), and the Committee’s post-World War II development and eventual transformation into the Institute of Swahili Research (Chapter 4). The historic 1925 Dar es Salaam Kiswahili standardization conference and the Binns Commission’s

1952 report receive particular emphasis in my analysis. These two important events highlighted the complete reversal of British colonial language policy regarding Kiswahili, with the first signifying the deepening British commitment to Kiswahili and the second the metropolitan colonial establishment’s repudiation of Kiswahili as a regional or even territorial lingua franca.

My study of the Committee’s main periodical publication from 1933 to 1970 (Chapter 5) reveals how the publication reflected the Committee’s decolonization as it evolved toward greater use of

Kiswahili and greater East African authorship. In the conclusion, I reflect on the ILC’s decolonization and its relevance for the larger questions of language and cultural dependency in postcolonial societies.

Language and the Colonial Project

The British governors’ initial decision to establish the Inter-territorial Language

Committee and the ILC’s subsequent development cannot be understood apart from the context of colonial-era language politics in East Africa. The changing dynamics of British language

3 policy and the role of Kiswahili in each of the East African dependencies were not isolated aberrations but generally consistent with British colonial language policy elsewhere on the continent. What made the East African case different was not unique British policy but the specific historical context and wide geographic reach of Kiswahili. The Committee was established to implement British language policy, weakened when changing circumstances caused the British to alter their policy and saved by its compatibility with the Tanzanian nationalists’ linguistic aspirations. Language not only formed the content of the Committee’s work, but the politics of language shaped its institutional development and ultimate decolonization.

Beyond its instrumental value as a means of communication, language contributes to individual and group identities. Language is a crucial element in the individual’s sense of identity and in how one relates to and understands society and the broader world. Individual and societal choices about which languages to learn, which languages to privilege, and which languages to use in what manner and with whom are rarely if ever value-neutral, technocratic decisions which master linguists can make dispassionately for the common good. As author, playwright, and activist Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o explains, “The choice of language and the use to which language is put is central to a people’s definition of themselves in relation to their natural and social environment, indeed in relation to the entire universe.” 2 Disputes over language use and language policy touch upon not only instrumental questions of efficiency and effectiveness in communication but also questions central to the identity and fundamental beliefs of individuals, organizations, societies, and governments. Like many rulers before and since, the

European imperialists of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries recognized the importance of language as a tool of political control. In examining state planning efforts, anthropologist

James C. Scott notes that one major state goal is “to make a society legible, to arrange the population in a way that simplifie[s] the classic state functions of taxation, conscription, and prevention of rebellion.” 3 Language standardization has been a major state-building project in many states: “Of all state simplifications, then, the imposition of a single, official language may be the most powerful, and it is the precondition of other simplications.” 4 Colonial language policies were part of the imperialists’ efforts to make their colonial subjects’ world more legible, more efficiently governable by colonial administrators. Adapting Max Weber’s concept of state rationalization as “the process by which a state establishes efficient and orderly rule,” David

Laitan defines language rationalization as “the use of state power, through administrative regulation and public education, to standardize language within the boundaries of a state.” 5

Language rationalization eases the costs of state tasks such as tax collecting and informing the public of new regulations. 6 Language rationalization is an age-old means for achieving greater societal legibility.

As foreign occupiers from societies very culturally and ethnolinguistically different from those they ruled, European colonial administrators in Africa faced an even more challenging quest for legibility than that of indigenous state builders. They established and implemented language policies as they tried to linguistically rationalize the societies they ruled. Although colonial governments often justified their language policies as the means to solve practical communication problems in multilingual societies, the colonial quest for legibility aimed at maintaining and strengthening the metropolitan state’s control and fashioning new identities for their colonial territories and subject peoples. Colonial language policy neither uniform nor uniformly enforced across the African continent but rather varied based on the colonizing power and local conditions. Ali Mazrui broadly distinguishes between the colonial language policies of

5 the Germanic Europeans, including the British and the Germans, and the Latin Europeans, most notably the French and Portuguese. The former were generally more supportive of African languages and cultures, while the latter were more supportive of assimilating the colonized into the colonizers’ national language and culture. Mazrui observes that in some cases it was the racism of the British, Germans, and Afrikaners and their belief in their Germanic languages’ inherent superiority which led them to support their subjects’ use of the supposedly inferior

African languages. 7 Whether by imposing their own languages or standardizing indigenous languages or both, the European imperialists pursued language policies designed to maintain the colonial system of control.

Critical scholars of decolonization stress the importance of the oppressed people’s own languages and cultures in both imperialism and resistance to it. Ngũgĩ identifies African languages with the “resistance tradition,” diametrically opposed to and engaged in an ongoing struggle with the “imperialist tradition.” 8 He highlights the negative legacy of the imperialist tradition in Africa and particularly imperialism’s “cultural bomb” which destroys colonized people’s faith in their own cultures and “makes them want to identify with that which is furthest removed from themselves . . . with other people’s languages rather than their own.” 9 The colonial regime harnessed language and culture as weapons of social control. The different decisions in differing circumstances to either encourage African elites to use the colonizers’ language or to strictly limit the subjects’ access to the European language similarly perpetuated the European language’s perceived superiority. The colonial system’s cultural bomb was integral rather than tangential to the larger system of control because it targeted the colonized people’s self-identity:

For colonialism this involved two aspects of the same process: the destruction or the deliberate undervaluing of a people’s culture, their art, dances, religions, history, geography, education, orature and literature, and the conscious elevation of the language of the coloniser. The domination of a people’s language by the languages of the colonising nations was crucial to the domination of the mental universe of the colonised. 10 For Ngũgĩ, writing in African languages is an important way to combat the colonial legacy by communicating an author’s ideas to the general public rather than merely the educated elites. Like most prominent African writers, he first became famous for his writing in a European language, English in his case. However, he later began writing in his mother tongue, Gĩkũkyũ, an act he saw as “part and parcel of the anti-imperialist struggles of Kenyan and African peoples.” 11 Ngũgĩ has been one of the African intellectuals at the forefront of advocating both that more writers use African languages and more works be translated into African languages.12 He envisions an expansion of

African-language literature as a crucial component in “re-membering” the African past and cultures “dismembered” by colonialism.13 For Ngũgĩ, the African Renaissance is an ongoing rebirth in the life of Africans signaled by the continent’s intellectual and artistic achievements, and “the success of Africa’s renaissance depends on its commitment and ability to re-member itself, guided by the great re-membering vision, Pan-Africanism.”14

By referencing Pan-Africanism, the ideology and movement which emphasizes African unity and reaffirms the dignity of Africans and the value of their cultures, Ngũgĩ links the present-day African Renaissance with the African anti-colonial movements who won their countries’ independence. Questions of language policy and use are not obscure technical matters but rather continue to affect, both consciously and subconsciously, how contemporary generations in Africa and elsewhere view themselves and the world around them.

South African anti-apartheid activist Steve Biko also called for resistance to the denigration of African cultures as a key element within his Black Consciousness philosophy.

During his 1976 trial for his activities promoting Black Consciousness and opposing the South

African apartheid regime, Biko testified that the use of English in secondary and higher education contributed to black university students’ sense of inferiority:

You may be intelligent but not as articulate [as white students], you are forced into a subservient role of having to say yes to what they are saying, talking about what you have experienced, which they have not experienced, because you cannot express it so well. This in a sense inculcates also in numerous students a sense of inadequacy. You tend to think it is not just a matter of language, you tend to tie it up also with intelligence in a sense, you tend to feel that that guy is better equipped than you mentally.15 The privileged status granted to the English and Afrikaans languages at the expense of the indigenous African ones reaffirmed and perpetuated the whites’ political, social, and economic dominance in South Africa. Although his writing was less explicitly concerned with African languages than that of Ngũgĩ, Biko’s approach is largely consistent with the Kenyan author’s emphasis on African languages, and the apartheid government’s efforts to impose the Afrikaans language as the language of instruction for black students triggered the 1976 Soweto student uprisings associated with Black Consciousness. Ngũgĩ approvingly cites Biko as one of the forerunners of the emergent African Renaissance.16

Philosopher and psychiatrist Frantz Fanon, active in the Algerian struggle for independence from France, likewise appreciated the role of language within the colonial system and the anti-colonial struggle. Asserting that “to speak a language is to appropriate its world and culture,” he criticized colonial subjects and former colonial subjects for seeking to use the colonial power’s language and culture in order to be accepted by the colonial power’s elite. 17

The colonial elites thus became separated from the masses and from their own culture. Through the “emaciation of the stock of national culture,” the colonial regime reduced the arts and

8 traditions of the colonized to “a set of automatic habits, some traditions of dress, and a few broken-down institutions” with “no real creativity and no overflowing life.” 18 The shell of traditional, precolonial life thus remained but without any of its vitality or dynamism. Fanon argued that a revived, participatory national culture could emerge out of these remnants through the anti-colonial struggle, and he described the revival in literature, oral storytelling, handicrafts, ceramics and pottery, dancing, and traditional ceremonies within the larger context of the

Algerian struggle.19 Fanon did not restrict the channels of resistance to non-European languages.

Instead Fanon believed that languages such as French could be separated from their colonial baggage by the colonized peoples’ appropriation of the languages for the purposes of national resistance.20 For Fanon, as for Ngũgĩ and Biko, matters of language and culture were central to both the establishment and the dismantling of the entire colonial enterprise.

Ngũgĩ, Biko, and Fanon give language and culture prominent roles in their accounts of colonization and decolonization. The colonial efforts at language rationalization supported the colonial state, and reasserting African languages was one way of resisting colonialism.

Dependency theorists argue that the global economic system keeps weaker “peripheral” states, largely former colonies, in permanent economic dependence on the more powerful states of the

“center,” including the former colonial powers. Incorporating insights from Ali Mazrui and

Ngũgĩ, Ireri Mbaabu interprets colonial language policies as reinforcing the colonized people’s linguistic and cultural dependence on the West while simultaneously creating opportunities for the anti-colonial movements. Although an unintended consequence of colonial language rationalization, the spread of European languages and government-endorsed African lingua francas such as Kiswahili allowed African nationalists to better coordinate their resistance activities across ethnolinguistically diverse territories. Yet uncritical acceptance of the externally

9 imposed or standardized languages for efficiency’s sake risked implicitly endorsing the destructive values of Ngũgĩ’s cultural bomb. Although British colonial governments presented

English as intellectually and culturally superior to all indigenous East African languages,

Kiswahili’s role as a regional lingua franca gave Kenyan, Tanganyikan, and Zanzibari nationalists the means to effectively mobilize and inspire supporters without reliance on

European languages known only by the elite. Through their efforts to use Kiswahili to consolidate their control, the German and British colonizers gave East Africans a linguistic weapon with which to resist both formal colonial control and more general European cultural domination.

Language and the Decolonization Process

Given language policy’s importance in maintaining the colonial system, language played surprisingly little role in the independence negotiations between the British colonial rulers and

East African nationalists. Gary Wasserman’s characterization of the Kenyan decolonization process as consensual decolonization provides a useful model for understanding Britain’s East

African dependencies’ negotiated paths toward independence. At the simplest level, decolonization is “the transfer of political authority from a colonial state to indigenous leaders within the framework of state sovereignty.”21 As Wasserman notes, the colonial power often retains power and influence over the newly independent government even after the transfer of formal authority. Consensual decolonization refers to the bargaining “process of transferring colonial political authority in which there is a large measure of agreement among the participants that the outcome of the process is to be independence.”22 All four East African dependencies achieved full independence through peacetime negotiations rather than armed struggle; the 1950s

Mau Mau insurgency in Kenya stands out as a violent exception in the region. Wasserman

10 identifies three themes in consensual decolonization: “the adaptation of colonial elites to the removal of colonial authority”; “the cooptation of the nationalist elites into the colonial system”; and “the pre-emption [italicized in original] or control of mass discontent, ensuring the acquiescence of the masses to the process of consensual decolonization.”23 This framework helps explain East African decolonization although adaptation was a less significant theme outside of Kenya because of the other dependencies’ much smaller and less influential European settler populations. The independence bargaining processes dealt with many contentious issues including independence timelines, government structures, electoral systems, the political status of the Buganda kingdom in Uganda, traditional claims to Kenyan farmland appropriated by the

European settlers, and the fate of the regionally organized colonial services such as East African

Airways. Language policy and the fate of the East African Swahili Committee were not major topics of debate between the British and the nationalists during the consensual decolonization process.

Consensual decolonization is a helpful framework for understanding the East African decolonization context of the Committee’s final years and its transformation into a research institute but does not explain the why the regional status of Kiswahili and the EASC were largely off the negotiation agenda. The place of Kiswahili promotion within the British hierarchy of goals helps explain why this was the case. EASC’s status as a non-issue stemmed from the changing place of Kiswahili and the Committee in the British imperial order, which I analyze using the concepts of nested and embedded regimes.24 Oran Young defines regimes as “sets of rules, decision-making procedures, and/or programs that give rise to social practices, assign roles to the participants in these practices, and govern their interactions.”25 Within the British colonial system in East Africa, the Kiswahili standardization conferences which led to the ILC’s

11 formation marked the emergence of a nascent regional Kiswahili promotion regime.

“Institutional nesting” occurs when “specific arrangements that are restricted with regard to functional scope, geographic domain, or some other relevant criterion are folded into broader institutional frameworks that concern the same general issue area but are less detailed in their application to specific problems.”26 In the case of the ILC, nesting refers to how the Committee and language policy in general were situated within the British colonial governments in East

Africa. Young describes the related concept of embeddedness as follows: “For the most part, issue-specific regimes are deeply embedded in overarching institutional arrangements in the sense that they assume—ordinarily without saying so explicitly—the operation of a whole suite of broader principles and practices that constitute the deep structure of international society as whole.”27 Although these definitions refer to the nested and embedded regimes within the international system, nesting and embeddedness can also occur within other complex political systems such as the British Empire or the British colonial governance framework for East Africa.

Nesting and embeddedness are important concepts in analyzing how specific issues such as

Kiswahili language policy fit within larger policy frameworks. British support for the regional standardization and promotion of Kiswahili led to the Inter-Territorial Language Committee’s creation. The East African governors nested the ILC, the Kiswahili promotion regime’s organizational embodiment, within the existing regional and territorial colonial hierarchy by placing it under the East African Governors’ Conference and appointing the four dependencies’ directors of education as members. The Kiswahili promotion regime was embedded within the

British colonial system and subordinate to the high value the colonial system placed on perpetuating British control over the Empire’s territories and subject peoples.

As subsequent chapters explain, the rise of anti-colonial movements and increased British and indigenous opposition to Kiswahili caused the British colonial governments to reverse their prior support for Kiswahili. The Kiswahili promotion regime no longer served the colonial system’s underlying values to perpetuate colonial power relationships and became largely disembedded in the 1940s and early 1950s. The reorganization of the ILC as the EASC reflected the policy reversal and the disembedding of the Kiswahili promotion regime. Among other changes, the EASC’s membership no longer included the territorial directors of education, severing the previous direct link to high-level policymaking and thus also weakening the EASC’s nesting arrangements within the colonial apparatus. By the time the British and East African nationalists were negotiating the terms of independence, no interest groups viewed the EASC as a significant organization worth fighting over, nor was there much of a Kiswahili promotion regime left. The Committee’s leadership preserved the organization by redirecting its focus toward research and increasingly engaging with Kiswahili-speaking East Africans. Taking advantage of the precolonial and colonial linguistic legacies, Tanganyika’s nationalists viewed

Kiswahili as an important national unifying factor and ultimately supported the transformation of the Committee into a permanent research institute. The Institute of Kiswahili Studies has continued to study Kiswahili and promote its greater use within government institutions and

Tanzanian society.

Although not prominent in East African consensual decolonization, language policy remains a contentious issue in the region and across the globe. The case study of the ILC’s development from a piece of the colonial bureaucracy into the preeminent Kiswahili research center in independent East Africa provides insight into how language policy and politics interacted with both colonialism and decolonization in East Africa. Language policy was an

13 important and contested arena in the colonial and post-independence eras across East Africa, although not in the independence negotiations themselves. The formal granting of independence did not in and of itself complete the decolonization of power.28 The former European colonial powers retained much political, economic, and cultural influence over their former territories, a situation referred by Kwame Nkrumah, Pan-Africanist and Ghana’s first president, as neocolonialism.29 Due in part to the former colonial powers’ ongoing influence and in part to the practical realities of linguistic diversity, most African states perpetuated the colonial-era language policies.30 English, French, and Portuguese have maintained their privileged positions and remain dominant languages for formal education, the publication of laws, and even parliamentary debates. While these languages have at times been appropriated for anti-colonial purposes, their use can still carry much colonial-era baggage, such as the assumption that major

Western languages are inherently superior to indigenous languages. Despite the European languages’ decades of preeminence since independence, activists continue to push for greater recognition and use of African languages. My analysis of the ILC’s role in language policy development contributes to a greater understanding of that time and its continuing relevance in contemporary debates. In East Africa and beyond, critical interpretation of colonialism’s language legacy can contribute to the ongoing and fiercely contested debates on core questions such as which languages should be privileged and who is empowered or disempowered by the privileging of a given language.

CHAPTER 2

THE CREATION OF THE INTER-TERRITORIAL LANGUAGE COMMITTEE

Historical Context of Kiswahili in East Africa

The historical and social contexts of Kiswahili across the East African dependencies shaped the emergence of a Kiswahili promotion regime and the Inter-Territorial Language

Committee, which in turn affected the language’s subsequent development. As with every other living language, there is not and never has been a single uniform Kiswahili language. Languages are not fixed and unchanging but rather continually evolving. No language’s common usage perfectly matches the official form as codified in dictionaries and grammar books and taught via formal instruction, and in that sense “all languages are fictions.”31 Individuals and groups frequently use different languages in different situations based on their roles and class, gender, religious, and racial identities. Given its limited scope, this thesis’s treatment of Kiswahili’s diverse and complex sociolinguistic and historical contexts is necessarily simplified.

The Kiswahili language is one of the most widely spoken African languages in terms of both the number and geographic range of its speakers. It is the official language of Tanzania, one of Kenya’s two official languages, a national language of Uganda and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and the official lingua franca of the five-member East African Community (EAC).

Major Kiswahili dialects include Kimvita from Mombasa, Kiunguja from Zanzibar’s Stone

Town, Kiamu from Lamu, and Kingwana from eastern DRC.32 Kiswahili is the most prominent language within the larger Bantu group of related African languages. Other East African Bantu languages include most of the Tanzanian vernacular languages, many Kenyan languages including Gĩkũkyũ, and Luganda, the most widely spoken vernacular language in Uganda.

Kiswahili originated on the East African coast at least as early as the tenth century and likely earlier. 33 Linguists have extensively debated whether the language’s primary source was

15 an earlier Bantu language, Arabic, or a mixture of the two; the general consensus recognizes

Kiswahili as a Bantu language which has adopted many loanwords from Arabic and other languages.34 Kiswahili includes many Arabic words, but the language’s grammatical structure is clearly Bantu. Alamin Mazrui and Ibrahim Noor Shariff, who place greater emphasis on

Kiswahili’s Arabic linguistic influences than the consensus view, point out that some earlier

European linguists highlighted the Arabic contribution to argue that Kiswahili was not a true

African language.35 Although the relative weighting of their linguistic contributions to Kiswahili may never be decisively settled, both the indigenous coastal Bantu speakers and the Persian and

Arab traders who later settled along the coast greatly influenced the language’s development.

The coastal civilization established by the Waswahili was based around rival city-states stretching from Mogadishu in the north as far south as Sofala in present-day Mozambique.36

Key cities included Lamu and Mombasa in the north and Kilwa in the south. Commercial contacts and intermarriage between the Waswahili and the Persian and later Arab traders who settled among them introduced Islam to the coast, and by the time the noted Arab traveler Ibn

Battuta passed reached East Africa in 1331, the Waswahili had become predominantly Muslim.37

The Swahili civilization was involved in the flourishing Indian Ocean trade between East Africa,

Persia, Arabia, and India, with contacts far as China.38 Trade in ivory, gold, and slaves from the

African interior built the city-states’ prosperity.39 Waswahili poets produced a rich Kiswahili literature written in the Arabic script which included the celebrated tenzi epic poems. Kiswahili poetry originated in the north in Lamu and Pate and later spread to Mombasa.40 Though the earliest known manuscript dates to 1728, Kiswahili had likely been a written language for some time prior.41 From the 1500s through the early 1700s, the Portuguese became the dominant force along the East African coast as they sought to control the trade routes between Europe and the

East Indies. They defeated the Swahili city-states. The city-states frequently rebelled against

Portuguese rule and allied themselves with the Omani Arabs, who finally drove the Portuguese away in the early 1700s and became the region’s new hegemon from their main island settlement at Zanzibar off the coast of Tanganyika.42

Despite the language’s lengthy history along the coast, Kiswahili did not begin to seriously expand inland until the early 1800s. Under the Omani sultans of the al-Busaidy dynasty, trade flourished, and both Arabs and the Waswahili increasingly ventured inland in large caravans trading textiles and gun powder for ivory and slaves. Kiswahili, not Arabic, became the language of the caravan trade.43 As Kiswahili-speaking trade caravans journeyed inland, the language spread along the trade routes as far west as the present-day DRC and

Uganda and became associated with Islam, trade, and slavery.44 Small groups of Arab and

Waswahili traders established new Kiswahili-speaking, Muslim towns such as Tabora and Ujiji in present-day Tanzania and Bujumbura in present-day Burundi.45 Islam’s movement inland along the trade routes helped spread Kiswahili and literacy. Although the Muslims used Arabic to read the Koran and pray, the imams tended to use Kiswahili in their preaching as they interpreted the Koran’s teachings. Islamic Koranic education also taught young Muslims how to read Arabic script, the same script used at the time to write Kiswahili.46 However, most inland

Kiswahili speakers used the language primarily for trading purposes. Zanzibar became the commercial center of the caravan trade between the inland and the coast, and Sultan Seyyid Said began taking a more active role in ruling his East African domains in 1828 and later permanently moved his capital there from Oman.47

When European Christian missionaries arrived in the mid-1800s, they saw both opportunities and dangers in using Kiswahili. Mombasa-based German missionary Johan Krapf

17 of the Church Missionary Society (CMS) began studying the Kimvita dialect in 1844, while

Zanzibar-based British missionary Bishop Edward Steere of the Universities’ Mission to Central

Africa (UMCA) began his studies of Kiunguja in 1864. Krapf and Steere saw Kiswahili as a vehicle for rapidly spreading Christianity across East Africa due to the language’s status as a commercial lingua franca. 48 With Krapf and Steere leading the way, missionaries produced

Kiswahili dictionaries and grammars and began writing the language in Latin characters, instead of the traditional Arabic ones, for the first time. Other missionaries, however, opposed the use of

Kiswahili because of its close identification with Islam and Arabic culture, “argu[ing] that

Arabisms in Swahili necessarily carried the substance and spirit of Islam.”49 Some missions emphasized vernacular languages as the only suitable means for communicating the gospel to

East Africans, but others relied more heavily on Kiswahili.50 Each mission made its own choices about which Kiswahili dialect to use and, if not using Arabic characters, how to spell Kiswahili words in Latin characters. By 1925, missionaries had already translated the entire Bible into

Kimvita and Kiunguja and all or part of the New Testament translated into an additional three dialects.51 Despite their lack of a uniform Kiswahili orthography and dialect, the Christian missionaries helped spread Kiswahili across East Africa through their publications, preaching, and schools.

By the late 1800s, Kiswahili was the mother tongue of a vibrant coastal civilization and several smaller inland settlements and used as a trade language throughout much of East Africa.

Kiswahili’s status and use reflected the region’s social, political, and economic realities. In different contexts, the language was associated with the coast, the Waswahili, Islam, and trade, including the slave trade. Most Africans who spoke Kiswahili as an additional language were men, reflecting their greater involvement in long-distance trade than women.52 Because many

Christian missionaries and pastors used vernacular languages in preaching the gospel while

Muslim imams more uniformly used Kiswahili, inland Muslims tended to be more proficient in

Kiswahili than Christians.53 Arabic had higher status than Kiswahili as a language of religion and learning along the coast, especially in Zanzibar with its influx of Arabs after sultan relocated there, but Kiswahili was much more commonly used in daily life.54

Pre-Standardization Colonial Language Policies

When the German and British colonizers arrived in the 1880s and 1890s, Kiswahili was already well-established along the coast and used as a lingua franca over a much larger region.

Both colonial powers claimed control over vast areas inhabited by ethnolinguistically diverse societies. These East African societies initially appeared largely illegible to the agents of the state, who knew little about their subjects’ cultures, languages, and resources. The British and

German administrations aimed to establish and perpetuate their control, and doing so involved the classic state-building quest for legibility. Greater legibility was one of the goals of their evolving language policies that laid the groundwork for the subsequent British Kiswahili promotion regime.

German adventurer Carl Peters began negotiating treaties in East Africa on his own initiative in 1884, and the German government declared a protectorate over the territory he had visited in 1885. Peters’ German East Africa Company (Deutsch-Ostafrikanische Gesellschaft) initially administered the territory, but, after militarily intervening to suppress rebellions against company rule, the German government took formal control in 1891.55 The German colonial administrators had concerns about using either German or Kiswahili in administering German

East Africa, their vast territory which included Tanganyika (the mainland of present-day

Tanzania) and present-day Rwanda and Burundi. They did not want their subjects to learn

German because exposure to Western knowledge and ideas might equip them to more effectively rebel, but the German administrators similarly feared the potential of Kiswahili as a unifying language. They were also concerned with the language’s association with Islam, which they perceived as another basis for colonial resistance.56 Despite some halting efforts at promoting

German, the Germans primarily relied on Kiswahili for communicating with their East African subjects.57 Confirming German fears, the indigenous resistance, largely consisting of ethnic groups other than the Waswahili, used Kiswahili for interethnic communication during Maji Maji rebellion (1905-07). The German brutally crushed the rebellion and recognized that Kiswahili would serve as a unifying factor whether they promoted it or not. The German administration expanded its already significant use of Kiswahili.58

The German use of Kiswahili in administration and education built upon Kiswahili’s preexisting preeminence in the region and firmly established it as German East Africa’s lingua franca. At the 1905 Colonial Congress in Berlin, German linguist Carl Meinhof proposed that

Kiswahili could be de-Islamized by writing it in Latin characters, as opposed to the Arabic characters which had long been used. Some missionaries and government officials were already using the Latin script, and, following Meinhof’s suggestion, the German government adopted

Latin characters for all official business in 1906.59 The Germans utilized Kiswahili extensively in their communications with local leaders and East Africans employed by the government’s

Junior Service.60 The Germans also used Kiswahili in their relatively few government schools.61

Some of the Christian missionaries of German East Africa wanted to continue to use the vernacular languages and pushed back against government pressure for greater Kiswahili use. In the ensuing compromise, the colonial government allowed missionaries to preach in vernacular languages but required them to use Kiswahili as the language of instruction in the mission

20 schools. 62 The German language policy made German East Africa much more legible to the colonial administration than the territory otherwise would have been and helped maintain the colonial order.

The British were more ambivalent than the Germans about Kiswahili during their early decades in power in East Africa. In both Kenya and Uganda, the Imperial British East Africa

Company’s activities preceded the British government’s formal presence. The Company’s predecessor, the British East Africa Association, successfully negotiated with Sultan Barghash bin Said of Zanzibar in 1887 for rights to administer the northern portion of the mainland territory the sultan claimed, part of present-day Kenya, and the British government declared a protectorate over the Company’s territory in 1895.63 The East Africa Protectorate’s government was committed to English as the colony’s lingua franca but used Kiswahili extensively for efficiency, while the missions generally promoted vernacular languages.64 Most missionaries, responsible for providing most formal education during the protectorate’s first decades, supported the use of vernancular languages over Kiswahili because of their commitment to spreading the gospel in Africans’ own mother tongues, the so-called Livingstonian principle due to its identification with British explorer and missionary David Livingston, and because of the association between Kiswahili and Islam. As educators, the missionaries also accepted the general principle that children learn best, particularly in their earliest years of schooling, in the language they understand the best.65

Despite their preference for vernacular instruction in students’ early years, the East Africa

Protectorate’s missionaries were not generally hostile to the teaching of Kiswahili in higher grades or to the idea of Kiswahili as the protectorate’s lingua franca. The missionaries and most of the administrators who testified before the Commission on Education in the East Africa

Protectorate in 1919 supported greater teaching of Kiswahili, but the Protectorate’s Director of

Education, J. R. Orr, argued that teaching Kiswahili was “a waste of time” and that the focus should be on the vernacular languages in the early years of schooling and then English subsequently.66 The Commission ultimately backed Orr’s views, but the minority issued their own report advocating Kiswahili’s use as a lingua franca.67 The Commission’s split decision revealed that, despite Orr’s opposition, official and missionary support for Kiswahili was strong.

Recognizing his relatively weak position and the threat of German conquest, Sultan Ali bin Said of Zanzibar accepted a British protectorate over his island realm in 1890. The British took increasing control of Zanzibar’s internal affairs while relying on the Zanzibar Arabs to staff their administration. 68 Kiswahili was the dominant language of daily life, with even many Arab households using Kiswahili more than Arabic. Stanley Rivers-Smith, Zanzibar’s first British

Director of Education (1907-1920) who had previously served in a similar capacity in the British de facto protectorate government in Egypt, “acquired a great respect for Islam and a love of the

Swahili language” during his time in the islands, passions which influenced his subsequent decisions as Tanganyika’s first British Director of Education.69 However, the British administration privileged the land-owning Zanzibaris of Arab descent and the Indian professional class, and the government used various languages in the courts and education, privileging Arabic and English.70 At Sultan Seyyid Ali’s request, the British established the Zanzibar Department of Education in 1906 and began slowly organizing a relatively small, elite-focused educational system. Kiswahili was the medium of instruction for only the first three grades at the

Government Primary School, and many students dropped out after instruction switched to Arabic and English in the fourth year.71 The educational language policy reflected both the practical benefits of relying on widely known Kiswahili and the British desire to privilege English.

Because of Islam’s role as the Zanzibar’s dominant religion and Arabic’s cultural prestige, the

Zanzibar government schools initially continued to use Arabic characters to write Kiswahili while using Latin characters for other Bantu languages.72 Rivers-Smith, with the support of the missionaries, announced that the schools would begin using Kiswahili in Latin script in 1909.

The decision greatly reduced enrollment in Zanzibar’s government schools, as many Muslim students dropped out; the Department of Education acknowledged its mistake in forcing the change but did not revert to the Arabic script.73 Rivers-Smith’s effort to introduce the Latin script was an early attempt at standardizing Kiswahili to make Zanzibari society more legible to the colonial bureaucracy. Greater use of the Latin script made it easier for British officials to learn and write Kiswahili and communicate with the Sultan’s subjects.

Formalized in the 1920 Education Commission report and officially approved by the

Secretary of State for Colonies in 1921, British educational language policy in Zanzibar differed by students’ ethnicity. Indian students were taught in Gujarati for their first three years and then increasingly in English with Gujarati as a compulsory subject. Due to the declining use of

Arabic among Zanzibar’s Arab population, both Arab and African students received their first three years of education in Kiswahili. After the instruction switched to English, Arab students took Arabic as a compulsory subject, while African students took Kiswahili.74 In the words of the 1920 report, “the goal of educational effort for each of the nationalities should be for the

Arab agriculture, for the Indian commerce, for the African industries.”75 Zanzibar’s small size and widespread use of Kiswahili meant that legibility was less of a concern for the British than in

Kenya and Uganda. The British were instead more concerned with preserving the social status of favorable elites. By privileging English and Arabic over Kiswahili in official business and by aligning educational language requirements with ethnic cleavages, the protectorate’s language

23 policy contributed to social stratification and division. These divisions, particularly the African majority’s feelings of exclusion, would later contribute to the bloody 1964 Zanzibar revolution.76

Unlike Kenya, Tanganyika, and Zanzibar, the region which would become Uganda had no significant population speaking Kiswahili as a first language. The Luganda-speaking

Buganda kingdom of the Baganda people, ruled by their kabaka (king), was a major political force, but many other ethnolinguistic groups and polities were also present in what would become the British Protectorate of Uganda. Kiswahili had already reached the region via the caravan trade and “was in everyday use at Kabaka Mutesa’s court.”77 The earliest British missionaries in Uganda initially used Kiswahili as the language of instruction in their schools and translated key Kiswahili religious publications into Luganda. Bishop Alexander McKay, a prominent leader in the Church Missionary Society’s Ugandan mission and the builder of the territory’s first printing press in 1875, extensively used Kiswahili and saw the language as important for the conversion of East Africa to Christianity.78

Taking over from the Imperial British East Africa Company, the British government established protectorates over the various kingdoms of present-day Uganda, beginning with

Buganda in 1893-4.79 Early British attempts to promote Kiswahili in Uganda were stymied by the political power of Buganda, whose rulers generally opposed Kiswahili in favor of Luganda and had the missions’ support.80 The missions largely reversed their earlier support for Kiswahili in schools as they became more concerned about the spread of Islam, which had a small but growing number of adherents in the protectorate. More so than in either Kenya or Tanganyika, perhaps because both had sizeable Waswahili populations, Christian missionaries in Uganda vigorously opposed the promotion of Kiswahili because they feared doing so would provide a foothold for further Islamic growth.81 As a result, the British administration only promoted

Kiswahili in those areas of the protectorate outside the Buganda kingdom.82 Kiswahili had limited utility for the Ugandan protectorate government because the well-established resistance from the Baganda and missionaries and the lack of a sizeable Kiswahili-speaking population.

Following the German surrender in World War I, the British assumed control over most of German East Africa as the League of Nations mandatory territory of Tanganyika.83 This development united a large East African domain under British rule. The new British administration in Tanganyika inherited the German colonial system of control which had utilized

Kiswahili for administration purposes on a larger scale that that of any of the other British dependencies. The British supported vernacular languages and English more than German administration had promoted vernacular languages and German and thus weakened the social prestige enjoyed by Kiswahili, but their policy changes merely slowed rather than reversed the ongoing spread of Kiswahili in Tanganyika.84 The efforts to standardize Kiswahili and establish the ILC arose as the British colonial regimes increased their involvement in their subjects’ daily lives, mostly notably through education.

In the 1920s and 1930s, the promotion of Kiswahili as a regional lingua franca became the official language policy of the British East African dependencies as part of the British quest to make their subjects’ societies more legible. High-level colonial officials, particularly the powerful directors of education, actively engaged in language policy discussions. Following regional conferences in 1925 and 1928 in Dar es Salaam and Mombasa, respectively, the East

African governors created the Inter-Territorial Language Committee for the East African

Dependencies as a permanent organization to carry out their standardization agenda.

The addition of Tanganyika to the British sphere of influence in East Africa increased the potential economies of scales from the use of Kiswahili as a regional lingua franca, but it was

25 not the only reason that Kiswahili promotion became government policy. The changing nature of the colonial education systems was a major factor in the greater emphasis placed on language policy. While formal education had initially been largely left to the missions, the colonial state apparatus became increasingly involved in regulating, funding, and expanding education in the

1920s, both through the establishment of state schools and the provision of grants to religious and private schools. The Secretary of State for the Colonies’ Advisory Committee on Native

Education in the British Tropical African Dependencies released its 1925 memorandum

Education Policy in British Tropical Africa, which both captured and helped to promote this new thinking in British colonial education policy:

As a result on the one hand of the economic development of the British African Dependencies, which has placed larger revenues at the disposal of the Administrations, and on the other hand of the fuller recognition of the principle that the Controlling Power is responsible as trustee for the moral advancement of the native population, the Governments of these territories are taking an increasing interest and participation in native education, which up to recent years has been largely to the Mission Societies.85 The Committee praised and encouraged the missions and other voluntary initiatives but reserved for the state “the general direction of educational policy and the supervision of all Educational

Institutions.”86Other than endorsing the use of vernacular languages in education and calling for cooperation among dependencies in textbook development, the Committee’s memorandum did not dwell on the question of language.

The Committee’s explanation of the purpose of colonial education incorporated both the paternalistic and practical motivations which drove early East African language policy. On the one hand, the colonial governments and missions were to work together to use education to guide the subject peoples toward a limited exposure to modernity while protecting what was good in their cultures:

Education should be adapted to the mentality, aptitudes, occupations and traditions of the various peoples, conserving as far as possible all sound and healthy elements in the fabric of their social life; adapting them where necessary to changed circumstances and progressive ideas, as an agent of natural growth and evolution.87 On the other hand, though, the Committee stressed that such avowed altruism was not to prevent the education system from producing trained Africans suited to fill colonial manpower needs:

The first task of education is to raise the standard alike of character and efficiency of the bulk of the people, but provision must be made for the training of those who are required to fill posts in the administrative and technical services, as well as of those who as chiefs will occupy positions of exceptional trust and responsibility.88 These dual purposes of colonial education, for the benefit of the colonized subjects and for the benefit of the colonial regime, reflected Sir Frederick Lugard’s idea of Europeans’ “dual mandate” for administering their colonial territories. As a British colonial administrator in

Nigeria, Lugard famously implemented indirect rule, allying with favorable local leaders to economically maintain British control. He had previously been a key leader in the Imperial

British East Africa Company’s colonization efforts in present-day Kenya and Uganda in the

1880s and 1890s. Lugard’s influence on the Advisory Committee was not surprising given that he was one of its ten members and had written his famous work The Dual Mandate in British

Tropical Africa only three years before the memorandum. Lugard described the dual mandate as follows:

Let it be admitted at the outset that European brains, capital, and energy have not been, and never will be, expended in developing the resources of Africa from motives of pure philanthropy; that Europe is in Africa for the mutual benefit of her own industrial classes, and of the native races in their progress to a higher plane; that the benefit can be made reciprocal, and that it is the aim and desire of civilised administration to fulfill this dual mandate.89 Both paternalistic and practical motivations influenced East African policymakers in considering the role of Kiswahili, and they frequently framed their arguments in terms of either the benefits to the colonial subjects or to the administration’s bottom line. The use of Kiswahili as a lingua

27 franca was a matter of efficiency for British colonial planners, allowing them to distribute textbooks and other educational materials on a much larger scale and for much less money than would have been the case if multiple vernacular languages had been used instead. However, both the advocates of vernacular education and the supporters of greater regional use of

Kiswahili also appealed to paternalism as they explained how their favored language policy would better develop and help the subject peoples.

The increased focus within the British Empire on “native education” made the question of language policy a more central concern of the colonial governments. The concept of the dual mandate allowed the British colonial administrators to frame their education and language policies so as to highlight their benefits both to the colonial system and to the subjugated peoples within it. The increased state role in education extended state power into the lives of more East

Africans and represented another effort at making their societies more legible and controllable from the colonial administrators’ perspectives. With education as a major post-World War I colonial priority, language policy became a more important matter of concern for colonial officials. In part because of the growing importance of education, the British dependency governments eventually embedded Kiswahili promotion within the regional colonial hierarchy of goals.

The 1925 Dar es Salaam Conference

Though the political environment became more favorable for Kiswahili in the 1920s, the variation among the language’s dialects limited its utility in supporting British rule. If each government language training offered in Kiswahili or document published in Kiswahili had to be translated into two, three, or more dialects, then the potential benefits of emphasizing Kiswahili rather than either English or the vernacular languages would have been greatly reduced.

Missionaries and colonial administrators began more seriously discussing the need for inter- territorial coordination on language issues and the possibility for language standardization. Rev.

William J.W. Roome, a prominent Kampala-based missionary in the British and Foreign

Missionary Society, and Rivers-Smith, the new Tanganyikan Director of Education, were two consistent British advocates throughout the 1920s for the standardization of the Kiswahili dialects and the greater use of Kiswahili across East Africa. Their efforts, driven by their own assessments of how Kiswahili standardization would help their respective organizations, were not initially coordinated, and the two men didn’t meet in person until the 1925 conference in Dar es Salaam, a conference brought about in large part through their advocacy.90 Recognizing that wide agreement on one form of Kiswahili could reduce both the missions’ and governments’ expenses, Roome had proposed a Kiswahili standardization conference to the Ugandan government and missions as early as September 1921.91

When the British organized their Tanganyikan mandate in 1920, Rivers-Smith, then

Zanzibar’s Director of Education and a former Director of Education for the British occupation of Egypt, became the new territory’s first Director of Education.92 Rivers-Smith had developed a great appreciation of Kiswahili during his time in Zanzibar and by 1921 was actively lobbying within the government to make Kiswahili the primary school medium of instruction. Although aware of some missionaries’ opposition to the language’s use due to its association with Islam and assuming that “tribal natives by learning Swahili do drift towards Mohammedanism,”

Rivers-Smith nonetheless argued on the grounds of efficiency that a single medium of instruction was necessary and that Kiswahili would better serve the government’s purposes than English.93

He noted that using a single language would greatly simplify the government’s needs for textbooks and fluent school inspectors. In essence, Roome and Rivers-Smith argued for the

29 standardization and use of Kiswahili as an inter-territorial lingua franca as a way to make East

African societies more legible for the British. They sought to embed a Kiswahili promotion regime within the colonial order by showing how it would strengthen colonial control. They clearly subordinated Kiswahili standardization and promotion beneath the larger goal of preserving and more effectively administering the colonial system.

The first of several governmental efforts to standardize Kiswahili came not from

Tanganyika but from Kenya. The British East Africa Protectorate had been reorganized in 1920 into the Kenya Protectorate, the coastal strip of land which the British technically administered on behalf of Zanzibar’s sultan, and the Kenya Colony, the remainder of the old East Africa

Protectorate. Despite the legal distinctions, the common Kenyan colonial government in Nairobi jointly administered the two Kenyan dependencies. In an August 2, 1924 letter to the Kenya’s

Colonial Secretary, Orr, the Kenyan Director of Education who had vigorously opposed

Kiswahili in 1919, highlighted “the handicap placed on the development of education in Eastern

Africa by the variety of Ki-Swahili prevailing in the different colonies.”94 In addition to Rivers-

Smith’s advocacy on educational grounds for standardization of Kiswahili across Kenya and

Tanganika, Orr mentioned a discussion with Roome, who had explained that “his society [had] been asked to translate the Bible into at least four dialects of Ki-Swahili and emphasize[d] the economy that would be effected if one dialect only could be used.”95 Orr proposed that the

Kenyan government call a May 1925 conference in Kampala or Nairobi to include representatives from Uganda, Tanganyika, Nyasaland (present-day Malawi), and the eastern provinces of Belgian Congo. The Director of Education’s shift from opposing Kiswahili to calling for government support for its standardization emphasized how much the integration of

Tanganyika into East Africa had caused greater recognition of Kiswahili’s potential value to the colonial order.

In his August 9 comments on Orr’s proposal, Oscar Watkins, one of the Kenyan government’s three official Kiswahili examiners, brought up three significant considerations which would be central in the standardization discussions of the 1920s and beyond: the scope of the standardization; Kiswahili’s role in Kenya and Uganda; and the standard language’s relationship to the various dialects. Watkins had dedicated himself to learning Kiswahili ever since his initial journey to take up his first Colonial Service post in Kenya in 1908 and had quickly distinguished himself through his ability to oversee court hearings in Kiswahili without an interpreter.96 Recognizing the limited resources for standardization, Watkins restated Orr’s project as the standardization of “the language that is to be used in school and religious books,” adding that “no other standardisation is possible.”97 Some of the linguists and other civil servants involved in the standardization efforts would have defined their mandate more broadly, including the standardization of the Kiswahili used in the media and all published books, but they all recognized that neither Kiswahili nor its present speakers nor those who would learn it in the future were blank slates who could be manipulated at will. The tension between this basic recognition of top-down language planning’s limits and the goal of using Kiswahili to make East

Africa more legible for British colonial power would later greatly shape the ILC’s work. Watkins also suggested that Kenya’s participation in any standardization efforts ought to hinge on whether Kiswahili would be a medium of instruction in the colony; he further rejected the need for the participation of the Belgian Congo, Nyasaland, and Uganda because Kiswahili was

“foreign” to those colonies. On the controversial question of the basis for standardization, he argued for choosing one dialect rather than attempting to create a compound one. He identified

Kiunguja as the top candidate because of its use at the Zanzibar Sultan’s court and its dominance among published dictionaries and grammar books; he mentioned Mombasa’s Kimvita as the next best option. Watkins’ analysis set out the issues which defined the standardization debate, and his awareness of differing levels of Kiswahili usage across the various British dependencies foreshadowed the eventual breakup of the Kiswahili promotion regime.

The Kenyan colonial administration did not act on Orr’s suggestion, and Tanganyika’s

Rivers-Smith then took the lead in organizing the first major conference on the standardization of

Kiswahili. On August 11, Tanganyikan Chief Secretary John Scott formally invited Kenya and

Zanzibar to each send three delegates—“a Government Official, a Missionary, and a Native”—to join three Tanganyikan delegates on a special committee “to decide on a common orthography” for the language.98 The question of orthography was crucial; for Kiswahili to be of greatest benefit to the British colonial governments, they needed a common spelling system in Latin characters rather than the various orthographies then in use which differed from mission to mission and government to government. Although the government of Zanzibar appointed its three delegates within a month of receiving the invitation, the Kenyan government did not send a delegation because the conference dates conflicted with newly appointed Governor Edward

Grigg’s arrival.99

Kiswahili’s influence did not stop at the western borders of Tanganyika and Kenya, and

Rivers-Smith soon found himself discussing the inclusion of additional delegates. Rev. Roome suggested that Rev. John Whitehead, a Baptist missionary based at Wayika on the Lualaba in eastern Belgian Congo and noted expert on Kiswahili’s Kingwana dialect who was visiting Dar at that time, be invited to attend as a representative from Belgian Congo. Roome thought that the

Ugandan government had no desire to participate but that the Uganda missions wanted

32 representation.100 In response to Rev. Roome’s letter, Rivers-Smith suggested to Scott on

September 17 that Whitehead and a representative from the Ugandan missions be formally invited, with proper notification going to the Belgian Congo and Ugandan governments. While requesting the invitations out of respect, Rivers-Smith told Scott that he “[did] not think that

Uganda and the Congo would have anything to contribute to the deliberations of our

Committee.”101

Despite the Kenyan director of education’s initial call for the conference and Rev. Roome and Rivers-Smith’s efforts to obtain representation from Uganda and the Belgian Congo, the

1925 conference on Kiswahili standardization ultimately only included representatives from

Tanganyika and Zanzibar. Frederick Johnson, Fr. J.S. Lemble of the Society of the Holy Ghost, and High Court interpreter Samuel Chiponde represented Tanganyika, while senior commissioner P. Sheldon, Rev. G.W. Broomfield of the UMCA, and Abdulla Mohamed el

Hathramy of the Education Department represented Zanzibar. Rev. Roome attended in an unofficial capacity to present the views of the Kenyan missions. In addition to Roome, four other Tanganyikan-based European missionaries and Rivers-Smith presented their views to the assembled “committee for standardization of the Swahili language.” The committee met for five hours daily from October 6 until October 10.102

The Dar es Salaam conference marked the first formal steps toward establishing a regional Kiswahili promotion regime and nesting it within the colonial order. Johnson, the committee chair and a British colonial civil servant noted for his Kiswahili proficiency, would become one of the dominant figures in standardizing and promoting Kiswahili. He opened the committee’s first meeting with the presentation of his position paper “The Standardisation or

Revision of Kiswahili,” prepared on behalf of the Tanganyikan government. This paper laid the

33 groundwork for the decisions of the Dar and Mombasa conferences, the creation of the Inter-

Territorial Language Committee, and the British efforts to standardize Kiswahili. Johnson highlighted the ability to publish all Kiswahili materials in a common dialect as one of the major benefits of standardization for both the East African governments and missions.

Reaching the same conclusions as Watkins had the previous year, Johnson recognized

Kiunguja and Kimvita as the only dialects suitable to become the standardized form, dismissing the others as “of too local a character and . . . spoken by very few people compared with

[Kiunguja and Kimvita].”103 Johnson strongly endorsed Kiunguja and claimed broad support for his position. The Tanganyikan government had requested that mission and colonial administrators provide their views on the choice between Kiunguja and Kimvita, and almost all of the relatively few replies received supported the dialect of Zanzibar. Johnson contended that while Kimvita’s use was largely understood only in Mombasa’s vicinity, Kiunguja was understood much better in the interior of Kenya and Tanganyika. He cited examples of the use of Kiunguja by some of the Kenyan missions and, interchangeably with Kimvita, in the Kenyan government’s Kiswahili newspaper Habari. After mentioning the example of a CMS conference where Kavilondo delegates from Lake Nyanza required the proceedings interpreted “from the

Mombasa to the Zanzibar dialect in order that they might understand,” Johnson asserted his opinion “that the Mombasa natives as well as those living up country in Kenya would find no difficulty in reading and understanding books printed in the Zanzibar dialect, or a modification of it.”104 Johnson contended that, although some inland Kenyans and Tanganyikans familiar with

Kiunguja did not understand Kimvita, Kimvita speakers could understand Kiunguja.

As his report made clear, Johnson was not opposed to the continued existence of the other dialects as such. He acknowledged that any colonial standardization project could only

34 standardize written Kiswahili and that different spoken variations would continue, noting that

English speech had not yet even been standardized in England. While Johnson stressed that

Kiswahili standardization was not “for Waswahili only but for Swahili speaking people which is a very different proposition,” he clarified that standardized Kiswahili’s vocabulary should not be restricted to those words commonly used by second-language speakers because “the tendency among the Native [was] to use an extremely limited vocabulary and thus he often [failed] to express his thoughts to their best advantage.” 105 Johnson recommended using Bantu words instead of Arabic words wherever possible but realized that some Arabic words were used so frequently that they would remain, acknowledging the limits of language planning in his admission that “we could not uproot [these words] if we would.”106 He also outlined several of the orthographic issues which would need to be addressed in standardizing Kiswahili.

Beyond his framing of the standardization question, Johnson proposed two specific actions to implement the committee’s standardization decisions. First, he proposed “a revision of the Dictionary (Madan’s),” referring to UMCA missionary A.C. Madan’s 1902 English-Swahili

Dictionary and 1903 Swahili-English Dictionary.107 Second, he saw the need to institutionalize the standardized orthography: “Finally, whatever decision is made about the Standard language and orthography to be used, I feel that it will be useless unless a permanent publication committee is appointed.” 108 He proposed that this committee be made responsible for approving new non-religious Kiswahili publication ideas, editing pre-publication drafts of new works, and proposing new Kiswahili textbooks. Johnson sensed that the Kiswahili promotion regime could not be nested within the colonial order without the creation of an organization to implement its work, a fair assessment given the failure to even secure Kenyan participation in the conference.

Johnson would be heavily involved in implementing his proposals, as the first Secretary of the

Inter-Territorial Language Committee and the primary editor of the revised dictionary.

Following several days of discussion, the Committee approved its report, which included

19 recommendations. These recommendations largely followed and expanded upon Johnson’s position paper and laid the groundwork for standardizing Kiswahili. The first recommendation was the most controversial and confirmed the Committee’s support for Kiunguja:

Resolution No. 1 That the Zanzibar dialect with such modifications as may be required be adopted as the Standard form of Swahili

It was held by the committee that other dialects of Swahili, including that of Mombasa[,] could not occupy that position owing to their confined and local use, and to the improbability of its further extension, but that the Zanzibar dialect either in its pure or modified form was undoubtedly spreading practically over the whole of the three territories, Tanganyika Territory, Kenya Colony, and Zanzibar, and also over the Congo.109

As Johnson had already articulated, Kiunguja was the preferred dialect of the Tanganyikan government. Given that the official delegates only represented Tanganyika and Zanzibar, the selection of Kiswahili was not surprising.

The majority report also endorsed Johnson’s plan for a new committee to implement the agreed upon standards and expanded upon his brief comments to provide a more coherent vision of what such a body would look like. In Resolution No. 3, the Committee proposed “that a permanent committee be appointed for the purpose of giving advice and encouragement in the preparation of literature and for revising any work before its publication.” 110 The Committee’s explanation of the proposed permanent committee’s work largely paralleled that of Johnson.

Resolution No. 4 specified “that the Governments and Missions of the three dependencies,

Tanganyika Territory, Kenya Colony, and Zanzibar, be asked to nominate representatives on this permanent committee, and that native representatives be included in their number [emphasis

36 added].”111 The Committee envisioned a permanent committee with a membership similar to its own. In 1925, East Africans had little say in decision-making in the British dependencies. That the final report recommended the inclusion of native Kiswahili speakers envisioned that the work of Kiswahili standardization would be a collaborative effort between Europeans and Africans, albeit an unequal one. Resolution No. 5 clarified that the proposed committee would review

“text books of schools and all literature other than the periodicals and pamphlets of a local nature” as well as the grammar of any religious materials the missions chose to submit.112

Resolution No. 6 added to the committee’s task that of revising “standard works,” with Bishop

Steere’s A Handbook of the Swahili Language as Spoken at Zanzibar and Madan’s dictionaries approved as the standard grammar and dictionaries, respectively.113

The Committee’s other resolutions largely affirmed Johnson’s views. Resolution No. 2 encouraged the use of Bantu words over those of Arabic origins while endorsing the continued use of those “established” Arabic words, described by the Committee in identical wording to that of Johnson’s position paper as Arabic words which “have become part and parcel of the Swahili language.”114 The committee directly addressed many of the general orthographic and standardization questions which Johnson had raised in his position paper but, recognizing how many more questions still remained, adopted four “guiding principles” in Resolution No. 13 for future standardization work:

(1) The Bantuisation of all Arabic and foreign words as far as possible, (2) fixing the spelling of all words with due regard to the commonest pronunciation, not necessarily the correctest from the foreign point of view, (3) the simplification of all words which through more or less common usage have become wrongly spelled, and (4) the establishing wherever possible of distinctions between words with two or more meanings.115

Together with its proposal for a permanent committee, these guiding principles reaffirmed that the Committee saw the standardization of Kiswahili as a major and ongoing project. Despite the paternalistic and technocratic elements present throughout the colonial-era standardization discourse, the colonial administrators conceded in the second guiding principle that standard

Kiswahili could not be an imposed creation of European linguists but rather would need to incorporate and affirm Kiswahili speakers’ choices. This principle complemented the decisions to include East Africans on the Committee and to recommend their inclusion on the permanent committee.

The Dar es Salaam conference marked the first formal signs of the emerging Kiswahili promotion regime. Two of the four East African dependencies had agreed to start working to standardize the language as a first step to using Kiswahili more widely. Although East Africans attended the conference, greater colonial efficiency was the driving impetus behind the new regime. Rivers-Smith, Roome, and Johnson had succeeded in embedding Kiswahili standardization and promotion in the colonial hierarchy of priorities. The Dar es Salaam conference recommendations outlined how the colonial administrations would standardize

Kiswahili to make it more suitable for their purposes and that a permanent inter-territorial committee would nest Kiswahili promotion and standardization within the larger colonial governance framework.

Language Policy Developments between the Dar es Salaam and Mombasa Conferences

I have discussed the 1925 conference at length because its conclusions were largely accepted at the subsequent 1928 conference in Mombasa and greatly shaped the ILC and its work during the 1930s. The selection of Kiunguja as the standard dialect, the report’s general approach to standardization, and the proposal for a permanent, inter-territorial committee were

38 all reaffirmed in Mombasa and became core elements in the British East African language policy.

The 1925 conference marked the launch of British efforts to standardize Kiswahili to make East

Africa more legible. Both the Zanzibari and Tanganyikan governments endeavored to follow up on the Dar es Salaam recommendations. In correspondence between June and October 1926, the chief secretaries of Tanganyika and Zanzibar informed each other that their governments had approved all of the Dar es Salaam standardization recommendations apart from several spelling suggestions.116 Both dependencies appointed publications committees to review school textbooks and made plans to coordinate their committees’ work. Despite their assertions to support the Committee’s report, no permanent inter-territorial committee on Kiswahili came into being in the years following the Dar es Salaam conference. The three-member Zanzibar publication committee included Abdulla Mohamed, its “native” delegate from the standardization conference, but the Tanganyikan committee included only Europeans—Johnson and two missions delegates, including the Rev. Broomfield who was also on the Zanzibar committee.117

In two significant ways, the incorporation of East Africans and the formation of an inter- territorial committee that would include Kenya, the 1925 standardization plan’s implementation remained incomplete.

Rivers-Smith and the Tanganyika Central Publishing Committee pressed ahead and contracted with publishers for new textbooks in standardized Kiswahili. Fearful of outside interference which would undo the agreed upon orthography and the preparations for its use, the

Tanganyikan government reacted negatively to suggestions that the newly founded International

Institute of African Languages and Cultures become involved with the standardization process.

The Institute, launched in June 1926 following a September 1925 conference of leading

European scholars of African linguistics, aimed to coordinate European and South African

39 academic institutions’ research into various African languages and cultures. 118 In October 1926, the eminent British colonial administrator and theorist Sir Frederick Lugard, honorary chairman of the Institute’s Executive Council, wrote to Tanganyikan Governor Donald Cameron about the new organization’s work and requested that he postpone the implementation of the new

Kiswahili orthography until the Institute’s linguists reviewed it:

[. . .] the first task on which the two Directors are to embark is a study of the results of the Conference, and a personal discussion with the leading experts in London, Paris, Vienna and Berlin on the subject of African orthography. A purely scientific Orthography is ill- adapted for every day practical work, and the object in view is to lay down some general principles for a practical working system, based on scientific methods. Secondly, to try and adopt these general principles to a particular language, viz. Swahili. I hear that you are about to adopt an Orthography, and I write to suggest that you should hold it over for a short time, about three months, until this Consultation with all the experts has taken place. I hope you will do this, so that a uniform Orthography may be adopted by all British and Foreign colonies.119 Lugard was clearly misinformed about the progress made in standardizing Kiswahili as he wrote his letter to Cameron more than a year after the Dar es Salaam conference, and the Tanganyikan civil servants’ frustration with his request stemmed partly from their investment in the resulting orthography.

Foreshadowing his defensive posture toward the proposed Mombasa conference, Rivers-

Smith strongly opposed re-opening the approved Kiswahili orthography to involve the Institute’s experts. He informed the Chief Secretary that the interference of outside linguists would not be effective, put the quality work already done at risk, and force Tanganyika to violate its publishing contracts. Rivers-Smith and the others involved in standardizing Kiswahili were not motivated solely by a desire to wisely use government funds or perpetuate colonial rule. As the Director of

Education made clear, he was deeply and personally invested in the success of standard

Kiswahili:

I have been endeavoring for nearly 20 years to obtain recognition of the necessity for careful organisation in East African education, in which uniformity in Swahili is a first essential. We seem to be on the point of advance but further postponement might conceivably preclude my participation even in the beginning of this most important task of standardisation.120 Rivers-Smith received strong support from the other colonial officials who reviewed Lugard’s proposal and received permission to continue his efforts undisturbed by the Institute. Perhaps to avoid a public falling out, Rivers-Smith attended a meeting of the Institute’s Advisory Council later in 1926 and expressed his openness to receiving feedback from the Institute’s linguists on the standardized Kiswahili orthography.121

As Tanganyika and Zanzibar took steps to standardize Kiswahili, Ugandan Governor

William Frederick Gowers began advocating that Kiswahili become the territory’s lingua franca.

Previous Ugandan administrations had shown little interest in Kiswahili standardization efforts.

In response to Roome’s 1921 inquiries about Uganda’s participation in a possible inter-territorial

Kiswahili standardization conference, Acting Chief Secretary E.C. Elliot informed the missionary, “In so far as this Government is concerned, the fact that Luganda is the language of the Protectorate preclused [sic] any action being taken by Government with regard to the

Conference” and, furthermore, that only 3 of 400 colonial officials had the Higher Standard

Certificate in Kiswahili which indicated their advanced proficiency in the language.122 The 1925

Dar es Salaam conference report had not even included Uganda among the participating dependencies of the proposed permanent inter-territorial committee.

After taking office in 1925, Governor Gowers undertook his own reassessment of the

Protectorate’s language policy. In a September 26, 1927, dispatch to the Secretary of State for the Colonies, Gowers explained that conditions had changed since the previous decision to substitute Luganda for Kiswahili as the required language of study for all colonial officers. He cited both the post-World War I extension of British rule to Tanganyika and increased

41 transportation links between Uganda and its eastern neighbors as “creating a situation which render[ed] it impossible for Uganda to maintain an attitude of isolation” regarding Kiswahili.123

Mentioning the ongoing Kiswahili standardization efforts to his east and the personal influence of Rivers-Smith, Gowers argued that Kiswahili was a much better choice for a broader East

African “Union” language than the less widespread Luganda. In his dispatch, he noted that he had already begun preparations to restore the former financial incentives for newly arrived colonial officers to become proficient in Kiswahili as their initial language. He also supported the use of Kiswahili as the medium of instruction in schools in many regions of the country and an additional language subject in others, including Buganda, which would retain their current languages of instruction, primarily Luganda.124 In comments circulated among Tanganyikan officials, Rivers-Smith described Gowers’ policy shift as “probably the best thing that has ever happened for native education in East Africa” and moved promptly to secure Ugandan support for the Dar es Salaam Kiswahili orthography.125 The unexpected support of the Ugandan government increased the chances for the creation of a truly regional Kiswahili promotion regime.

1928 Mombasa conference Thus, by early 1928, Tanganyika, Uganda, and Zanzibar were already in agreement on the standardized Kiswahili orthography from the 1925 Dar es Salaam conference. However, there was not yet an up-to-date dictionary for the standard dialect nor a standing inter-territorial committee, and Kenya had yet to seriously participate in the regional standardization efforts. As the wealthiest East African dependency and the home of Kimvita, the only significant contender to Kiunguja’s rise as the standard dialect, Kenya represented the most serious remaining threat to the creation of a single regional standard form of Kiswahili for official business, publications, and education.

The Kenyan government began its own Kiswahili standardization process when its

Language Board took up work on standardizing the colony’s Kiswahili in 1927.126 Tanganyika subsequently “proposed further co-operation” between the two dependencies, a proposal followed by the 1928 Mombasa conference.127 However, the path to a single standard Kiswahili was not without contention. The Tanganyikan Secretariat’s records indicate that the

Tanganyikan colonial civil servants jealously defended their Dar es Salaam orthography against perceived Kenyan efforts to renegotiate the whole matter and only agreed to attend the Mombasa conference to avoid being outmaneuvered. In a telegram sent to the Tanganyikan Chief

Secretary on March 8, 1928, the Kenyan Colonial Secretary noted that Professor Carl Meinhof, the German linguist noted for his expertise on Kiswahili and other Bantu languages who had advised the Germans to adopt a Latin orthography for Kiswahili in 1905, would be in Zanzibar in

May and proposed a standardization conference of the four East African dependencies to take advantage of Meinhof’s assistance.128 This seemingly innocuous telegram set off a flurry of correspondence within the Tanganyikan government as officials sought to block what they perceived as a Kenyan attempt to renegotiate the Dar es Salaam orthography. Rivers-Smith dismissed the Kenyan effort as unnecessary given that agreement had already been reached in

1925 and exclaimed, “I am at a loss to understand why Nairobi wishes to participate now with a foreign authority [Meinhof], in a conference which she was invited to but failed to attend in

1925.”129 Internally circulated comments on the Kenyan offer, by both Rivers-Smith and others, opposed Tanganyikan participation in a new standardization conference because of concerns that adopting a revised orthography would require the Tanganyikan government to break their existing contracts with textbook publishers.130 Key Tanganyikan civil servants, most notably

Rivers-Smith, were both personally and professionally invested in the Dar es Salaam

43 orthography, and their consensus led Chief Secretary Scott to inform the Kenyan government that Tanganyika did not want to fund or participate in the proposed standardization conference and that it opposed any effort which would undermine the existing orthography and textbook contracts with publishers, who had already invested in expensive permanent metal printing plates.131

Although Scott, with Governor Cameron’s support, sent the Ugandan and Zanzibari Chief

Secretaries copies of his March 24 letter to Kenya, Zanzibar had already endorsed Kenya’s conference proposal.132 In a memorandum which the Kenyan government later forwarded to

Tanganyika, William Hendry, Zanzibar’s Director of Education, recognized that Tanganyika would be opposed to altering the orthography and that Zanzibar’s participation would be

“pointless” without its western neighbor but suggested that, with a guarantee of Zanzibar’s opposition to any orthographic changes, Tanganyika might agree to participate. Hendry framed the proposed conference as an opportunity to bring Kenya into the ongoing standardization work, particularly through the formation of the inter-territorial publications committee and participation in the dictionary revision projects.133 Both Meinhof and the Ugandan government also quickly agreed to participate in the conference.134 Within the Tanganyikan administration, Deputy

Director of Education Albert Isherwood, acting on behalf of Rivers-Smith, endorsed a reversal of the previous Tanganyikan position, arguing that Tanganyika, Uganda, and Zanzibar together could thwart any Kenyan attempt to thwart the current orthography but, that without

Tanganyika’s involvement, Kenya might succeed in bringing the other two dependencies to support a new orthography.135 Gerald F. Sayers, a Secretariat official later promoted to deputy chief secretary, likely summed up the views of many Tanganyikan policymakers when he remarked, “This is all very confusing.”136 As late as May, some officials within the Tanganyikan

44 government still opposed any participation in the Meinhof conference. The Colonial Secretary of

Kenya attempted to persuade the Tanganyikan government to attend, clarifying that the conference would only affect Kenya’s and Uganda’s choices of which dialect to use and acknowledging the Dar es Salaam resolutions’ “value.”137 Finally yielding, the Tanganyikan government accepted the invitation to attend the Mombasa conference.

The inter-territorial bureaucratic wrangling over the proposed conference emphasized the importance of Johnson’s original 1925 proposal to create an inter-territorial committee. Even when all four governments supported the idea of a Kiswahili promotion regime to some extent, the various officials were focused on protecting their own prerogatives. Even among those officials who agreed on the importance of Kiswahili to the colonial order, there were sharp disagreements driven as much as personal experiences and territorial loyalties as by any objective determinants of an optimal language policy. As discussed in the introduction, language politics are necessarily subjective and value-laden because of language’s role in shaping individual and collective identities. If anything, the East African language policy discussions of the 1920s were less contentious than contemporary debates because the colonial system’s constraints severely limited the input of those most affected, the non-European East Africans themselves. Although one third of the six official Dar es Salaam conference delegates had been “natives,” both men were colonial government employees and thus dependent on the colonial order for their well- being.

The Mombasa conference marked the first time that representatives of all four British

East African dependencies discussed the standardization of Kiswahili together. Professor

Meinhof’s participation gave the conference a sense of academic respectability which the smaller

Dar conference had lacked. The conference itself witnessed the last stand of the Kimvita

45 dialect’s advocates, most notably the Church Missionary Society which had been associated with

Kimvita since the 1840s.138 The conference’s results were rather anticlimactic in light of the preceding bureaucratic maneuvering. As Hendry and Isherwood anticipated, Tanganyika and

Zanzibar, with Uganda’s support, were well-positioned to defend the 1925 resolutions and their work in standardizing Kiunguja. The conference reaffirmed the Dar es Salaam report’s substantive resolutions.139 Although the Mombasa conference report included some minor wording changes, the four governments’ representatives recommended the adoption of Kiunguja as the standard dialect and Steere’s and Madan’s works as the standard references and the creation of an inter-territorial publications committee.140 According to some accounts, Canon

Edward W. Crawford of CMS left the conference “in tears” after the selection of Kiunguja instead of Kimvita, but Kimvita’s defeat in the face of unified opposition from Tanganyika,

Uganda, and Zanzibar was largely assured once Tanganyika agreed to participate.141 Despite

Rivers-Smith’s previously mentioned objection to Meinhof’s involvement, the German linguist made no attempt to undermine the existing orthography.

The Dar es Salaam and Mombasa conferences signaled a decisive break from previous

British language policies in East Africa. Rather than favoring vernacular languages or English, all four British dependencies had come together to support Kiswahili as a regional lingua franca.

Although several key actors such as Johnson and Rivers-Smith were strongly committed to

Kiswahili at least in part because of their appreciation for the language, the change in policy was not based on personal whims alone. The extension of British rule to Tanganyika and its numerous Kiswahili speakers and the growing state role in education increased Kiswahili’s attractiveness as a tool of colonial control. However, the language’s rich and varied dialects were of limited value in making East African societies more legible to their British rulers.

Language standardization or, framed in Weberian terms, rationalization was necessary to maximize Kiswahili’s value to the colonial system.

CHAPTER 3

THE COMMITTEE FROM 1930 THROUGH WORLD WAR II

Post-Mombasa Preparations for the Committee

Following the Mombasa conference, the dependency governments finally began preparing to create the proposed inter-territorial committee. This key step in institutionalizing the standardization agenda had been missing in the follow-up to the Dar es Salaam conference, thus leaving the necessary legwork to the Education Departments and the periodic meetings of

Tanganyika’s and Zanzibar’s publishing committees. The lack of a permanent committee contributed to the lack of progress on revising the selected standard dictionary, another of the Dar es Salaam recommendations. The inclusion of Kenya and Uganda in the standardization efforts made this piecemeal approach even less tenable than it had been previously. The regional

Kiswahili promotion regime was not fully nested within the existing East African governance framework until the Inter-Territorial Language Committee’s creation.

As with its call for the Mombasa conference, the Kenyan government took the initiative in organizing inter-territorial implementation of the recommendations. In a post-conference letter to the other dependencies, Kenya’s Acting Colonial Secretary reiterated two key points of agreement on the proposed inter-territorial committee: “complete inter-territorial co-operation both in the preparation of any new dictionary and grammar and in the constitution of a committee for selection, revision and translation of education texts” and the appointment of “a full time secretary . . . whose salary would be provided by contributions from the various territories . . . to be stationed at a such a place as should be mutually agreed upon.”142 The dependencies’ Directors of Education supported the creation of an inter-territorial language committee at their 1929 conference in Dar es Salaam. They also agreed that in areas with “a

48 dominant native language,” teaching should transition from vernacular languages to the dominant language “as soon as possible” and that English teaching “should be postponed until the pupil has reached an approved standard in that native language and then only if recognized teachers of English are available.”143 The Directors of Education thus strongly endorsed the

Kiswahili promotion agenda. Because education was one of the areas most affected by government language policy, the Directors’ support was crucial in implementing the Kiswahili standardization and promotion agenda.

Opposition to Regional Integration and Kiswahili as Regional Lingua Franca

By 1929, all four dependencies were in agreement on the Kiswahili standardization agenda, the promotion of Kiswahili as a regional lingua franca, and precedence of Kiswahili over English in “native” education. As detailed above, Kiswahili advocates stressed the efficiency gains of greater regional use of Kiswahili. To some extent, the case for Kiswahili as a regional lingua franca was associated with the case for closer union among the four dependencies with the eventual goal of creating a self-governing dominion under white settler minority rule. Conservative Party politician Leopold Amery, the British Secretary of State for the Colonies from 1924 to 1929, was a firm believer in union and worked to increase settlers’ participation in East African governance. Kenyan Governor Sir Edward Grigg, an Amery appointee, also backed closer union and white settler control.144 Because Kenya had a much larger white population than the other three dependencies, its settlers stood to gain the most from closer union.

Some proponents of closer union and settler privilege saw Kiswahili as a way to preserve white power by excluding most East Africans from English and western education. Major Ewart

S. Grogan, a prominent Kenyan settler leader, strongly endorsed Kiswahili as Kenya’s lingua

49 franca. From his perspective, and that of other settlers, Kiswahili met the educational and communication needs of the African majority without exposing them to English and wider education that might cause them to question their subservient role.145 Even as the Kenyan government moved toward promoting Kiswahili over English, many white settlers disdained

Kiswahili as an inferior language and learned only a greatly simplified version for communicating with their workers.146 The settlers generally supported Kiswahili as the non-

European lingua franca as a means to control the indigenous population.

The closer union proposals provoked significant opposition, both in East Africa and in

Britain. Lord Lugard argued against giving any settler government authority over the much larger African population.147 Sir Donald Cameron, the Tanganyikan governor, also pushed back against the idea of closer union.148 The opposition Labor Party and other critics of closer union highlighted the fact that any East African federation dominated by white minority government would violate the terms of Britain’s League of Nations mandate, which obligated the British government to consider the best interests of Tanganyika’s indigenous residents. After coming to power in 1929, the Labor Party government began examining options for a more broad-based

East African union but ultimately scrapped them after the Foreign Office’s law officers determined that the inclusion of Tanganyika within such a scheme would violate the terms of the mandate and international law.149

During their investigations of closer union proposals, the various commissions, including a joint parliamentary committee, also examined the new policy of promoting Kiswahili as a regional lingua franca. While various colonial officials testified in favor of the new Kiswahili promotion policy, local opposition was also evident. The Buganda kingdom strongly voiced its opposition to increased Kiswahili use. Serwano Kulubya, Buganda’s Omuwanika (treasurer),

50 addressed the issue of Kiswahili during his 1931 testimony before the parliamentary joint committee. In response to a question about the introduction of Kiswahili in Uganda, Kulubya opposed the current language policy, which he described as “putting aside our own Mother tongue [Luganda] and adopting some other language which has no foundation.” 150 Although he acknowledged that the Ugandan government had been less aggressive in introducing Kiswahili in

Buganda than in other areas of the protectorate, Kulubya emphasized Buganda’s support for the teaching of Luganda and other vernacular languages, with English as the preferred second language. He characterized English “as the key to everything.”151 Kulubya’s testimony affirmed earlier statements by Kabaka Sir Daudi Chwa II and the Buganda government.152 Ugandan

Governor Gowers’ support for Kiswahili did not reverse the Baganda’s longstanding opposition to the language.

The views of pro-Kiswahili settlers and pro-English Baganda illustrated the complexities of East African language politics. Given greater voice in colonial deliberations because of

Buganda’s special legal status, the Baganda were the most prominent but certainly not the only

African advocates for prioritizing English education over Kiswahili. In Kenya, members of the

Kikuyu ethnic group organized the Independent Schools Movement, which operated its own schools in opposition to the mission schools. The Kikuyu independent schools introduced

English earlier than government and mission schools following the new pro-Kiswahili government policy did because the parents believed in the importance of English for advancement in Kenyan colonial society. 153 Because the British governors and other high-level policymakers believed that Kiswahili standardization and promotion strengthened colonial control, they agreed upon and implemented the new language policy despite this local opposition.

However, local opposition contributed to Uganda and Kenya’s later abandonment of the

Kiswahili promotion regime.

The Committee’s Early Work (1930-39)

The proposed East African federation did not come into existence, but the Inter-

Territorial Language Committee was part of a more limited regional governance framework which focused on cooperation rather than political integration. The creation of the Conference of

East African Governors in 1926 with a permanent Secretary was the British Colonial Office’s first significant move at facilitating high-level inter-territorial cooperation among their dependencies in the region, and the Conference Secretary’s involvement with the standardization of Kiswahili highlighted both the high priority placed on standardization and the increased inter- territorial cooperation across many issues. The Secretary circulated the draft proposal for the

Inter-Territorial Language Committee in 1929. After obtaining the backing of the three

Governors and the British Resident in Zanzibar, the Secretary then submitted it to the British

Secretary of State for the Colonies for approval, which was granted.154

The Inter-territorial Language Committee (ILC) to the East African Dependencies formally came into being on January 1, 1930.155 More than eight years after Roome and Rivers-

Smith began their quest for regional standardization and four years after the Committee for the

Standardization of the Swahili Language called for a permanent committee in Resolution No. 2, the ILC’s creation marked a new stage in the British formal standardization efforts. As Ali and

Alamin Mazrui observe, “this committee became a paramount mechanism in the process of standardizing Kiswahili throughout the region, as well as promoting regionally usable literature in the language.”156 Over the next 34 years, it carried out its work under a variety of names, including the East African Inter-territorial Language Committee, the East African Inter-territorial

Language (Swahili) Committee, and the East African Swahili Committee. The Dar es Salaam and Mombasa conferences had embedded the Kiswahili promotion regime within the larger

British agenda of maintaining control over the East African dependencies. However, until the

ILC’s formation, the regime was only incompletely nested within the region’s British colonial governance system because there was no permanent organization charged with coordinating

Kiswahili standardization and promotion activities.

The governments of Kenya, Tanganyika, Uganda, and Zanzibar each contributed financially to the ILC until its dissolution. Each dependency had four representatives on the

Committee—the Director of Education, a second official representative, and two non-official representatives, often missionaries. The inclusion of the Committee’s permanent Secretary gave the ILC a total membership of 17.157 Resolution No. 4 of the Dar es Salaam conference had called for a three-dependency committee of Kenya, Tanganyika, and Zanzibar, but the Mombasa conference revised the resolution to include Uganda and Nyasaland (present-day Malawi). Given

Gowers’ promotion of Kiswahili in Uganda in the years between the conferences and the historic role of Kiswahili in facilitating communications between Ugandans and their eastern neighbors,

Uganda’s inclusion was reasonable, but Nyasaland never participated in the ILC.158 The

Committee rotated its annual meeting among the four territories—usually meeting in Dar es

Salaam, Kampala, Nairobi, or Zanzibar—and the host dependency’s Director of Education served as chairman.159

Though the basic structure of the Committee itself resembled that of the ad hoc standardization conferences, two key elements made the Committee a more effective instrument for carrying out the standardization agenda. First, the formal inclusion of the Directors of

Education meant that the high-level policymakers would influence the Committee’s internal

53 decisions, reducing the risk that its decisions would be overruled by the Governors’ Conference or not implemented by the Education Departments. The Directors of Education, particularly

Rivers-Smith, had already been involved in the standardization process, and their cooperation would be essential in approving, purchasing, and distributing textbooks in standard Kiswahili.

Second, the creation of the permanent position of Secretary tasked a single individual with carrying out the Committee’s decisions and routine business. The Tanganyikan administration’s hostile responses to perceived threats from first the International Institute of African Languages and Cultures and then the Kenyan government highlighted the risks of having the standardization agenda tied too closely with any one or two of the East African dependencies. The Secretary served on behalf of all four governments and, at least in theory, was a more neutral figure with which to associate standardization. The Secretary became the point person for coordinating all

British Kiswahili standardization and promotion activities.

At its first annual meeting in Nairobi in April, 1930, the Committee took up again and reaffirmed the Dar es Salaam resolutions, as amended at the Mombasa conference.160 Frederick

Johnson, who had first called for a permanent inter-territorial publications committee at the 1925

Dar es Salaam conference, served the Committee’s first Secretary. Ronald Snoxall, a longtime colonial education officer who served as ILC Secretary in the 1950s, memorialized Johnson’s contributions as follows:

In addition to being a remarkable Swahili scholar, he was a glutton for work and expected everyone else to accomplish as much as he did, which was quite impossible. He possessed an extraordinary facility for the language, spoken or written, and it was said, could type directly from English into Swahili by rapid simultaneous translation.161 Johnson had been in the Colonial Service in Tanganyika, and he remained based in Dar es

Salaam, the first headquarters of the ILC. Johnson’s appointment as Secretary and the ILC office’s location in Dar es Salaam confirmed the significant role Tanganyika’s government had

54 in bringing about the Committee. Despite the push for increased government involvement in education, some of this era’s most prominent Kiswahili linguists and educators were missionaries. Johnson collaborated extensively with British missionary educators such as Revs.

B.J. Ratcliffe, A.B. Hellier, and G.W. Broomfield. Under Johnson’s watch, the Committee also launched the Bulletin, a regular publication with articles about the Committee’s work and

Kiswahili-related topics.162 For more information on the Bulletin and successor publications, see

Chapter 5.

The East African governors approved the ILC’s constitution at their 1934 annual meeting, held in Nairobi from May 1 to 6. The six-page constitution, included in the Governors’

Conference annual report as “Contribution and Functions of the Inter-Territorial Language

(Swahili) Committee to the East African Dependencies” and also printed in the Committee’s

Bulletin, spelled out the Committee’s operations in more detail than had been done previously and addressed the concerns previously raised by the ILC in the preceding years. That the

Governors, who had already been involved in establishing the Committee, considered its concerns at their conference confirmed the high-level support for the regional promotion and standardization of Kiswahili. The Governors’ involvement also signified that the Kiswahili promotion regime was fully embedded in the existing governance structures. The Governors specified 13 main tasks for the ILC:

3. The methods by which the Committee shall work are:

(i) Standardising orthography, obtaining complete Inter-territorial agreement. (ii) Securing, as far as possible, uniformity in the use of existing and new words by the exercise of control over the publication of School and other dictionaries. (iii) Securing uniformity of grammar and syntax through the publication of standard books on the subject.

(iv) Giving encouragement and assistance to authors whose native tongue is Swahili. (v) Giving advice to all prospective authors concerning books which they propose to write. (vi) Procuring the revision where necessary of the language of approved Swahili text-books and books of a general nature already published. (vii) Drawing up an annual programme of Swahili books required under the heading (a) Text-books, and (b) General literature. (viii) Making arrangements for the translation into Swahili of the textbooks and books of a general nature selected, or for the direct authorship in Swahili of such books. (ix) Examining and where necessary correcting the Swahili of such textbooks and general literature before publication. (x) Revising, and giving advice concerning, the matter of all Swahili books that are dealt with by the Committee. (xi) Supplying authors with information as to methods of teaching in vogue in the various territories. (xii) Answering general enquiries regarding Swahili language and literature. (xiii) Undertaking such other activities as may be deemed incidental or conducive to the attainment of the foregoing objects.163 This list of functions fulfilled the 1925 and 1928 conferences’ recommendations but also went beyond them. Although many of the functions directly related to the tasks of standardizing

Kiswahili publications, the Constitution also charged the Committee with tasks related to the general promotion of Kiswahili. The ILC’s power rested in its “control” over dictionaries and its authority to publish, edit, revise, and order other books as needed. With a minimal staff consisting of the permanent Secretary, up to four appointed readers to review and edit books, and

“such Swahili-speaking clerical staff as may be authorized from time to time,” the ILC was never envisioned as having enforcement powers to impose standard Kiswahili.164 Even in 1934, at perhaps the height of its formal power with the governors’ endorsement, the ILC was primarily involved in education, linguistics, and literature, three areas of focus which would stay consistent through its existence. Despite the ILC’s relatively small staff and budgetary allocation, British

56 academic journals such as Africa: Journal of the International African Institute and Journal of the Royal African Society periodically included summaries of the committee’s reports and reviews of its books.165

The need to update A.C. Madan’s dictionary of Kiswahili, approved as the standard work at both major standardization conferences, had been one factor behind the standardization efforts by Rivers-Smith and others. Producing the dictionary was the major project of Johnson’s seven- year tenure as Secretary (1930-37). Johnson died before bringing the project to completion but his successor Rev. B.J. Radcliffe finalized the dictionary and oversaw ILC’s 1939 publication of

A Standard Swahili-English Dictionary (Founded on Madan’s Swahili-English Dictionary).166

Ratcliffe was a CMS missionary who pushed unsuccessfully for the selection of Kimvita as the standard dialect at the 1928 Mombasa conference but subsequently became very involved in the

ILC’s work.167 In his foreword, the Anglican UMCA Bishop of Zanzibar noted that the ILC

“[had] done so much to standardize the language and to preserve its orthography from confusion.”168 The publication of the standard dictionary was a key step in the Committee’s efforts to rationalize Kiswahili. The dictionary allowed British officials and East Africans to more easily learn and use Kiswahili and helped authors and publishers use and spell words in accordance with the ILC’s standardized form of the language.

In addition to the dictionary, the ILC also exercised influence through the granting of its seal of imprimatur to books. The ILC Secretary coordinated the review of proposed textbooks by the Directors of Education, each of whom retained authority over the books used by schools in his dependency and informed the Secretary of his anticipated textbook orders for each book proposal.169 Although the imprimatur was only required for school textbooks, British publishing companies generally refused to publish Kiswahili books without the Committee’s seal, which

57 they viewed as a selling point.170 Despite its sponsorship of several writing contests, the

Committee’s efforts to impose the new standard Kiswahili spelling and grammar may have contributed to the relatively low output of Kiswahili literature during the 1930s and 1940s.171

Fulfilling its role within the colonial bureaucracy, the ILC of this period focused on developing

Kiswahili for governmental use as a tool of social control rather than for the East Africans’ greater self-expression and use.

The Dependencies’ Implementation of the Kiswahili Promotion Regime

The ILC was the key organization tasked with coordinating the regional Kiswahili promotion regime, but its work would have been of limited effectiveness without the support of the four dependencies. The Committee’s budget and staff were small, and most East Africans never encountered a member or employee during the Committee’s 34 years of existence. The colonial governments put the Kiswahili promotion and standardization agenda into effect through two main channels—language requirements for British colonial civil servants and educational language policies. The four governments’ broad support for Kiswahili in the late 1920s and throughout the 1930s demonstrated that colonial administrators regarded Kiswahili standardization and promotion as important priorities in the preservation and development of the colonial order.

Each of the four dependencies required that British colonial officers pass a series of

Kiswahili exams.172 Failure to do so could result in non-confirmation of an officer’s appointment, lower pay, and slower promotion, while governments provided bonuses to officers with Kiswahili proficiency. Tanganyika and Zanzibar required new officers to pass a Lower

Standard Examination within their first year of service, while Kenya required officers to pass an oral exam within their first year and the Lower Standard Examination before the halfway point of

58 their third year. To pass the Lower Standard Examination, officers had to “have attained the standard of understanding and conversing confidently and well in Kiswahili.”173 All three governments also administered a Higher Standard Examination which demonstrated advanced proficiency in Kiswahili, including idiomatic usage and translation, and affected senior officers’ pay and advancement.174 In line with the protectorate’s support for the privileged minorities,

Zanzibar also offered Higher Standard Examinations in Arabic and Gujarati.175 Uganda’s language policy was similar to the other three dependencies; however, officers stationed in

Buganda took Luganda oral exams instead of Kiswahili, and officers could substitute a lower or higher exam in Luganda or one of the protectorate’s other vernacular languages for the Higher

Standard Examination in Kiswahili.176 The dependencies thus supported the Kiswahili promotion regime by realigning the incentives within their own bureaucracies. These policies increased demand for Kiswahili exam preparation books and materials.

As mentioned earlier, one of the ILC’s major achievements was the large-scale production and circulation of Kiswahili textbooks for East African students. The colonial governments’ educational language policies, modeled on the Directors of Education’s 1929 Dar es Salaam recommendations, placed new emphasis on Kiswahili and facilitated this increase. The

Directors of Education and their colonial Education Departments were instrumental in promoting

Kiswahili and providing the new textbooks for the growing number of schools.

Under Rivers-Smith, Tanganyika had largely continued the German colonial education system’s use of Kiswahili as the language of instruction. Formal education expanded slowly; by

1945, a mere 7.5 percent of school-age Tanganyikan students attended school. The four-year primary school course instructed students in reading, writing, and arithmetic in Kiswahili. A few students went on to study at government central schools. The first two years of central school

59 instruction were in Kiswahili, and the final two were in English. The central schools prepared 59 students for jobs as teachers, clerks, and junior civil servants in the colonial government.177 The official use of vernacular languages in the early primary school years, initially widespread in rural schools, had largely ended by 1945; Kiswahili remained as the dominant language of instruction in primary education and English as the language of the few secondary schools.178

Unlike the German system which had used Kiswahili rather than German as the linguistic ticket to government employment, the British privileging of English, even within a Kiswahili-oriented educational system, caused some East Africans to view Kiswahili “as a ‘second class’ language.”179 The fact that the territory’s non-African schools rarely taught Kiswahili even as a subject only reinforced this view.180 This dual language policy utilized standardized Kiswahili to make Tanganyikan society more legible for the British while maintaining the perceived cultural superiority of English. Zanzibar’s continued use of Kiswahili in primary education while privileging English and Arabic similarly met the colonial order’s aims.

In the pre-World War II years, both Kenya and Uganda used Kiswahili as a language of instruction but to lesser extent than Tanganyika. In the 1930s, Kenyan government primary schools relied on Kiswahili as the main language of instruction, but, beginning in 1936, the new elementary syllabus began instruction in English, availability of instructors permitting, as a subject in the third year of primary school.181 In Uganda, Governor Gowers had declared

Kiswahili an official language of the protectorate in 1927.182 Kabaka Sir Daudi Chwa II and

Uganda’s four Christian bishops publicly opposed the greater role for Kiswahili.183 The Kabaka was initially misinformed that Gowers had planned to replace Luganda with Kiswahili as

Buganda’s official native language, but his reaction demonstrated the strength of the Baganda’s determination to maintain Luganda against Kiswahili.184 As he tried to fashion a new, pro-

Kiswahili language policy for Uganda’s schools in the face of Baganda and missionary opposition, Controller of Elementary Education Ronald Snoxall and the Uganda Education

Department generally promoted increased teaching of Kiswahili as a subject rather than as a language of instruction.185 Kiswahili was used as the language of instruction in areas of Uganda with non-Bantu vernacular languages of the Nilotic group and taught as a subject in Bantu areas, except in Buganda and Busoga where it was not taught at all. Vocational training schools, some mission schools, the government teacher training school, and the police and military schools also used Kiswahili as their language of instruction.186 The Kenyan and Ugandan governments adopted educational language policies which favored Kiswahili, though less strongly than that of

Tanganyika, as they adhered to the new regional Kiswahili promotion regime.

ILC and World War II

During World War II (1939-45), Kiswahili promotion yielded to the overarching British priority of supporting the Allied war effort. All four East African dependencies’ governments worked to mobilize their societies’ resources for the war. The Committee ceased meeting during the war to reduce its travel budget. However, even in these strained circumstances, the

Committee’s work continued. Ratcliffe remained the permanent secretary and oversaw the printing of many Kiswahili books, 400,000 in 1943 alone.187 The Committee also worked with the King’s African Rifles (KAR), the British military units comprised of Africans from Kenya,

Tanganyika, Uganda, and Nyasaland. The experiences of the King’s African Rifles (KAR) in

World War II highlighting both the benefits of greater regional use of Kiswahili as well as its potential dangers to the colonial order.

The linguistic diversity of the East African dependencies posed a serious challenge to the

British administration’s plans to rely primarily on local manpower rather than expensive British

61 regular troops to uphold colonial rule. Having a single KAR language of command allowed the

British to assign soldiers from different ethnolinguistic backgrounds to the same units and transfer African officers throughout the KAR. The British commanders chose Kiswahili over

English because many more potential recruits knew at least some Kiswahili or a related Bantu language than knew English.188 British officers were also initially concerned that teaching

African soldiers English would make them undisciplined.189 The KAR’s use of a simplified form of standard Kiswahili made it easier for the British to use local troops to preserve the colonial order, a striking case of language standardization as a tool in state efforts to make society more legible and thus governable. In the early decades following KAR’s 1902 founding, the British primarily recruited Sudanese troops and used Ki-Nubi as the language of command.

As the British increasingly recruited East Africans, the military took advantage of Kiswahili’s status as a regional lingua franca and adapted it as the official language of command for its

Kenyan, Tanganyikan, and Ugandan battalions, with the Uganda KAR battalion being the last to switch from Ki-Nubi to Kiswahili. The KAR used a simplified form of Kiswahili known as “Ki-

KAR.”190

Lieutenant General William Platt, the wartime commander of the KAR, formed the East

Africa Army Education Corps (EAAEC) in late 1941 to increase the military and language training, as well as pro-Allies propaganda, provided to the KAR’s troops as an enticement for them to continue fighting in Burma after the British victory over the Italians in East Africa.

Recognizing the risks educated veterans could pose to their power within the colonial order, the white Kenyan settlers unsuccessfully opposed the military’s enhanced African education programs.191 Because of the EAAEC’s work, soldiers’ Kiswahili fluency and literacy, as well as their knowledge of English, increased, and “the average African veteran of the Second World

War left the army substantially better educated than his civilian counterpart.”192 The military language policy helped the British economize their limited resources but also created an educated group of veterans experienced in fighting alongside comrades of other ethnic groups and even territories with Kiswahili as a common bond.

Working with the military to improve soldiers’ Kiswahili proficiency was one of the

ILC’s major wartime tasks. In response to requests from the military, the Committee provided advice on language policy and training.193 Ratcliffe noted that “the demand for the common standard orthography ha[d] been repeatedly expressed” due to the wartime growth of the East

Africa Command.194 The ILC’s earlier standardization work and its ongoing assistance to the

East Africa Command enabled the British to use Kiswahili to more effectively mobilize East

African labor for the war effort.

While the KAR’s recruits assimilated into the organization’s culture and adopted the Ki-

KAR variant of Kiswahili, the British officers had a harder time learning the language of command. Although the officers of the smaller interwar peacetime forces could not take leave or receive promotions until they passed “a simple oral Swahili test,” the much larger wartime officer corps included many “unwilling or unable to master Swahili,” requiring some African soldiers to serve as Kiswahili-English interpreters.195 As the KAR’s numbers increased dramatically during the war, making non-Kiswahili-speaking officers more common, the East

Africa Command, the Nairobi-based British headquarters responsible for the KAR, reversed the earlier policy discouraging African soldiers’ use of English and made efforts to increase the use of English relative to Kiswahili while retaining Kiswahili as the language of command.196 In early 1945, Platt confirmed the military’s long-term plans to continue using Kiswahili for the foreseeable future while moving toward English as long-term objective, a decision endorsed by

63 the Tanganyikan government.197 Education efforts greatly improved the English abilities of most

African officers in the KAR, but the East Africa Command returned to its previous support for

Kiswahili in the years immediately preceding independence because most enlisted soldiers continued to have a very poor command of English.198

The KAR’s use of Kiswahili as the official language of command enabled the British to more easily recruit, train, and transfer their African military personnel. The British military more fully adopted Kiswahili as a lingua franca than any other British territorial or inter- territorial governmental organization and, perhaps because the military was more insulated from anti-Kiswahili political pressure than the civilian colonial administrators, continued its use of

Kiswahili until the dependencies’ independence. Yet the use of Kiswahili by the military and the police had unintended consequences, contributing not only to a rising sense of anti-colonial nationalism but “also the emergence of regional consciousness.”199 KAR soldiers frequently served in territories other than their own and interacted with both British officers and African soldiers and non-commissioned officers from the other East African dependencies. Historian

Timothy Parsons argues that KAR veterans were likely less instrumental in the postwar anticolonial movements than earlier histories portrayed, more focused on securing personal post- service benefits from the colonial governments than on the nationalist political organizing.200

Nonetheless, they formed a large body of East African men (320,000 served in World War II alone) who had served together as East Africans, though often in tribalized units, under the East

African Command with a simplified form of Kiswahili as their common language. The military’s Kiswahili usage contributed to the spread of Kiswahili in East Africa.201 The KAR’s experience with Kiswahili demonstrated that greater use of Kiswahili could make East African societies more legible for the colonial rulers by enabling them to more easily recruit and transfer

64 personnel throughout the region, rather than merely within a single dependency or linguistic area. Yet the returned World War II KAR veterans posed a significant nationalist, and potentially pan-regional, threat to the colonial order, thus demonstrating a key risk of greater

Kiswahili use that the Germans had been concerned with at the turn of the century.

Analysis and Criticism of the ILC’s Work

Under Johnson and Ratcliffe, the ILC performed its intended functions within the British

East African colonial system. The Committee produced an updated dictionary using the approved orthography, coordinated the dependencies’ approval of new Kiswahili textbooks, provided a forum for the Directors of Education and other stakeholders to cooperate on implementing language policy, and worked with publishers in meeting the rising demand for

Kiswahili reading materials. The four dependencies implemented policies promoting Kiswahili’s use in both education and colonial officer testing. During the 1930s, all ILC members were

Europeans, and the Bulletin’s readership was predominantly European.202 Although the

Committee’s standardization efforts were ostensibly of benefit to both the British regime and the colonial subjects, a linguistic dual mandate, the organization was more oriented toward the former’s needs. The quest for legibility, not a desire for indigenous empowerment, was the dominant motivation behind the Kiswahili promotion regime. Had the British colonial governments continued to promote Kiswahili, the ILC would have likely remained a valuable element in the colonial regime.

Contemporary and subsequent criticism of the ILC centered on its standardization activities in these early years and emphasized that the Committee’s work was largely a means to strengthen the colonial order. That the standardization process and the nature of standard

Kiswahili (Kiswahili sanifu) have received much more popular and scholarly attention than the

Inter-Territorial Language Committee and its institutional development is a testament to the fact that standard Kiswahili is one of the Committee’s most significant legacies. There are several controversies regarding standard Kiswahili. Firstly, some have questioned whether the Dar es

Salaam and Mombasa conferences made the right decision in choosing Kiunguja over Kimvita, a decision the ILC worked to implement. Second, more radical critics have argued that standard

Kiswahili is not a “real” Kiswahili dialect at all but rather should be seen as the British substitution of a simplistic and culturally impoverished language for the multiple beautiful, culturally embedded, and organically developing Kiswahili dialects.

Those who believe that Kimvita should have been chosen advance several arguments.

First of all, the rich tradition of precolonial Kiswahili literature was written in Kiamu and

Kimvita and very little literature had been written in Kiunguja by 1925. 203 Secondly, critics argue that Kiunguja was an inferior, simplified dialect used primarily between Arabs and

Africans in Zanzibar’s Stone Town and did not reflect the dialects of most Kiswahili speakers, including those of rural Zanzibar.204 The stronger form of the claim that the Committee should have chosen Kimvita is the assertion that the final standardized dialect differed so greatly from any previously existing dialect that it should be rejected as an artificial, externally imposed language, a charge that strikes at the heart of the ILC’s standardization work. As the title of his

1977 book The Liberation of Swahili from European Appropriation suggests, Abdallah Khalid views standard Kiswahili as a European form of the language:

The authorities of occupation then appointed a so-called “Inter-Territorial Language (Swahili) Committee for the East African Dependencies” of Britain whose members were Europeans and whose task it was to further adapt the Zanzibar lingua franca for European use. The product of the Committee’s labours was a partly new language with no speakers, and which at first none but its European inventors knew. Africans, for a while, called it “Kizungu” or “Kisirikali”, meaning the Europeans’, or the government’s, language.205

Khalid argues that this European Kiswahili cut off East Africans from the rich literature and history associated with the Kiswahili dialects and that the replacement of this fake Kiswahili with a version of Kimvita would be a major step in achieving cultural independence from Europe.

As evidenced by standard Kiswahili’s early derisive nicknames mentioned above,

Khalid’s argument echoes criticism which has followed the ILC’s work from its beginnings, perhaps most famously in an early exchange between two Europeans in the pages of the ILC’s own Bulletin in 1934. An anonymous British officer in the Kenyan Education Department described standard Kiswahili as a “new language” that was “superimposed” on Kiswahili speakers and criticized the British as “perhaps too apt to overlook the fact that the people themselves are not only capable of adapting their language to modern needs, but are doing so with amazing rapidity.”206 Writing in the same Bulletin, ILC member Canon Broomfield acknowledged some of the criticism but argued that for the time being the European linguists had training and skills which African Kiswahili speakers lacked.207

The ILC initially carried out its standardization work with minimal regard for Kiswahili speakers, in large part because its primary orientation was toward the interests of the colonial regime. The lack of any native Kiswahili speakers on the Committee for its first 16 years symbolized its lack of consideration of their desires. A 1940 editorial in the Tanganyikan newspaper Kwetu disparaged the ILC for precisely this reason: “I for one cannot appreciate the existence of an Association [the ILC] which claims to represent a certain section of a community without having a member of that particular section of community on an equal footing.”208 Two of the six delegates to the 1925 Dar es Salaam conference were East Africans; the failure of the

Committee to include even a single non-European member during the years of its standardization work explained much of the criticism of its work. Interestingly, W.H. Whiteley and Snoxall,

67 both Committee secretaries during its later years, conceded that the Committee’s imposition of the standardized orthography and opposition to the influences of Kimvita and other dialects had negative effects on the development of the Kiswahili language, particularly its literature. Snoxall said in the early years of standardization he thought the ILC members “were somewhat arrogant in insisting” on Kiunguja and that by the time he served as chairman, “It seemed to me that dialectical forms would enrich the language as they have indeed done since.”209 Whiteley acknowledged that “an over-rigid application of the standard forms did appear to give books written in Standard Swahili an artificial and stilted style” but defended the Committee members as good men who were trying to “get as many Africans educated as possible in the shortest possible time.”210 Both Secretaries’ comments show that the Committee was more focused on serving the colonial order than worrying about how East Africans thought about their actions.

The ILC’s standardization efforts have rightly been subject to much criticism and doubtlessly privileged the interests of the British colonial regime over those of the native

Kiswahili speakers or other East Africans. However, although “the Inter-Territorial Language

(Swahili) Committee implemented the colonial language policy well,” it is not fair to completely dismiss the Committee’s work as linguist Rajmund Ohly does.211 The Committee’s work in approving and coordinating inter-territorial textbook ordering facilitated the distribution of millions of Kiswahili textbooks, however imperfect the books may have been.212 The ILC was created as a vehicle to extend colonial power, but its later marginalization suggested that its standardization work may have unintentionally empowered East Africans more than the British had expected. As will be seen, Kiswahili aided both Kenyan and Tanganyikan nationalists in mobilizing their ethnolinguistically diverse populations, certainly not a goal of the East African

Governors in 1929.

CHAPTER 4

THE MARGINALIZATION AND TRANSFORMATION OF THE COMMITTEE (1945-1964)

At the war’s conclusion, the ILC’s members and staff may have expected their work to continue as before, but shifts in British language policy soon undermined the Committee’s aims.

W. H. Whiteley, the ILC’s Secretary for much of the 1950s, recalled that by the late 1940s, “any pre-war agreement on educational policies in the various countries had long since given way to divergence, and the place of Swahili in those policies was yielding, to a greater or lesser degree, to English.”213 The late 1920s decision to make Kiswahili the regional lingua franca embedded

Kiswahili promotion within the existing hierarchy of colonial aims. The growth of anti-colonial and nationalist sentiment across East Africa, along with increased criticism of the Kiswahili promotion regime’s educational consequences, caused the East African colonial governments to reassess their language policies. From the colonial administrators’ perspective, the benefits of widespread use of Kiswahili in making the East African dependencies more legible and efficiently governable were increasingly outweighed by nationalism’s existential threat to the colonial order.

Even before World War II, East Africa’s pro-Kiswahili language policies had elicited opposition. While the previously mentioned Baganda in Uganda and the Kikuyu in Kenya were the most prominent opponents, the policies also encountered resistance from Tanganyika’s

Sukuma, Chagga, Haya, and Nyamwezi and Kenya’s Luo ethnolinguistic groups.214 In the

1930s, the colonial governments sometimes accommodated dissenting groups, most prominently the Baganda, but continued to support the growth of Kiswahili.

As was true across many African and Asian colonial territories, the participation of

KAR’s East African soldiers in World War II and these soldiers’ return home fueled rising nationalism and anti-colonialism across the continent. KAR veterans had served in combat under white officers and fought alongside white units and questioned the prestige and perceived cultural superiority the Europeans had long enjoyed in East Africa:

The colonial European attached too much importance to his prestige. This meant almost everything to him. It was a strong “weapon” in his hand, a powerful force with which he had conquered the African psyche. Through it, colonial Europeans had launched and won a kind of psychological warfare over the Africans; this was shattered by World War II experiences. That is why Europeans, correctly and understandably, felt that they had lost some power while the Africans felt that they (Africans) had gained some of it. Things were never quite the same after World War II, at least the “weapon’s” efficiency had been reduced, if not actually lost.215

The growing anti-colonial sentiment weakened the European cultural domination described by

Fanon and Ngũgĩ, a domination in which language played a key role.

The growing opposition to the colonial system increased British officials’ awareness of

Kiswahili’s potential as an anti-colonial mobilization tool. While greater use of standardized

Kiswahili enabled the British to more efficiently govern their East African dependencies, the language’s diffusion also equipped East Africans to better communicate across ethnolinguistic barriers with each other. KAR veterans, teachers, students, and graduates formed a growing class of new Kiswahili speakers and, increasingly, readers extending across the region.

Governmental newspapers and radio broadcasts defended the colonial status quo, but a growing number of independent Kiswahili newspapers spread anti-colonial messages, taking advantage of the colonial governments’ Kiswahili promotion policies.

As the dependency governments attempted to preserve the colonial system, they adopted a dual strategy of promoting vernacular languages in the lower grades and introducing English as

70 a subject and a language of instruction earlier, both changes coming at the expense of Kiswahili.

The turn from Kiswahili to vernacular languages in part represented a linguistic version of the classic “divide-and-rule” strategy in the service of larger British efforts to weaken East African nationalism.216 Although it was too late to unteach those already familiar with Kiswahili, the new language policies aimed to at least slow the language’s growth. The policy change also had the advantage of reducing criticism from those ethnolinguistic groups which had long opposed the privileging of Kiswahili over their vernacular languages and from Western educators. As will be seen, British colonial educators argued against Kiswahili as an unnecessary third language after a child’s mother tongue and English that hindered student progress. Just as

Kiswahili’s advocates had pointed to its benefits as a lingua franca for both East Africans and the British regime, the dual linguistic mandate now worked against the language with the language portrayed as bad for the colonial regime and harmful to East Africans’ progress.

Dependencies Turn Against Kiswahili

As each dependency had adopted the Kiswahili promotion regime to differing extents, so each also varied in its postwar abandonment of Kiswahili. With its lack of a Waswahili population and the strong influence of the Baganda, Uganda almost entirely withdrew support for

Kiswahili. Kenya also backtracked significantly but, with Kiswahili used as the mother tongue of the coastal Waswahili and for interethnic communication in Nairobi and other towns, still had a greater Kiswahili presence than Uganda. Although the British regional language policy reversal affected Tanganyika and Zanzibar, they still promoted the language to a limited degree, a fact attributable to their significant Waswahili populations and the substantial Kiswahili penetration of inland Tanganyika. The Kiswahili language policy reversals affected the

71 dependencies’ language requirements for British colonial civil servants and their educational language policies.

The dependencies diversified their language proficiency requirements in light of their reduced support for Kiswahili. Rather than tying all language-related proficiency requirements, bonuses, and pay raises to Kiswahili, the colonial governments increased the incentives for civil servants to study vernacular languages. In Kenya, at least, this change was partially attributable to the British experience in combatting the Mau Mau insurgency of 1950s. The British quickly realized that very few of their colonial officers were proficient in Gĩkũkyũ, the language of the

Kikuyu fighters, and other vernacular languages used by the insurgents.217 The British difficulties highlighted a weakness in promoting standard Kiswahili as a means to make East

African societies more legible: Kenyans who had learned Kiswahili could still choose to use their vernacular languages to coordinate localized resistance to British rule.

The Ugandan government began phasing Kiswahili out of its educational system even before World War II ended. The government’s October 1944 conference to consider the latest memorandum from the Advisory Committee on Education in the Colonies, “Memorandum on

Language in African School Education,” strongly backed English as Uganda’s future lingua franca while simultaneously endorsing greater emphasis on six vernacular languages, including

Luganda but excluding Kiswahili. Those schools outside Buganda which had used Kiswahili as the medium of instruction increasingly switched to the vernacular languages, though English- language private schools gained popularity. By 1949, the only government primary schools using Kiswahili as their language of instruction were those for the children of the police, prison guards, and military. The military remained the one strong inter-territorial institution which continued to use Kiswahili. In 1952, the Ugandan government dropped Kiswahili as a subject

72 from the remaining schools teaching it. The schools associated with police, military, and prison guards then became the only ones left in the territory to offer Kiswahili instruction.218

Although Kenya did not follow Uganda by completely eliminating Kiswahili, the Kenyan educational system increasingly favored English, not only in the more prestigious secondary instruction but also in primary education teaching. As in Uganda, the move away from

Kiswahili began with wartime recommendations. Archdeacon Leonard Beecher of the CMS led a 1942 committee which examined African language education and called for English to serve as

Kenya’s lingua franca instead of Kiswahili. Beecher’s committee issued a second report in 1949 which emphasized the importance of 20 Kenyan vernacular languages. In 1953, English displaced Kiswahili to become the only language in which students could take their primary school leaving examinations. Subsequent commissions continued to advance English at the expense of Kiswahili, and English was soon introduced as a subject in the first year of primary school.219 The Kenyan Education Department focused on training more and better English teachers throughout the 1950s and into the independence era. In addition to the high-level political decision to abandon Kiswahili as Kenya’s lingua franca, Kenyan parents’ demands for more English instruction contributed to the policy changes.220

In Tanganyika and Zanzibar, government policy continued to privilege English over

Kiswahili but, other than the more open colonial officer language requirements, neither dependency instituted major policy changes. Members of Tanganyikan ethnic groups such as the

Sukuma, Nyamezi, Haya, and Chagga increasingly advocated for an educational model emphasizing vernacular languages and English, but, without the central location and political influence of the Baganda and Kikuyu, were unable to bring about major language policy reforms.221 In 1958, Tanganyika began introducing English as a subject in third year of primary

73 school, two years earlier than previously; English continued to be the language of instruction from the seventh year onward.222 In the postwar years, Zanzibar’s Arab Association continued its earlier advocacy for a switch from Kiswahili to Arabic as the language of instruction in primary schools, but the Department of Education resisted, pointing out that Arabic was already offered as a subject at all educational levels. By Zanzibar’s independence in 1963, popular support for Kiswahili’s continued use as the language of instruction had reduced pressure for

Arabic as the language of instruction.223 In both Tanganyika and Zanzibar, the colonial governments maintained their use of Kiswahili. The language was already so widely used in both that even a major shift toward vernacular languages and English would not have prevented nationalists from using Kiswahili to coordinate their efforts.

Post-World War II Reorganization

The British reversal on Kiswahili reduced the Committee’s stature as its regional governance structures underwent a period of reorganization. When the British established the

East African High Commission to more formally link the governments of Kenya, Tanganyika, and Uganda in 1948, the Inter-territorial Language Committee was one of the 21 enumerated services placed under the High Commission’s authority.224 Much of the Committee’s work of approving Kiswahili literature was transferred to the newly created East African Literature

Bureau (EALB), responsible for publishing after the latter’s creation in 1948. The ILC was officially listed as “an auxiliary of the Bureau.”225 The EALB published authors in Kiswahili without forcing them to comply with the standardized orthography, and the number of Kiswahili books published quickly increased.226 Between Ratcliffe’s 1949 retirement and the appointment of Whiteley as the next permanent Secretary in 1952, the EALB’s director C.G. Richards worked

74 with H.E. Lambert, a longtime British colonial officer noted for his research related to East

African languages, in managing the Committee’s affairs.227

The transfer of its most visible task to another colonial agency and an extended vacancy in its Secretary position highlighted the fact that the ILC no longer enjoyed its former prominence. The Committee’s annual budget had scarcely changed from 1930 to 1951, rising only slightly from £2,000 to £2,200 despite the overall increase in postwar British colonial development funding. Whiteley only served as a half-time Secretary due to his concurrent appointment as a Research Fellow of the East African Institute of Social Research (EAISR) at

Makerere College in Kampala, Uganda.228 In 1952, the Committee was renamed the East

African Swahili Committee with its membership reduced to nine, two representatives from each dependency and the Secretary. The EASC’s membership no longer included the Directors of

Education, cutting off the Committee’s active engagement with high-level policymakers. This change recognized the fact that the Kenyan and Ugandan Education Departments were actively reducing the presence of Kiswahili in their schools and thus it was irrational to expect their directors to participate in promoting the language. The reorganization also clarified the relationship between the Committee and the EALB. The new EASC only reviewed and granted imprimatur to textbooks; all other books could be submitted directly to the EALB.229 The

Committee adopted a new list of activities which reflects its changed status:

(a) The presentation of adequate material for the study of Swahili. (b) The constant revision of dictionaries and textbooks in the light of the results of research. (c) Cooperation with language boards in the matter of examinations. (d) Informing the East African public through the press about the status, value, progress and development of Swahili. (e) Research into Swahili history, language, dialects, conservation and interpretation of indigenous and traditional literature.

(f) Maintaining contact between the Swahili speaking countries, Tanganyika, Zanzibar, Kenya, Uganda, Northern Rhodesia, Nyasaland, Somaliland, the Belgian Congo and the Comoro Islands. (g) Maintaining contact between learned societies, colleges, and universities of London, South Africa, Leiden, Louvain, Berlin and encouraging studies in others. (h) Encouraging the study of Swahili in European and Indian schools in East Africa for the purpose of maintaining good relations between the races, and for the purpose of discovering potential linguists who will contribute to this rich field of research. (i) Extracting from the journals of colleges and learned societies, from periodicals and the press, articles of interest and value to the study of Swahili. (j) Conducting or supervising classes for the proper teaching of Swahili at approved centres, so that the present haphazard methods of learning may be avoided. (k) Performing secretarial services for voluntary language committees.230 This list had a much greater focus on linguistic research, as opposed to implementing the standardization agenda, than did the ILC’s original list of tasks from the Governors’

Conference.231 With coordinated Kiswahili promotion now frowned upon by the colonial order, the shift toward research marked the Committee’s evolution to accommodate the changed priorities. However, the dependency governments were significantly less committed to Kiswahili research than they had been to the standardization project. Linguistic research into a language which had fallen out of policymakers’ favor was not a financial priority for any of the dependencies.

These reforms coincided with the Committee’s 1952 relocation from Nairobi, where it had been since 1946, to Makerere’s EAISR in Kampala, Uganda. Though the EASC’s new headquarters were in the dependency where Kiswahili was the least widespread, Whiteley engineered the move because of the EAISR’s expressed support for the Committee’s research.232

Whiteley’s appointment also marked the increased professionalization of the Committee’s leadership; as research became the Committee’s most important task, EASC leaders such as

Whiteley, J.W.T. Allen, and Dr. Jan Knappert became prominent international scholars of

Kiswahili. This change coincided with the larger trend toward professionalization in “Bantu linguistics,” the European-dominated field of study which examined African languages and was framed in such a way as to perpetuate unequal colonial power relations.233

Binns Commission and the 1952 Cambridge Conference

The shift in British colonial education policy away from Kiswahili was confirmed in the

Binns Commission report.234 A thorough examination of this report reveals how completely the

British attitude toward Kiswahili had changed and how the EASC found itself suddenly so marginalized. The contrast with the 1920s documents related to the Dar es Salaam conference is striking.

In preparation for the 1952 Conference on African Education hosted by Cambridge

University, the Nuffield Foundation, a private British foundation established by automobile manufacturer William Morris (Lord Nuffield), funded two study groups to travel to the British territories in Africa, one to West Africa and the other to East and Central Africa. In addition to the four East African Swahili Committee member territories, the East and Central Africa Study

Group visited Nyasaland, Northern and Southern Rhodesia, and Somaliland from July 1951 to

February 1952.235 Arthur L. Binns, Lancashire’s Chief Education Officer, served as chairman;

Professor B.A. Fletcher, an education professor at the University of Bristol, and Freda H.

Gwilliam, an assistant educational advisor in the Colonial Office, were the other two members.236 In its report prepared for the Cambridge conference, the Study Group identified language as one of four “initial problems” facing the educational system. It considered the teaching of vernacular languages, Kiswahili, and English separately. The Study Group called for greater efforts in the teaching and preservation of vernacular languages, supporting the use of vernaculars as the languages of instruction for the first four years of primary school. However,

77 aside from the endorsement of its use as a vernacular for those students who spoke it as their mother tongue, Kiswahili received scant support in the report. In the Study Group’s view,

“unlike the African vernaculars, Swahili is not so rooted in an ancient social and spiritual tradition,” but rather too closely tied to the history of the slave trade to be embraced by many ethnic groups. Despite its support for vernacular languages’ role in preserving traditions and oral histories and the promotion of vernacular publishing, the Study Group limited Kiswahili’s own rich literary heritage to a passing mention, acknowledging that Swahili had “inspired a little good poetry and some original stories.” Although “easy to learn,” Kiswahili was unsuited as a lingua franca because of its limited vocabulary and the lack of published material.237

After its dismissal of Kiswahili’s value, the Study Group then laid out the case for ending

Swahili’s status as an educational lingua franca in areas where it was not the vernacular language. In a severe indictment of the Kiswahili policy which had birthed the ILC, the report stated that “the existence of Swahili in Kenya and Tanganyika and its place in school teaching is unfortunate, for it seems to have affected adversely the teaching both of the vernacular and of

English.”238 The Study Group viewed Kiswahili as an unnecessary third language and preferred

Northern Rhodesia’s use of only vernacular languages and English in education. Although

Kiswahili seemed to be the obvious choice for the primary school language of instruction, the report portrayed such a decision as short-sighted. Teaching Swahili literacy detracted from building the English proficiency needed by those who went on to higher studies, and “there [was] not a sufficient amount or depth of literature in Swahili available to the school leaver to justify its teaching.”239 Additionally, the use of Swahili as the primary education medium of instruction had produced East African teachers fluent in Kiswahili but with poor command of English.

Given its members’ low estimation of Kiswahili’s value as anything more than a vernacular language, and even then as a less fully developed and culturally embedded vernacular than the others of East Africa, the Study Group proposed to end the greater official recognition

British territorial governments extended to Swahili than to the other vernaculars. The report characterized opposition to their proposal as “vested interests” consisting of “those whose knowledge of Swahili bestows financial or other benefits upon them . . . and the very few

Europeans who perhaps unconsciously do not wish to share their language with the Africans.”240

The report did not explicitly mention the East African Swahili Committee, but its members and allies were surely included within the unflatteringly described opposition. The Study Group attested that every group they had met with and the vast majority of both African and European inhabitants of Kenya and Tanganyika would support the significant shift in educational language policy. English, not Kiswahili, was the correct choice for the region’s lingua franca due to its more developed vocabulary, much more widely available literature and educational resources, and connections to the wider world, especially for science and technology.

With the Kiswahili findings limited to five paragraphs, the report provided little detail beyond the general points outlined above for the reasons behind the Study Group’s strident opposition to widespread use of Swahili in Kenyan and Tanganyikan schools. During the Study

Group’s tour, Gwilliam shared her thoughts on the European residents of East Africa who supported Swahili’s use in an October 21, 1951, letter to Sir Christopher Cox, the Colonial

Office’s Educational Advisor and her superior and confidante. Her scathing criticism concludes with the anglicized plural of the Kiswahili word commonly used by East Africans to address the colonial masters, bwana:

Confound the Swahili [language] that gives the old hands such a lovely warm comfortable feeling of “understanding the African” and denies to the African his right to understand and enter into the heritage of the English-speaking world: that lulls the delightful but heavily paternal administrators into such bliss as “No politically-minded Africans here, thank goodness!” “Excellent race relations here as long as we are left to determine the pace of our own progress.” Who is “we”? Ask the Africans who can speak English and you get another story — But let their ostrichism shelter them a little longer from the rude awakening for they are doing a fine job in the old manner — Bwanas for ever!241

Gwilliam expressed her contempt in similar terms to the Binns Commission’s previously quoted description of the opponents of the proposed language policy changes. Neither the

Commission’s report nor Gwilliam’s letter included any suggestion that there was a non- paternalistic, participatory case to be made for Swahili’s continued use in East African schools.

The Study Group issued an extensive “Blue Book” and an 84-page unanimous report ahead of the Cambridge conference. Among its 76 comprehensive recommendations, including

9 related to educational language policy, the Study Group formalized its proposals for an end to

Swahili’s role as a lingua franca as follows:

RECOMMENDATION NO. 18 We recommend that a policy should be followed which leads to the eventual elimination of Swahili from all schools where it is taught as a lingua franca. In putting this policy into effect different transitional policies could be followed by Kenya and Tanganyika. In Kenya, a policy of gradual elimination over the whole territory could be followed by Kenya and Tanganyika. In Tanganyika a more piecemeal policy would be wiser. At first one or two ‘vernacular areas’ (such as, for example, the Wagogo area) could be detached from the main Swahili-teaching bloc and in them a vigorous vernacular plus English policy pursued. This policy of ‘detachment’ could continue until in the end an area would be left in which only Swahili and English remained as teaching languages and where Swahili could grow to maturity as a vehicle of culture.242 This recommendation attacked the very foundations of the East African Swahili Committee’s existence. There was no reason for an East African Luganda or Pare Committee because the colonial administrations primarily dealt with those languages as the vernaculars of particular and more geographically limited ethnic groups. In creating the ILC, the territorial governors had

80 formally acknowledged the reality that Swahili already had a much greater geographical reach than the vernacular languages and pledged their governments to the limited promotion of the language as an East African lingua franca, albeit one of inferior rank to English. Binns,

Fletcher, and Gwilliam not only rejected any further promotion of Kiswahili as an educational language of instruction but proposed to actively shrink Swahili’s influence until the language became just another vernacular.

The Conference on African Education, held at King’s College, Cambridge from

September 8 to 20, 1952, considered both regional study groups’ reports in its deliberation. The

Conference delegates split into five thematic groups. Language issues fell primarily under the purview of Group D, tasked with “Organization and Curriculum.” Ignoring Kiswahili by name,

Group D’s final report mentioned only vernacular languages, English, and Arabic (in the context of religious education for Muslim communities). In line with the Binns Study Group’s recommendations, the report’s primary education language section reiterated the importance of

English and, depending on local circumstances, vernacular education and the need to limit the number of language students were required to learn. The Group’s report noted that “a large majority of our group, including all our African members, feels strongly that the teaching of

English should have priority, and that, in the long run, this will not prove detrimental to the development of vernacular languages large enough to evolve a literature of their own.”243 With more tentative support for vernacular education than the Binns report and no mention of non-

European regional lingua francas, the report’s findings provided no substantive challenge to the

Binns report’s recommendation to roll back Swahili’s privileged status in East African education.

Although to a lesser degree than Group D, the Conference’s Group E, which considered

“Education and the Adult,” also dealt with language questions. Group E’s final report acknowledged that each colonial territory had need of its own unique language policy and suggested the creation of territorial language agencies bearing striking resemblance to the East

African Swahili Committee:

. . . there is a strong case to suggest that there is a strong case for bringing together a body in each territory which is charged to keep in touch with experiments inside and outside the territory, and to supply objective advice to the Department of Education. We think this body should be associated with the Colleges of Arts, Science, and Technology. It should not take part in the linguistic and political controversies which from time to time arise in connexion with the use of languages in education and in literature.244 However, unlike the EASC, Group E’s proposal lacked any provision for inter-territorial language policy coordination. The silence of either the Binn report or the conference group reports on the EASC and its work highlighted the Committee’s marginalization within the larger colonial apparatus. The 31 official conference members representing the East African dependencies (9 from Kenya, 10 from Uganda, 9 from Tanganyika, and 3 from Zanzibar) included many intimately familiar with the Committee and the project of Swahili standardization, not the least of whom were the four directors of education who were technically still Committee members until the following year.245 None of the 8 Africans within the East

African delegations were associated with the EASC. Interestingly, although none of the reports identified the EASC, Group D praised the work of the East African Literature Bureau.

The Binns Commission report revealed that the Kiswahili promotion regime had been completely disembedded from the colonial order. The Commission’s activities did not cause the shift in East African language policy, which were well under way by 1952. Colonial education commissions had opposed Kiswahili’s role as a lingua franca for decades, both before and after the Kiswahili policy reversal. The Binns Commission typified the educator objections to

Kiswahili as a unnecessary third language which was neither the optimal language for teaching young students, as vernacular languages were, nor the language which would help advanced students access international publications and scientific knowledge, as English was. Already in

1927, however, the Colonial Office’s Advisory Committee on Native Education had issued a

“Memorandum on the Place of the Vernacular in Native Education” which emphasized the use of vernacular languages and English. Political realities, and not British education experts’ opinion, were what had changed in the interim.246

When the East African dependencies had committed themselves to Kiswahili standardization and inter-territorial language cooperation in the 1920s, high-ranking officials such as Tanganyikan Director of Education Rivers-Smith and Ugandan Governor Gowers had invested themselves in the policy’s success. Kiswahili appeared to be an efficient means to administer linguistically diverse territories. The ILC was created to support the standardization agenda. The post-World War II shift left the Committee suddenly at odds with British policy.

However, the EASC’s newfound political irrelevance facilitated its more active inclusion of and collaboration with a more obvious but long overlooked constituency than the British regime, East

African Kiswahili speakers themselves.

Kiswahili and East African Nationalism

As the Germans experienced in the Maji Maji War, the spread of Kiswahili was a double- edged sword. Greater knowledge and use of Kiswahili within society allowed the German and

British colonial governments to more efficiently and effectively govern their East African territories but simultaneously empowered East Africans from ethnolinguistically diverse backgrounds to more easily communicate and coordinate anti-colonial activities than would have otherwise been possible either by relying on interpreters or a European language. Ali Mazrui

83 distinguishes between two broad wartime functions of language, “the category of inspiration with morale as its objective; and the category of organization, with efficiency as its purpose.”247

These functions are also relevant in the discussion of non-violent anti-colonial and nationalist movements. Following World War II, nationalists began increasingly using Kiswahili for political mobilization.248 Taking advantage of the language’s geographically widespread use, nationalists extensively used Kiswahili for inspirational and organizational purposes in Kenya,

Tanganyika, and Zanzibar.

The Tanganyika African Association (TAA), the first major African nationalist organization in colonial Tanganyika, was formed in 1929. The organization grew beyond the privileged base of civil servants who had founded it, and in 1947, after members protested at a leader’s use of English during a meeting, TAA declared Kiswahili to be the official language of its meetings. Its successor organization, the Tanganyika Africa National Union (TANU), used

Kiswahili as its official language from its 1954 founding onward. TANU recognized Kiswahili’s importance in discussions at its founding meeting, and TANU leaders used the language as they established branches across the country. In January 1960, TANU declared that Kiswahili would be the national language of independent Tanganyika.249

In addition to continuing TAA’s organizational use of Kiswahili, TANU pioneered the inspirational use of Kiswahili for large-scale popular mobilization against colonial rule. Swalehe

Mwinamila, a noted musician and TANU member, wrote Kiswaili songs such as “Amkeni

Msilale” (“Wake up, don’t sleep”) to raise Tanganyikans’ political consciousness.250 TANU politicians popularized the one-word Kiswahili slogan Uhuru (“freedom” or “independence”) as a greeting and used it to open and close their meetings and rallies.251 TANU’s promotion of

Kiswahili increased popular support and use of the language. Within TANU’s socialist and

84 nationalist ideology, Kiswahili was not merely an efficient solution to the otherwise intractable problem of interethnic communication but an essential component of the new national identity that the party sought to build. TANU’s president, former teacher Julius Nyerere, saw Kiswahili as a key piece of the party’s opposition to tribalism and foreign domination.

Kiswahili also factored in the Kenyan independence struggle. Prominent nationalist leaders such as anthropologist Jomo Kenyatta, the leader of the Kenyan African National Union, and trade unionist Tom Mboya used their Kiswahili speeches to mobilize opposition to British rule.252 Vernacular languages played a more prominent role in Kenyan independence than in

Tanganyika, particularly the use of Gĩkũkyũ in the Mau Mau insurgency, but the national leaders still found Kiswahili to be an important tools for reaching people outside their ethnic groups.253

Kenyatta’s Kiswahili slogan Harambee (“Let’s pull together”) became independent Kenya’s official motto and has been associated with a wide variety of community self-help projects.254

All of Zanzibar’s major political parties—the pro-Sultan Zanzibar Nationalist Party

(ZNP), its allied Zanzibar and Pemba People’s Party (ZPPP), and the more revolutionary Afro-

Shirazi Party (ASP) —heavily relied on Kiswahili for both organizational and inspirational purposes. Just eight days after the January 1964 revolution which violently overthrew the Sultan and the traditional Arab power structure, the ASP-dominated Revolutionary Council declared

Kiswahili to be Zanzibar’s official language, a symbolic blow against the previous British privileging of English and Arabic.255

In Kenya, Tanganyika, and Zanzibar, the leading nationalists used Kiswahili to both organize and inspire anti-colonial resistance.256 Once in government, they continued the British colonial use of Kiswahili as a way to make their societies more legible and were able to do so more effectively because of their own grasp of the language. However, they also promoted

Kiswahili as a symbol and tool of national unity, beyond the mere efficiency the language offered.

Committee’s Increased Engagement with East Africans and Shift toward research

As the nationalist movements began organizing and using Kiswahili for their own purposes, the East African Swahili Committee finally began to take steps to include more East

Africans. Although the initial resolutions calling for the ILC’s establishment had called for the appointment of “native representatives” to the Committee, the East African Governors had not included any such provision in the membership guidelines of the Committee’s Constitution. All

ILC members were Europeans until 1939 when the governors appointed one African from each dependency. Because of the wartime suspension of unnecessary government travel, including that required for the annual ILC meetings, these new members did not attend their first meeting until 1946.257 Meaningful East African participation in the Committee’s decision-making thus did not occur until the ILC’s marginalization had begun, and even then the four East Africans were a decided minority on the 17-member committee which included the four powerful

Directors of Education. The fact that the chairmanship rotated among the Directors, who were always high-ranking British career colonial officers, meant that the East Africans were effectively barred from the ILC’s highest office. No East African ever served as Secretary, the individual most responsible for directing and carrying on the Committee’s work.

The reorganization of the ILC as the EASC opened doors for even greater East African participation. With the removal of the Directors of Education from their ranks, the EASC members were now free to elect their own chair, and the reduced size meant even a few East

Africans formed a larger proportion of the membership. At the August 1953 meeting, three of the eight members in attendance were East Africans.258 When EASC Chair Ron Snoxall invited

86 two Belgian colonial officials from the Congo to attend an EASC meeting, they were surprised that Africans were also members.259 Tanganyikan civil servant and eminent Kiswahili poet

Shaaban Robert eventually became the Committee’s first and only East African chairman, a position he held until his death in 1962. Robert’s elevation to the chairmanship demonstrated the increasing role of native Kiswahili speakers in the Committee’s work.

Left with little room to advance Kiswahili policy-wise, the EASC continued its move into linguistic and literary research. At the 1958 annual EASC meeting, the members informally agreed that “the Committee was primarily a research body and as such was most properly linked with Makerere” University and that “[g]overnments should be urged to continue their support until such time as it could be incorporated into a Faculty of African Studies at some East African

University.”260 The final three Secretaries, Whiteley (1952-59), J.W.T. Allen (1959-61), and Jan

Knappert (1961-64) oversaw their research programs while under tight budgetary constraints.

EASC research assistant Oswald Bernard Kopoka of Tanganyika, one of the first East Africans to publish multiple academic pieces in the Committee’s Journal, “produced a series of pioneer studies in Swahili grammar, in Swahili, which were only terminated by his resignation in 1958 to join the Shell Co.” 261 Kopoka and the Committee blamed his resignation on the limited support the East African governments provided the Committee.262 In 1959, Allen announced that the continued existence of the Committee was in question due to the uncertainty of future government funding, and the Committee moved closer to becoming a research institute of

Makerere.263

As the East African dependencies moved toward independence, Allen and the EASC began searching for support from all corners. The Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, a private

Portugal-based foundation funded by British oil tycoon Calouste Gulbenkien’s fortune, provided

87 a £9,000 grant, with a £6,000 match from the British government’s Colonial Development and

Welfare Funds, which funded Knappert’s appointment as Secretary and Senior Research

Fellow.264 A Dutch scholar of Kiswahili, Knappert became the first non-British Secretary of the

Committee. Though technically remaining within the colonial governance framework, the EASC had become a much different organization from the old ILC. By the early 1960s, East Africans formed a significant portion of its membership and held its chairmanship, a Dutchman served as

Secretary, and most of its funding was private.

The foundation money was of limited duration, and Knappert continued Allen’s quest to secure the Committee’s long-term survival in some form. The EASC had become largely disembedded from the British regional governance framework and aims. Its status was not a major issue to either the nationalists, who had more pressing concerns, or the British government, which had long since abandoned the Kiswahili promotion regime, during the dependencies’ independence negotiations. The British gave up their sovereignty over Tanganyika in 1961, quickly followed by Uganda (1962), Kenya (1963), and Zanzibar (1963). Knappert oversaw the

Committee’s February 1962 move to Mombasa and then the final March 1963 return to Dar es

Salaam as he worked to find a permanent base of support. In 1964, the EASC officially disbanded and became the Institute of Swahili Research within University College in Dar es

Salaam, a subunit of the University of East Africa. The Committee’s decision to become a research institute gave it access to greater financial and academic support.265

Mbaabu suggests that Knappert and Allen executed the EASC’s final moves and transformation into the Institute without full legal authority as part of a secret plan to remove the

Committee from Uganda given the dependency’s lack of support for Kiswahili.266 While

Mbaabu may be correct that legally only the four governments could decide to dissolve the

Committee and transform it into the Institute because the Governors’ Conference had originally established the organization, the EASC’s irrelevance amidst the decolonization tide sweeping

East Africa meant that no government had an interested in opposing the decisions to move or dissolve. Due to budgetary constraints and its relatively low level of Kiswahili use, Uganda stopped paying its annual contribution upon independence. Tanganyika, the state most supportive of Kiswahili, had no reason to oppose the EASC’s decision to relocate to Dar es

Salaam and then attach itself as an Institute to its newly launched constituent unit of the

University of East Africa.

The Committee’s transition as the Institute of Swahili Research formalized the changes in the institution which had taken place since World War II. The organization’s new name highlighted research as its primary task, a change which reflected the Committee’s reality since the late 1940s. The Institute also finally transitioned from European to African leadership.

Whiteley served as the Institute’s director from 1965 to 1967 when J.A. Tejani, a Zanzibari educator of Indian ancestry, succeeded him to become the Institute’s first Tanzanian director.267

In 1969, George Mhina became the first mainland Tanzanian to hold the post.268 Although the

Institute lacked the EASC’s power of imprimatur for school textbooks, it otherwise continued the existing research programs.

As part of the University of East Africa, the Institute became temporarily re-nested within the regional governance framework, ending its years without a clear role following the British abandonment of the Kiswahili promotion regime. Although Uganda stopped its funding in 1964,

Kenya continued to contribute to the Institute’s upkeep until 1974.269 As the East African

Community (EAC), the successor to the East African Common Services Organization (EACSO) which oversaw the remaining inter-territorial cooperative efforts in East Africa, fragmented, the

University of East Africa dissolved into its three component national campuses in 1970, and the

Institute was then fully incorporated into the new University of Dar es Salaam. The end of

Kenyan support and the fraying of regional cooperation derailed plans to relaunch the Institute as a regional organization; the Institute of Kiswahili Research (TUKI/IKR) instead became the sole responsibility of Tanzania and thus embedded within the national institutional framework. The

Institute became understandably focused on Kiswahili in Tanzania, where the TANU government backed up its pre-independence support for Kiswahili with major language planning and promotion efforts. Kiswahili became an essential component in President Nyerere’s efforts to forge a new socialist Tanzanian identity. 270

My examination of the ILC’s evolution has highlighted the changing nature of British colonial language policy and its effects on the Inter-Territorial Language Committee. The post-

World War I establishment of British rule over Tanganyika and the increasing colonial government involvement in education led key government stakeholders such as Rivers-Smith to advocate for greater use and standardization of Kiswahili. Having inherited the German administrative system which relied heavily on Kiswahili, the Tanganyikan government was the strongest in support of regional standardization. Through the 1925 and 1928 standardization conferences, the East African governments committed themselves to standardizing Kiswahili based on the Kiunguja dialect of Zanzibar and to establishing a permanent committee to apply the standardized orthography in Kiswahili publications, especially textbooks, and generally promote the language’s spread. They created a Kiswahili promotion regime, nested in the regional governance framework and embedded in the overarching colonial priorities, as a way to render East African societies more legible to the colonial rulers. The ILC came into being in

1930 and fulfilled the role given it in the British colonial system as the organizational embodiment of the Kiswahili promotion regime.

After World War II, British colonial language policy decisively turned against the use of

Kiswahili, culminating in the 1952 Binns Commission Report. Rather than viewing Kiswahili as offering the colonial governments efficiency gains, colonial policymakers saw Kiswahili as a tool being used against them by the rising nationalist movements and as an impediment to the spread of English. The work of the ILC, reorganized as the East African Swahili Committee, went against the British anti-Kiswahili turn, and the Committee was largely sidelined. The Directors of Education no longer served on the EASC, severing the link between the Committee and high- level colonial policymaking. The Committee, which had been an all-European affair in the

1930s, increasingly engaged with East Africans and became more involved in research. By emphasizing its research role, the EASC obtained outside funding needed to survive and then formally became the Institute of Swahili Research.

While the above overview describes many aspects of the Committee’s development, this simplified narrative largely focuses on the actions of the British colonial officials and the British

ILC/EASC Secretaries and members. These actors created and greatly influenced the

Committee’s development. However, aside from Shaaban Robert’s contributions as chairman and Oswald Kopoka’s work as research assistant, this top-down narrative largely ignores the role played by the East African Kiswahili speakers themselves. Because Whiteley still oversaw the

Institute as late as 1967, an analysis of only the top leaders ignores the social changes taking place across East Africa during the Committee’s life. East Africans were increasingly asserting themselves in public life. In the final chapter, I examine the Committee’s periodicals to better understand the Committee’s engagement with East Africans.

CHAPTER 5 ANALYSIS OF THE COMMITTEE’s PERIODICAL (1933-1970)

This analysis of the changing content of the ILC’s periodicals over 37 years adds to our understanding of how decolonization affected and was effected within one small but unique unit of the East African colonial apparatus. Because Kiswahili was their subject matter, the East African Swahili Committee and the Institute of Swahili Research were different from other government agencies. Many East Africans had an inherent advantage over the British and other Europeans in terms of speaking Kiswahili. Although relatively few Tanzanians were native speakers, most spoke linguistically related Bantu languages and had at least some exposure to Kiswahili through education, religion, the independence movement, and trade. Few East Africans had the Western higher educational credentials to be considered academic linguists by their European counterparts, but even in the early years the European experts conceded that they could not carry out their tasks without the active participation of East African Kiswahili speakers. Even the most proficient British Kiswahili speakers lacked the full cultural understanding of words’ connotations that comes from growing up with the language.

Frederick Johnson, the ILC’s first secretary and noted within the Colonial Service for his prodigious Kiswahili skills, sometimes produced grammatically correct but incomprehensible translations, as recounted by his colleague Snoxall:

Sometimes this talent could produce a rather strange result, as when an expression in English was turned into a literal Swahili equivalent. Thus, “the people of this tribe have climbed another rung on the ladder of civilization” became “watu wa taifa hilo wamekwisha panda kipawa kingine katika ngazi ya ustaraabu”. A figurative English sentence was thus rendered into elegant Swahili where little relevance attached to the unfamiliar metaphor.271

The British civil servants and linguists who dominated the ILC and its successor organizations until the mid-1960s not only relied on local cooperation to implement their plans, as all colonial administrators did to one degree or another, but at an even more fundamental level to fully grasp the nuances of Kiswahili, their avowed area of expertise. In such an organization, East Africans, specifically the Tanzanians after the dissolution of the EASC, reasonably expected to take control sooner rather than later.

As shown in the preceding chapter, East Africans exercised greater agency within and control over the ILC and its successor organizations as independence approached. My focused study of long-term trends in the Committee’s flagship publication supplements this overview with a fuller understanding of what decolonization looked like within the institution’s most public forum. Regularly publishing the journal was one of the Committee’s major responsibilities. The Bulletin was initially circulated among the Committee membership and other interested linguists and civil servants, but its readership grew to include both Europeans and East Africans in education and the publishing industry as well as the growing number of

Kiswahili scholars and enthusiasts both in East Africa and beyond. Despite the typical disclaimer that “the views expressed in this journal are those of the Contributors only and are not necessarily in accord with those of Editor and/or Members of the Committee,” the ILC’s periodical gave the Committee a platform to present its views and those of its prominent members and allies and highlight the importance of its work and mission. Although many more

East Africans came into contact with the Committee through the millions of printed textbooks bearing its imprimatur than with a copy of its periodical, the post-independence Institute of

Swahili Research did not wield the authority of imprimatur to approve textbooks. The journal,

93 as compared to textbooks, thus has the distinct advantage that its contents can be analyzed before and after the advent of independence and even to the present day.

Table 1. Publications of the ILC and Successor Organizations, 1930-

Publication Title Publishing Institution Issues (Years) Bulletin of the Inter-Territorial Inter-Territorial Language Nos. 1 – 5 (1930-32), Language (Swahili) Committee to (Swahili) Committee to the privately circulated; the East African Dependencies East African Dependencies Nos. 6 – 23 (1933-53) Journal of the East African East African Swahili Nos. 24 – 28/2 (1954-58) Swahili Committee Committee Swahili: Journal of the East East African Swahili Nos. 29/1 –34/2 (1959-64) African Swahili Committee/Jarida Committee la Halmashauri ya Kiswahili katika Afrika ya Mashariki Swahili: Journal of the Institute Institute of Swahili Nos. 35/1 – 40/1 (1965-70) of Swahili Research/ Jarida la Research Chuo cha Uchunguzi katika Lugha ya Kiswahili Kiswahili: Jarida la Chuo cha Institute of Swahili Uchunguzi katika Lugha ya Research, later the Institute Nos. 40/2 – present Kiswahili/Journal of the Institute of Kiswahili Research and (1970- ), although the title of Swahili Research the Institute of Kiswahili has changed to reflect the Studies Institute’s name changes.

Basic Methodology

As shown above in Table 1, the primary periodical publication of the ILC and its successor organizations underwent its own series of name and format changes during the four decades following the ILC’s establishment. For this study, I examined the contents of all 43 issues published between October 1933 and September 1970. Although the ILC began publishing its Bulletin in 1930, its first five issues were privately circulated and are very difficult to find. Thus, my study began with the first publicly printed issue, Bulletin No. 6. I concluded with No. 40/2 of September 1970 because this momentous issue marked the journal’s completion of its transition to a Tanzanian-run, primarily Kiswahili journal, symbolized by its title’s replacement of the anglicized “Swahili” to language’s name for itself “Kiswahili.” By 1970,

Tanzanians held the key offices of the Institute of Swahili Research, and the Institute came under the authority of the newly established University of Dar es Salaam.

In examining the journal, I was chiefly interested in the extent to which changing patterns in its contents reflected the ongoing decolonization process in East Africa as a whole and within the Committee itself. Among many alternative ways to categorize and track the journal’s changes, I chose two main approaches—analyzing changing patterns in two proxy measures and identifying significant “firsts” that marked departures from past patterns. As simple proxies for decolonization, I chose the geographic origin of the journal’s contributors and the predominant languages of its articles. Both of these measures are inexact, especially when considering the possibility that the British may have continued to indirectly exercise neo-colonial control through

Kiswahili-speaking, East African elites. However, that risk was minimal with regards to language policy. As most blatantly expressed in the 1952 Binns Commission report, the British decisively shifted away from the promotion of Kiswahili as a regional or even national lingua franca in the years following the Second World War. The EASC budget was held flat, and the

British made no serious attempt to maintain the Committee as a regional body in the East African decolonization process. The British policy in the lead-up to independence and in the subsequent decades, primarily through the British Council, has been to promote the use and teaching of

English.272 As did the Committee, the Institute has consistently promoted the study and use of

Kiswahili. Some of its scholars have advocated for Kiswahili’s use as a medium of instruction in both secondary and tertiary education.273 Because the British opposed greater use of Kiswahili, an official goal of the Tanzanian government and a sometimes rhetorical goal of the independent

Kenyan and Ugandan governments under Jomo Kenyatta and Milton Obote, respectively, the level of Kiswahili use in the journal is an appropriate proxy for decolonization as regards

95 language policy and the Institute of Swahili Research. Similarly, East African Kiswahili speakers were likely to have a greater understanding of the language’s social context and the role it played in the region than the European scholars, and thus the relative proportion of articles in the journal authored by East Africans and non-East Africans is also an appropriate proxy for decolonization in the limited sphere of the Institute and its work.

Within the 43 issues published between 1933 and 1970, I identified 506 separate items, including articles, word lists, letters, and announcements. I coded each item by its predominant language, its author’s name, and its author’s geographic origin. Given that many items included both Kiswahili and English, I determined an item’s predominant language based on the language whose readers could most easily process the content by focusing the language of the item’s title and text, any explanatory notes, and any translation of the initial text.

Qualitative Data Analysis

Over the 37-year period surveyed, the journal featured more than three times as many items written predominantly in English as in Kiswahili, 387 to 116.274 As Figure 1 shows, the proportion of Kiswahili articles was initially negligible, with none before Bulletin No. 19 in

1945. Thereafter, the proportion of Kiswahili increased unevenly. Although the final issue in the sample (40/2), the first under the title Kiswahili, indeed had the highest proportion of

Kiswahili items (13 of 16, or 81 percent), No. 33/1 of 1962/3 had the second highest proportion, and several of the intervening issues had Kiswahili proportions as low as 13 percent. Although the overall trend reflected decolonization, the language proportions of any given issue were likely also partially determined by more issue-specific considerations such as the quality and content of submitted articles as well as the editor’s personal preferences.

Figure 1. Proportion of Journal Items by Language, 1933-1970

Proportion of Journal Items by Language (1933-1970)

0,9

0,8

0,7

0,6

0,5

Proportion 0,4

0,3

0,2

0,1

1939 1933 1934 1935 1936 1938 1940 1941 1942 1943 1944 1945 1947 1951 1952 1953 1954 1955 1956 1957 1958 1959 1960 1961 1962 1963 1964 1965 1966 1967 1968 1969 1970 Year

English Kiswahili

Of those items which had an author of identifiable geographic origin, most were written by authors born outside of East Africa. The gap was much less than that between Kiswahili and

English, with fewer than two non-East African authored items for each East African one (249 to

149). As shown in Figure 2, every public Bulletin issue until 1939 was entirely authored by

Europeans, but from 1954 on, the East African proportion never fell below 20 percent. Swahili

No. 34/2 was the only issue with no identifiable non-East African items because it was a special issue devoted to various traditional and contemporary Kiswahili literature selections. As with the proportion of items in Kiswahili, the proportion of East African-authored items increased significantly but unevenly in the 1950s and 1960s. While the proportion of items authored by

East Africans reflected the decolonization process, it also reflected the more mundane editorial factors mentioned for the language proportion.

Figure 2. Proportion of Journal Items by Author's Geographic Origin, 1933-1970

Proportion of Journal Items by Author's Geographic Origin, 1933-1970 100,0% 90,0% 80,0%

70,0%

60,0% 50,0%

Proportion 40,0% 30,0% 20,0% 10,0%

0,0%

1957 1933 1934 1935 1936 1938 1939 1940 1941 1942 1943 1944 1945 1947 1951 1952 1953 1954 1955 1956 1958 1959 1960 1961 1962 1963 1964 1965 1966 1967 1968 1969 1970

Year

Non-East African East African

Key Moments of Growing East African Influence in the Committee’s Publications The above examination advances our understanding of overall trends in the Committee journal’s use of Kiswahili and its publishing of East African contributors. My other approach in surveying the journal was to identify key moments which advanced the use of Kiswahili or the participation of East African authors. Some of these have been alluded to earlier, but the following chronological review of these developments captures the progress made in the

Kiswahilization and Africanization of the Committee’s publications which may be missed by the variance in either proportion from the above issue-to-issue approach or Mbaabu’s frequent highlighting of important articles.275

From 1933 to 1939, all Bulletin articles were predominantly in English, and all identified authors were Europeans. Bulletin No. 13 (1939) featured Abdulla Mohamed El-Hadhramy’s list of “Swahili Intensifiers.” 276 Although not included in the table of contents, this was the first

Bulletin item signed by an East African. El-Hadhramy worked in the Zanzibar Education

Department and, as Zanzibar’s native delegate to the 1925 Dar es Salaam conference and subsequently a member of Zanzibar’s publishing committee, was one of the earliest East Africans involved in British Kiswahili standardization efforts. Not until No. 18 (1945) did new ILC member Amour Ali Ameir, another Zanzibar Education Department official, become the first

East African to publish a bylined article with his submission “Card Games.”277 No. 18 was also the first to include items written in Kiswahili with not only Ameir’s article but also letters from

Oswald Mhando and S. Joel Mdundo. 278

With the transition from the Bulletin to the larger and more academic Journal, the advent of book reviews advanced both the Kiswahilization and Africanization of the publication.

Shaaban Robert, the future EASC chair and author with the most works reviewed in the sample period, had three of his Kiswahili books reviewed in the final Bulletin, No. 23 (1953), the first to include book reviews. Tanganyikan EASC research assistant Oswald Bernard Kopoka became the first East African to publish a book review with his analysis of Robert’s Adili na Nduguze.279

The book reviews marked a major advance for East African participation in the journal. Whereas previously the mostly European contributors had written about East African Kiswahili speakers or discussed how to standardize the language for them, East Africans were engaged in book reviews from their introduction. Europeans reviewed the works of East Africans, most notably those of Robert, and, beginning with Kopoka’s 1956 review of Ernest B. Haddon’s Swahili

Lessons in Journal No. 26, East Africans reviewed the Europeans’ works.280 Even as Europeans

99 continued to produce most of the published content, the book reviews introduced East Africans as their equals. No. 25 in 1955 featured three book reviews written by East Africans in

Kiswahili, the first time the publication had put any of its more academic features in the language.281

Table 2. Historic East African and Kiswahili First Instances in the Committee Publications, 1939-1970

Historic East African and Kiswahili First Instances within the Issue (Date) Bulletin/Journal/Swahili/Kiswahili First published submission signed by an author of East African origin Bulletin No. 13 (1939) First bylined article by an author of East African origin; first items Bulletin No. 18 (1945) written predominantly in Kiswahili First book reviews written in Kiswahili; first mention of the word Journal No. 25 (1955) “Kiswahili” in table of contents First editor of East African origin Swahili No. 39/1 and 2 (1969) First Kiswahili editorial; first Kiswahili table of contents Swahili No. 40/1 (1970) First Kiswahili front cover Kiswahili No. 40/2 (1970)

The establishment of an independent society for the study of Kiswahili, the Jumuia ya

Taaluma ya Kiswahili, in Robert’s hometown of Tanga contributed to the Journal’s use of

Kiswahili. This organization, whose name Whiteley rendered in English as the Society for the

Preservation of Kiswahili, was an indigenous response to the British abandonment of the

Kiswahli promotion regime.282 The word “Kiswahili” as opposed to the anglicized “Swahili” appeared in a Committee periodical table of contents for the first time in the heading for a request from the society in Journal No. 25 (1955).283 No. 28/1 (1958) featured five of the society’s formal lectures, all in Kiswahili and all but one delivered by East Africans, on topics including

East African history to Kiswahili poetry.284 The Kiswahili book reviews in 1955 and the Tanga lectures in 1958 marked the Journal’s embrace of Kiswahili content. Though the proportion of

Kiswahili content would vary greatly from issue to issue, it was clear that the Committee’s publication would never return to its English-only early days.

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The last stage of the Journal’s Kiswahilization and Africanization came with the increasing use of Kiswahili in formatting the publication and in the appointment of Tanzanian editors. In 1959, its official title became Swahili: Journal of the East African Swahili Committee with the Kiswahili translation Jarida la Halmashauri ya Kiswahili katika Afrika ya Mashariki printed below it on the cover page. That subtitle was the first part of the journal’s formatting to be rendered in Kiswahili. Previously, despite the rising Kiswahili content, all the trade words had remained in English. No. 33/2 (1963) included the Kiswahili translation “Yaliyomo” in parentheses following “Contents.” The combined issue No. 39/1 and 39/2 (1969) announced

M.H. Abdulaziz’s appointment as editor, the first Tanzanian and East African editor in the publication’s history. For the first time since 1963, he included “Yaliyomo” but this time with

“Contents” in parentheses. While the memorial tributes to Shaaban Robert in 1964 were in

Kiswahili, the contents heading had still been in English; however, in No. 39, Abdulaziz titled his memoriam article for Tanzanian writer and poet Matthias E. Mnyampala in Kiswahili, the same language in which he wrote the article itself.285 That issue also included the Kiswahili heading

“Mapitio ya Vitabu” followed by its English translation “Book Reviews” in parentheses.

Abdulaziz’s second issue as editor, No. 40/1 (March 1970), featured a fully Kiswahili table of contents. In addition to the Kiswahili heading “yaliyomo” without English translation, the table used the Kiswhahili word “ukarasa” instead of “page.” Abdulaziz published Swahili’s first

Kiswahili editorial under the Kiswahili equivalent heading “Tahariri.”286

No. 40/2 (September 1970), the final issue in this study sample, signaled the completion of the journal’s outward Kiswahilization. In the preceding issue, Abdulaziz reported that some readers had already requested that the publication title be changed from Swahili to Kiswahili and that he hoped the issue would be considered by the Institute’s governing council. The simple

101 addition of the two-letter prefix –ki-, often used to signify “in the manner of,” carried a deep symbolism far beyond mere cosmetics. As Abdulaziz wrote, “Some of our readers have given their opinion that the name of this journal should be KISWAHILI instead of this [current one] of

SWAHILI because Kiswahili is indeed the name of this language” [author’s translation, italics added]. 287 Kiswahili speakers, once portrayed as passive actors or uneducated masses who needed to be given a language, were asserting ownership of their language in the language’s premier academic journal which had been established and, for most of the preceding four decades, largely written by Europeans. The front cover of 40/2 proclaimed the journal’s new official title Kiswahili: Jarida la Chuo cha Uchunguzi wa Lugha with “Journal of the Institute of

Swahili Research” parenthetically displayed in smaller print below. The cover bore the

Kiswahili words “mhariri” (“editor”), “chuo kikuu” (“university”), and “Septemba”

(“September”) without any translation. Edited by Abdulaziz’s successor J.K. Kiimbila, 40/2 included a Kiswahilized table of contents with nearly all items written in Kiswahili (13 of 16) and by East Africans (14 of 15).

This study of the continuous succession of publications from the Bulletin through

Kiswahili provides a more detailed account of what the Committee’s decolonization process looked like in one key aspect of its work. The textual analysis reveals that, as expected, the proportions of journal items written in Kiswahili and of journal items written by native-born East

Africans increased markedly between 1933 and 1970, particularly from the mid-1950s on.

However, rather than showing steady progress toward Kiswahilization and Africanization, both proportions fluctuated greatly in the final 15 years of the sample period. The long-term trends provide support for the idea that the journal reflected the process of decolonization occurring within the Committee and society at large, while the issue-to-issue variation suggests that the

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East African dependencies’ advance toward independence was not the only factor affecting the editorial decisions. The chronological exposition of key first instances in the journal’s history complements the content analysis. The key precedent-breaking instances shown in Table 2 highlighted the progress East African and Kiswahili-speaking contributors made over the sample period.

The increasing Africanization and Kiswahilization of the Committee’s journal reflected the contemporaneous changes within the Committee and East Africa. The Bulletin’s almost exclusively non-African authorship and orientation toward English speakers suited the purpose of the colonial Kiswahili promotion regime. The ILC’s task was to standardize Kiswahili so that it could make East African societies more legible to the British, not to encourage Kiswahili- speaking East Africans to participate in the standardization process. The later journals’ increased

Kiswahili use and East African authorship came after the British colonial governments had stopped supporting Kiswahili promotion. East Africans, particularly Tanzanians, began debating and discussing important linguistic and historical aspects of Kiswahili with Western linguists. As the British retreated from Kiswahili promotion, space opened up for a more free-flowing discourse.

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CONCLUSION

In the forty years following its founding, the organization originally known as the Inter-

Territorial Language Committee changed significantly in terms of its work, its role within the regional political hierarchy, and East African Kiswahili speakers’ participation in its work. The

ILC’s development is an instructive case study in colonial language policy and its unintended consequences. More generally, the ILC’s history is an example of an organization successfully adapting to major policy and social changes in order to survive. The continued development and spread of Kiswahili in the later colonial years, even with reduced government support, serves as a reminder that centralized, state language planning is far from the only way that languages develop.

The British standardized and promoted Kiswahili to allow them to more efficiently govern their East African dependencies. Fundamentally, the colonial governments sought to rationalize the Kiswahili language as a means to render their subjects’ societies more legible and thus more easily governable. During its early years, the ILC’s most pressing work involved the standardization of Kiswahili—revising Madan’s dictionary to reflect the standardized dialect, approving and procuring an adequate supply of textbooks in the standardized dialect, and developing and approving appropriate Kiswahili words for technical translation. Created by the

East African governors with the approval of the British Cabinet’s Secretary of State for the

Colonies, the ILC aimed to promote the use of standardized Kiswahili as a way to allow the

British to more easily deploy materials and staff, both British and indigenous, throughout the region. The dependency governments nested the ILC within the existing regional governance framework by placing the organization under the East African Governors’ Conference and subsequent regional cooperation bodies and by including the four Directors of Education as

104 members. Despite its limited staff and resources, the Committee made great strides in performing its role in the colonial system. Although the Committee’s work necessitated engagement with East African Kiswahili speakers, the organization was largely oriented toward the needs of the four member governments, particularly their Education Departments, and the practical concerns of British colonial officers using Kiswahili in their work. The Committee members, employees, and Bulletin contributors were predominantly British and associated with the region’s governments or missions.

After World War II, the rising tide of nationalism across East Africa triggered the reversal of the previous generally pro-Kiswahili language policy. Rather than a tool of social control,

Kiswahili came to represent a threat to the colonial order, a means by which anti- colonial movements could organize and inspire the dependencies’ populations. The Kiswahili promotion regime had been embedded within the overarching agenda of maintaining the colonial order. As the British perceived that Kiswahili promotion actually undermined that priority, they stopped supporting the language’s spread. By the time the Binns Commission recommended eliminating the use of Kiswahili in education outside of the areas where it was a vernacular language in 1952, the reversal of state support for Kiswahili was already complete in Uganda, outside of the military and police, and well under way in Kenya. Tanganyika and Zanzibar also became less supportive of the language’s use in education.

The language policy reversal affected both the EASC’s work and its role within the structures of East African colonial governance. Reorganized as the East African Swahili

Committee in 1953, the organization largely shifted from its emphasis on standardization and its practical application by the British government to more academic linguistic and literary research.

The Committee set about preserving oral traditions and unpublished historical manuscripts,

105 encouraging the growth of Kiswahili literature, and studying various Kiswahili dialects. After the reorganization, the dependencies’ Directors of Education, previously ILC members with special duties related to textbook approval, no longer served on the Committee, a reasonable change given that they were actively reducing Kiswahili’s role in education during that period.

The newly created East African Literature Bureau took over most of the Committee’s publishing tasks with the exception of Kiswahili textbook approval. The Committee, no longer firmly embedded within the regional colonial order, found itself adrift, cut out of policymaking and with an uncertain future.

The 1950s and early 1960s saw successive EASC Secretaries searching for a new and financially secure niche for their organization within first the decolonizing British regime and then the independent dispensation. The frequent location shifts of the EASC’s office mirrored the organization’s search for its place within the regional governance structures. The academic turn toward research saw the Committee move to Makerere University College, partner with

Makerere’s East African Social Research Institute, then shift briefly to Mombasa, and finally relocate to Dar es Salaam where the Committee formally became the Institute of Swahili

Research. The Committee’s marginalization occurred just as it finally began to open itself up to meaningful East African participation. East African Kiswahili speakers generally made up half of the EASC’s membership, and East Africans, most notably Oswald Kopoka, began producing significant scholarship.

Analysis of the Committee’s Survival

That the Institute for Kiswahili Studies continues to produce quality Kiswahili scholarship or even exists at all is a testament to the fact that the East African Swahili Committee survived by successfully adapting to the reversal in British language policy and then to

106 decolonization. The survival of the Committee, in the form of its successor Institute, stems from three main factors identified earlier: the British policy reversal, which ironically forced the

Committee to make changes which better prepared it to face decolonization; the shift in the

Committee’s primary work from standardization to research; and, most importantly, the increased involvement of East Africans in the Committee as decolonization approached.

The reversal of the British pro-Kiswahili policy after World War II disrupted the

Committee’s trajectory of institutional development. Had the British continued to promote

Kiswahili as a regional lingua franca, the ILC would likely have continued in much its same form until much closer to independence. If the Committee had remained primarily a standardization agency, it may well have become part of the first East African Community and then broken up when the EAC collapsed in the 1970s. Though the post-World War II marginalization of the ILC may have thus contributed to the organization’s ultimate survival, the initial effect of the change in language policy was to demoralize the Committee members and staff.288 Over time, the shift in British policy caused the Committee to shift its focus from standardization to research.

The reorientation of the Committee toward research represented the end of its quest for legibility. By simplifying the British task of administering their East African dependencies, the standardization and promotion of Kiswahili had aimed at strengthening British control. However, with the British policy reversal, the Committee’s work turned increasingly away from legibility and simplification. Its new focus actually undercut the simplification process by elevating non- standard language forms; much of its research involved studies of non- standardized Kiswahili dialects and the collection of historical manuscripts written in those dialects.

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The third and perhaps most important factor in the Committee’s survival was the increased participation of East Africans in its work and the alignment of the goals of the

Committee and the Tanzanian government. The previous paternalistic attitude toward East

Africans and Kiswahili speakers gave way to one of cooperation and partnership. Although the

Secretary position remained in British hands, the Committee was no longer the echo chamber of

European linguists and educators it had seemed in the 1930s, and the East African members and staff of the EASC contributed greatly to the Committee’s work. The Committee’s retreat from language control and the quest for legibility also opened up space for Kiswahili authors to use the language more creatively and produce new literature.289

Kenyan, Tanganyikan, and Zanzibari nationalists’ use of Kiswahili for organizational and inspirational purposes before and after independence signaled that many East Africans were willing to support the language which the British had rejected. The commitment of TANU and

Nyerere to developing Kiswahili as a national language increased Kiswahili’s status and represented an alternative source of support for the EASC’s activities. As the EASC leadership considered their options to preserve the organization, Tanganyika, Tanzania following its 1964 federation with Zanzibar, was the state with the strongest political support for Kiswahili and the natural location for its permanent home. The partnership between the EASC’s Europeans and

East Africans in its later years prepared the institution to come under the control of Nyerere’s

Tanzanian government. Although British linguists such as Whiteley initially held key Institute posts, it was obvious that Tanzanians would soon occupy the top leadership posts, as happened with the transition to the directorships of Tejani and Mhina in 1967 and 1969, respectively.

Since the EASC’s 1964 transformation into the Institute of Swahili Research, the Institute has remained the leading research institution on Kiswahili regionally and internationally. Known

108 for many years as the Institute of Kiswahili Research (TUKI/IKR), the reorganized Institute of

Kiswahili Studies (TATAKI/IKS) has continued to publish dictionaries, grammatical and linguistic studies, and several journals, including Kiswahili. The Institute and Tanzania’s

National Kiswahili Council (BAKITA) have succeeded in elevating the status of Kiswhaili in

Tanzania.290 The formal dissolution of the University of East Africa in 1970 put the Institute fully under the University of Dar es Salaam, formerly a constituent college of the University of

East Africa. Since the end of Kenyan support in 1974, the Tanzanian government has had full responsibility, through UDSM, for the Institute, which remains in contact with non-Tanzanian institutes and organizations such as the Kenya Kiswahili Association.291 Recognizing its continuity with the ILC, the Institute celebrated the 75th anniversary of the Committee’s founding with a special conference and Kiswahili issue.292

Significance of the Institute’s Africanization and Kiswahilization

The formal decolonization of the EASC was complete on December 12, 1963, with the independence of Kenya. From that point forward, all member governments of the East African

Common Services Organization, under whose authority the EASC briefly passed, were legally self-governing and sovereign. The successor Institute of Swahili Research was under the authority of the East African University from 1964 to 1970 and then Tanzania’s University of

Dar es Salaam. The formal transfer of authority in and of itself did not necessarily mean that power had shifted from the colonial states to the new African leaders or that the new leaders represented the interests of the masses. As Wasserman details, East African consensual decolonization was a bargaining process, and the British aimed to protect their interests, in part by coopting the new postcolonial leadership into maintaining much of the social, political, and economic status quo.293 However, since the disembedding of the Kiswahili promotion regime

109 from the larger colonial system, the EASC was not a key piece of the colonial apparatus upholding the status quo. If anything, the Committee was little more than an anachronism within the colonial bureaucracy by the 1960s, a reminder of a discredited language policy that refused to die.

East Africans became increasingly prominent as Committee members, staff workers, and

Swahili contributors in the 1950s and early 1960s, a trend which continued with the transition to the Institute. Simultaneously, Kiswahili-oriented articles became more common in the journals

Swahili and then Kiswahili. As with formal decolonization, the replacement of British personnel by East Africans and greater use of Kiswahili relative to English in official periodical publications did not necessarily mean that British domination had ceased. A simplistic application of the adage “personnel is policy” to the changes in the EASC might overstress the significance of East Africans occupying formerly British-held positions, but the saying refers as much or more to the importance of key personnel’s motivations and interests in implementing government policy as it does to their ethnolinguistic or national identity.

Critical scholars such as Fanon have harshly criticized indigenous elites for advancing the interests of their current or former colonial powers rather than those of the masses. The decolonization-era Tanzanian scholars associated with the Institute as staff or contributors to its publications all received their formal education at either Western universities or British- established East African universities, were socialized in a foreign knowledge production system, and thus at first glance may have appeared open to charges of neocolonial cooptation. If the

“decolonized” Institute had merely reproduced the colonial committee’s work but using

Tanzanian personnel who spoke Kiswahili instead of English among themselves, then the

Committee’s decolonization would have been little to celebrate.

110

However, given the scope of the Committee and later the Institute’s work, a more relevant adage would be “language is policy.” The devaluing of indigenous languages was a key component of the imperialist cultural bomb described by Ngũgĩ. Something as simple as

Abdulaziz’s 1969 decision to title and write his editorial in Kiswahili instead of English marked a rejection of the British devaluation of Kiswahili. By publishing articles and books about and increasingly in Kiswahili, the Institute challenged the intellectual underpinnings of the colonial order and neocolonialism, an important task given that the damage wrought by the cultural bomb did not vanish with formal decolonization. The Institute’s Tanzanian academics, educated in

Western or Western-established institutions with English as their language of instruction, actively worked in the years following formal independence to reverse the linguistic and cultural dependence of East Africa on the English language.

In the specific context of Kiswahili research, formal decolonization led to a sustained push to support the resistance tradition which Ngũgĩ associates with indigenous African cultures and languages against the imperialist tradition. Formal decolonization did not represent a decisive break from the Committee’s prior work under British control. To the extent that there was a decisive break, it was in 1952 with the ILC’s reorganization as the EASC. The end of the

British Kiswahili promotion regime meant the EASC’s work was no longer directly oriented toward perpetuating the colonial system. Though the EASC remained part of the colonial bureaucracy, the dependency governments no longer viewed the Committee’s work as valuable.

As they worked to stay relevant and find a more secure source of funding, the British administrators and academics associated with the EASC had every incentive to collaborate more closely with the only remaining constituency of support for their work, East African Kiswahili speakers themselves. By conducting their own research, promoting the work of East Africans,

111 and facilitating communication among the growing international community of Kiswahili scholars, the EASC’s British leadership prepared the way for the Institute’s later work. The turn away from the colonial efforts to use Kiswahili to make East African societies more legible and thus more easily governable greatly reduced the Committee’s power and relevance to imperial policy but also gave the Committee space to become more inclusive of and receptive to East

African input.

Future research and final thoughts

This study of the Inter-Territorial Language Committee opens several avenues for future research. One weakness of this thesis is my overreliance on British colonial documents and writings by the British linguists associated with the Committee. A thorough study of the East

Africans associated with the Committee, particularly as it transitioned to become the Institute, and greater inclusion of East African voices would more fully illuminate the development of

British policy toward Kiswahili and indigenous responses to British policy changes. Though the

British linguists were important actors in standardizing and promoting Kiswahili, the East

Africans’ agency in the language’s spread must not be downplayed and is much more significant in the language’s long-term development than that of the British. Building on existing overviews, more in-depth qualitative data analysis of the Bulletin, Swahili, and Kiswahili is a promising approach to analyzing the organization’s development.294 An extension of qualitative data analysis to the issues of Kiswahili published since 1970 would contribute to a fuller understanding of the Institute’s development in the subsequent decades, including its relationship with other government agencies both in Tanzania and elsewhere in East Africa and the effects of

Tanzania’s transition from a command to a market economy. A comparison between the histories of the Committee and the other colonial-era inter-territorial institutions in East Africa

112 would help identify similarities and differences for a better understanding of East African decolonization.

The survival of the Inter-Territorial Language Committee is but one anecdote in the decolonization saga. The case study of the ILC’s development touches on the value of indigenous languages in African postcolonial societies. The European colonial powers implemented language policies designed to perpetuate the colonial system, in part by devaluing indigenous cultures and languages. Even after independence, European languages continued to hold privileged positions in African countries, both because of the ruling elites’ knowledge of them and because the ethnolinguistically diverse polities often lacked any other language which was widely known. The place of European languages in postcolonial societies remains contentious and complex. Critics such as Fanon and Ngũgĩ have even appropriated European languages to critique the continued privileging of Western culture over indigenous traditions.

Although much attention has been focused on the heated debates over the formulation and implementation of language policies, the ILC’s history highlights the importance of what

Whiteley termed “the ideological aspect” of language planning, raising a language’s profile and mobilizing public support.295 Though practical considerations mean that European languages will continue to play important roles in postcolonial societies, the production of scholarship and resources in indigenous languages by institutions like the Institute for Kiswahili Studies can enhance the prestige of a language and contribute to the larger, cultural African Renaissance trumpeted by Ngũgĩ. In the battle over colonialism’s linguistic legacies, language is policy.

The Committee’s evolution over its 34-year history enabled its unlikely transformation from a colonial tool of language control to a research institute in the service of Tanzanian development. Ultimately, the Committee’s fate was decided not by the British colonial regime

113 which brought it into being and then later withdrew its support for the Committee’s work but by the Tanzanian government. In 1952, the Cambridge Conference on African Education favorably received the Binns Commission Report and its denunciation of Kiswahili’s prominent role in colonial education. Although the Committee’s subsequent survival and the rise of Kiswahili in

East Africa were at odds with the report’s recommendations, these events confirmed the larger truth that the European bureaucrats and educators would not get the last word on African education, a truth somewhat paternalistically conceded in the conference’s report:

The success of the conference at Cambridge cannot now be assessed; its measure will in due course be what peoples and the Governments of British territories in Africa, partly because of it, find themselves able to decide upon and carry into effect.296

The Institute of Kiswahili Studies, the ILC’s living legacy and institutional successor, continues to research and promote Kiswahili, a language which tens of millions of East Africans use daily and which continues to develop throughout the region despite the colonial efforts to suppress it.

114

ENDNOTES

1 Alamin M. Mazrui and Ibrahim Noor Shariff, The Swahili: Idiom and Identity of an African People (Trenton, N.J: Africa World Press, 1994).

2 Ngũgĩ wa Thiongʾo, Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature (London : Portsmouth, N.H: J. Currey ; Heinemann, 1986), 4.

3 James C. Scott, Seeing like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed, Yale Agrarian Studies (New Haven: Yale University Press, Yale University Press, 1998), 2.

4 Ibid., 72.

5 David D Laitin, Language Repertoires and State Construction in Africa (Cambridge [u.a.]: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1992), 9–10.

6 Ibid., 10.

7 Ali A. Mazrui, “Language & Race in the Black Experience: An African Perspective,” in The Power of Babel: Language & Governance in the African Experience, ed. Ali A. Mazrui and Alamin M. Mazrui (Oxford: James Currey, 1998), 14.

8 Ngũgĩ wa Thiongʾo, Decolonising the Mind, 7.

9 Ibid., 3.

10 Ibid., 16.

11 Ibid., 28.

12 Ngũgĩ wa Thiongʾo, Something Torn and New: An African Renaissance (New York: BasicCivitas Books, 2009), 123–132.

13 Ibid., 70–71.

14 Ibid., 88.

15 Steve Biko, I Write What I like (London: Bowerdean Press, 1978), 107.

16 Ngũgĩ wa Thiongʾo, Something Torn and New, 102–103.

17 Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, trans. Richard Philcox, Revised edition (New York : Berkeley, Calif.: Grove Press, 2008), 21.

18 Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, 1st ed. (New York: Grove Press : Distributed by Publishers Group West, 2004), 238.

19 Ibid., 239–244.

20 Alamin M. Mazrui, “Language & the Quest for Liberation: The Legacy of Frantz Fanon,” in The Power of Babel: Language & Governance in the African Experience, ed. Ali A. Mazrui and Alamin M. Mazrui (Oxford: James Currey, 1998), 63.

21 Gary Wasserman, Politics of Decolonization: Kenya Europeans and the Land Issue, 1960-1965 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976), 4.

115

22 Ibid., 5.

23 Ibid.

24 I draw on H. Richard Friman’s treatment of these concepts in the context of international prohibition regimes. H. Richard Friman, “Externalizing the Costs of Prohibition,” in Crime and the Global Political Economy, ed. H. Richard Friman, International Political Economy Yearbook, v. 16 (Boulder: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2009), 52– 57.

25 Oran R. Young, Governance in World Affairs (Ithaca, N.Y. ; London: Cornell University Press, 1999), 5.

26 Ibid., 167.

27 Ibid., 165.

28 Wasserman, Politics of Decolonization: Kenya Europeans and the Land Issue, 1960-1965, 4.

29 Kwame Nkrumah, Neo-Colonialism: The Last Stage of Imperialism. (London: Nelson, 1965).

30 Zaline M. Roy-Campbell, Empowerment through Language: The African Experience-- Tanzania and beyond (Trenton, NJ ; Asmara, Eritrea: Africa World Press, 2001), 2–3.

31 Sinfree Makoni, “African Languages as European Scripts: The Shaping of Communal Memory,” in Negotiating the Past: The Making of Memory in South Africa, ed. Carli Coetzee and Sarah Nuttall (Cape Town: Oxford University Press, 1998), 245.

32 Shihabdin Chiraghdin, Historia ya Kiswahili (Nairobi: Oxford University Press, 1977), 25–53.

33 Ali A. Mazrui and Alamin M. Mazrui, Swahili State and Society: The Political Economy of an African Language (Nairobi : London: East African Educational Publishers ; James Currey, 1995), 35; Mazrui and Shariff, The Swahili, 62; Rajmund Ohly, “Dating of Swahili Language (preliminary Notes),” Kiswahili 42–43, no. 2–1 (1972): 15–23; Wilfred Howell Whiteley, Swahili: The Rise of a National Language (London: Methuen, 1969), 28–40.

34 Mbunda Msokile, Historia na matumizi ya Kiswahili (Dar es Salaam, Tanzania: Educational Publishers and Distributors Ltd., 1992), 12–23; Rocha M. Chimerah, Kiswahili: Past, Present, and Future Horizons (Nairobi: Nairobi University Press, 1998), 27–36; Edgar C. Polomé, Language, Society, and Paleoculture: Essays by Edgar C. Polomé, Language Science and National Development (Stanford, Calif: Stanford University Press, 1982), 189– 190; Abdallah Khalid, The Liberation of Swahili from European Appropriation, A Handbook for African Nation- Building 2 (Nairobi: East African Literature Bureau, 1977), 43–52.

35 Mazrui and Shariff, The Swahili, 68–69.

36 Albert S. Gérard, African Language Literatures: An Introduction to the Literary History of Sub-Saharan Africa, 1st American ed (Washington, D.C: Three Continents, 1981), 93; Bernd Heine, Status and Use of African Lingua Francas, Afrika-Studien, Nr. 49 (München: Weltforum Verlag, 1970), 83–84.

37 Gérard, African Language Literatures, 93.

38 Mazrui and Shariff, The Swahili, 3.

39 Rajmund Ohly, Swahili - the Diagram of Crises, Veröffentlichungen Der Institute Für Afrikanistik Und Âgyptologie Der Universität Wien 21 (Vienna: Afro-Pub, 1982), 9.

40 Whiteley, Swahili, 42.

116

41 Alamin M. Mazrui, Swahili beyond the Boundaries: Literature, Language, and Identity, Ohio University Research in International Studies, no. 85 (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2007), 16–20; Gérard, African Language Literatures, 96–104; Polomé, Language, Society, and Paleoculture, 196.

42 Ohly, Swahili - the Diagram of Crises, 23–25.

43 Heine, Status and Use of African Lingua Francas, 84–86.

44 Msokile, Historia na matumizi ya Kiswahili, 39–40.

45 Heine, Status and Use of African Lingua Francas, 84.

46 George A. Mhina, Language Planning in Tanzania: “Focus on Kiswahili” (Dar es Salaam: University of Dar es Salaam, 1976), 12–13.

47 Whiteley, Swahili, 46.

48 Ibid., 52–55.

49 Mazrui and Shariff, The Swahili, 60.

50 Whiteley, Swahili, 55.

51 W.J.W. Roome, “Report of the Committee for the Standardization of the Swahili Language, Appendix B: The Lingua Franca Swahili. East Africa.” (Dar es Salaam: Tanganyika Education Department, October 16, 1925), Early Secretariat Collection, AB 1269: Standardization of Swahili for Schoolbooks, Tanzania National Archives, Dar es Salaam, Tanzania.

52 Whiteley, Swahili, 55.

53 Mhina, Language Planning in Tanzania: “Focus on Kiswahili,” 13.

54 Ohly, Swahili - the Diagram of Crises, 37.

55 John Iliffe, “Tanzania Under German and British Rule,” in Zamani: A Survey of East African History (Nairobi: East African Publishing House, 1968), 290–291.

56 Mazrui and Mazrui, Swahili State and Society, 38–39.

57 Charles Pike, “History and Imagination: Swahili Literature and Resistance to German Language Imperialism in Tanzania, 1885-1910,” The International Journal of African Historical Studies 19, no. 2 (January 1, 1986): 220– 223.

58 Mazrui and Mazrui, Swahili State and Society, 39.

59 Pike, “History and Imagination,” 229.

60 Whiteley, Swahili, 60–61; Chimerah, Kiswahili, 90–91.

61 Ireri Mbaabu, Historia ya usanifishaji wa Kiswahili (Dar es Salaam, Tanzania: Taasisi ya Uchunguzi wa Kiswahili, Chuo Kikuu cha Dar es Salaam, 2007), 90–91.

62 Mhina, Language Planning in Tanzania: “Focus on Kiswahili,” 11.

117

63 T. P. Gorman, “The Development of Language Policy in Kenya with Particular Reference to the Educational System,” in Language in Kenya, ed. Wilfred Howell Whiteley (Nairobi: Oxford University Press, 1974), 402.

64 Whiteley, Swahili, 66–67.

65 Gorman, “The Development of Language Policy in Kenya with Particular Reference to the Educational System,” 404.

66 Ibid., 405–406.

67 Ibid., 406–407.

68 Iliffe, “Tanzania Under German and British Rule,” 296.

69 J. Cameron and W. A. Dodd, Society, Schools & Progress in Tanzania, Society, Schools, and Progress 1 (Oxford: Pergamon Press, 1970), 59.

70 Nadra O. Hashim, Language and Collective Mobilization: The Story of Zanzibar (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2009), 84.

71 Ibid., 80–81.

72 Ibid., 111.

73 Roman Loimeier, Between Social Skills and Marketable Skills: The Politics of Islamic Education in 20th Century Zanzibar, Islam in Africa (Leiden: Brill Academic Publishers, 2009), 289–291.

74 Richard Hayes Crofton, Zanzibar Affairs, 1914-1933 (London: F. Edwards, 1953), 30.

75 Ibid., 33.

76 Hashim, Language and Collective Mobilization: The Story of Zanzibar.

77 Ireri Mbaabu, Language Policy in East Africa: A Dependency Theory Perspective (Nairobi: Educational Research and Publications, 1996), 49.

78 Ibid.

79 M. S. M. Kiwanuka, “Uganda Under the British,” in Zamani: A Survey of East African History (Nairobi: East African Publishing House, 1968), 312–313.

80 Whiteley, Swahili, 69–70.

81 Hamza Mustafa Njozi, “Islam, the Kiswahili Language and Integration in East Africa,” in Proceedings of the International Symposium on Islamic Civilisation in Eastern Africa: Kampala, Uganda, 15-17 December 2003, ed. A. B. K Kasozi and Sadik Ünay, Sources and Studies on the History of Islamic Civilisation 13 (Istanbul: Research Centre for Islamic History, Art and Culture, 2006), 256.

82 Mbaabu, Language Policy in East Africa: A Dependency Theory Perspective, 50.

83 The westernmost portion of German East Africa, present-day Burundi and Rwanda, came under Belgian control after World War I.

84 Whiteley, Swahili, 61–62.

118

85 Colonial Office, Advisory Committee on Native Education in British Tropical African Dependencies, and William George Arthur Ormsby-Gore, Education Policy in British Tropica AFrica: Memorandum Submitted to the Secretary of State for the Colonies by the Advisory Committee on Native Education in the British Tropical African Dependencies (London: H.M.S.O., 1925), 3.

86 Ibid.

87 Ibid., 4.

88 Ibid.

89 Frederick D. Lugard, The Dual Mandate in British Tropical Africa (Edinburg & London: Blackwood, 1922), 617.

90 Rev. W.J.W. Roome to S. Rivers-Smith, September 1925, Early Secretariat Collection, AB 1269: Standardization of Swahili for Schoolbooks, Tanzania National Archives, Dar es Salaam, Tanzania.

91 Rev. W.J.W. Roome to S. Rivers-Smith, July 6, 1925, Early Secretariat Collection, AB 1269: Standardization of Swahili for Schoolbooks, Tanzania National Archives, Dar es Salaam, Tanzania; J.J. Uganda to Rev. H.B. Ladbury, September 8, 1921, Early Secretariat Collection, AB 1269: Standardization of Swahili for Schoolbooks, Tanzania National Archives, Dar es Salaam, Tanzania.

92 Hashim, Language and Collective Mobilization: The Story of Zanzibar, 80.

93 S. Rivers-Smith to Chief Secretary, Tanganyika, “Memorandum No. 409/92/2: Language,” April 6, 1921, Early Secretariat Collection, AB 749: Education, Language, Tanzania National Archives, Dar es Salaam, Tanzania.

94 J.R. Orr to Colonial Secretary, Kenya, “No. 20/71/1,” August 2, 1924, Early Secretariat Collection, AB 1269: Standardization of Swahili for Schoolbooks, Tanzania National Archives, Dar es Salaam, Tanzania.

95 Ibid.

96 Elizabeth Watkins, Oscar from Africa: The Biography of Oscar Ferris Watkins, 1877-1943 (London: The Radcliffe Press, 1995), 11–12, 37.

97 O.F. Watkins to Colonial Secretary, Kenya, “No. 10/4,” August 9, 1924, Early Secretariat Collection, AB 1269: Standardization of Swahili for Schoolbooks, Tanzania National Archives, Dar es Salaam, Tanzania.

98 John Scott, Chief Secretary, Tanganyika, to Chief Secretary, Zanzibar, “No. 7702/15,” August 11, 1925, Early Secretariat Collection, AB 1269: Standardization of Swahili for Schoolbooks, Tanzania National Archives, Dar es Salaam, Tanzania.

99 Chief Secretary, Zanzibar, to John Scott, Chief Secretary, Tanganyika, “No. 669 (6700),” September 4, 1925, Early Secretariat Collection, AB 1269: Standardization of Swahili for Schoolbooks, Tanzania National Archives, Dar es Salaam, Tanzania; Colonial Secretary, Kenya, to John Scott, Chief Secretary, Tanganyika, “No. 4841/43/39,” October 5, 1925, Early Secretariat Collection, AB 1269: Standardization of Swahili for Schoolbooks, Tanzania National Archives, Dar es Salaam, Tanzania.

100 Rev. W.J.W. Roome to S. Rivers-Smith, September 1925.

101 S. Rivers-Smith to John Scott, Chief Secretary, Tanganyika, “No. 25/27/11,” September 17, 1925, Early Secretariat Collection, AB 1269: Standardization of Swahili for Schoolbooks, Tanzania National Archives, Dar es Salaam, Tanzania.

119

102 Committee for the standardization of the Swahili language, “Report of the Committee for the Standardization of the Swahili Language” (Dar es Salaam: Tanganyika Education Department, October 16, 1925), 1, Early Secretariat Collection, AB 1269: Standardization of Swahili for Schoolbooks, Tanzania National Archives, Dar es Salaam, Tanzania.

103 Frederick Johnson, “Report of the Committee for the Standardization of the Swahili Language, Appendix A: Paper on the Standardization or Revision of Kiswahili” (Dar es Salaam: Tanganyika Education Department, October 16, 1925), 2, Early Secretariat Collection, AB 1269: Standardization of Swahili for Schoolbooks, Tanzania National Archives, Dar es Salaam, Tanzania.

104 Ibid., 3.

105 Ibid., 5.

106 Ibid., 6.

107 Ibid., 5.

108 Ibid., 9.

109 Committee for the standardization of the Swahili language, “Report of the Committee for the Standardization of the Swahili Language. Appendix C: Resolutions” (Dar es Salaam: Tanganyika Education Department, October 16, 1925), 3, Early Secretariat Collection, AB 1269: Standardization of Swahili for Schoolbooks, Tanzania National Archives, Dar es Salaam, Tanzania.

110 Ibid., 4.

111 Ibid., 4–5.

112 Ibid., 5.

113 Ibid., 11.

114 Ibid., 3.

115 Ibid., 4.

116 Acting Chief Secretary, Zanzibar, to Chief Secretary, Tanganyika, “No. 469/5430,” June 24, 1926, Early Secretariat Collection, AB 1269: Standardization of Swahili for Schoolbooks, Tanzania National Archives, Dar es Salaam, Tanzania; G.C.F. Dundas, Acting Chief Secretary, Tanganyika, to Chief Secretary, Zanzibar, “No. 7702/137,” September 4, 1926, Early Secretariat Collection, AB 1269: Standardization of Swahili for Schoolbooks, Tanzania National Archives, Dar es Salaam, Tanzania; Chief Secretary, Zanzibar, to Chief Secretary, Tanganyika, “No. 763 (5430),” October 26, 1926, Early Secretariat Collection, AB 1269: Standardization of Swahili for Schoolbooks, Tanzania National Archives, Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. Interestingly, the sole dissenter from the Committee for the standardization of the Swahili language, Fr. Lemble of Tanganyika, also opposed the majority’s recommendations regarding the usage of “ch” and “ng.” See J.S. Lemble, “Report of the Committee for the Standardization of the Swahili Language, Appendix D: Minority Report by Rev. Fr. Lemble” (Dar es Salaam: Tanganyika Education Department, October 16, 1925), 2, Early Secretariat Collection, AB 1269: Standardization of Swahili for Schoolbooks, Tanzania National Archives, Dar es Salaam, Tanzania.

117 G.C.F. Dundas, Acting Chief Secretary, Tanganyika, to Chief Secretary, Zanzibar, “No. 7702/137”; Chief Secretary, Zanzibar, to Chief Secretary, Tanganyika, “No. 763 (5430).”

120

118 “International Institute of African Languages and Cultures,” Pamphlet (London: International Institute of African Languages and Cultures, 1926), Early Secretariat Collection, AB 1354: International Institute of African Languages and Cultures, Tanzania National Archives, Dar es Salaam, Tanzania.

119 Frederick Lugard to Donald Cameron, Governor, Tanganyika, “No. 8073/1,” October 16, 1926, Early Secretariat Collection, AB 1354: International Institute of African Languages and Cultures, Tanzania National Archives, Dar es Salaam, Tanzania.

120 S. Rivers-Smith to Chief Secretary, Tanganyika, minute with other officials’ comments, December 8, 1926, Early Secretariat Collection, AB 1354: International Institute of African Languages and Cultures, Tanzania National Archives, Dar es Salaam, Tanzania.

121 Clive Whitehead, Colonial Educators: The British Indian and Colonial Education Service 1858-1983 (London: I.B.Tauris, 2003), 129–130.

122 E.C. Eliot, Acting Chief Secretary, Uganda, to Rev. W.J.W. Roome, September 13, 1921, Early Secretariat Collection, AB 1269: Standardization of Swahili for Schoolbooks, Tanzania National Archives, Dar es Salaam, Tanzania.

123 W.F. Gowers, Governor, Uganda, to Leo Amery, Secretary of State for Colonies, dispatch, “No. 305,” September 26, 1927, 1, Early Secretariat Collection, AB 1269: Standardization of Swahili for Schoolbooks, Tanzania National Archives, Dar es Salaam, Tanzania.

124 W.F. Gowers, Governor, Uganda, to Chief Secretary, Uganda, minute, November 25, 1927, Early Secretariat Collection, AB 1269: Standardization of Swahili for Schoolbooks, Tanzania National Archives, Dar es Salaam, Tanzania.

125 S. Rivers-Smith to Chief Secretary, Tanganyika, “Minutes on No. 134,” January 9, 1928, Early Secretariat Collection, AB 1269: Standardization of Swahili for Schoolbooks, Tanzania National Archives, Dar es Salaam, Tanzania.

126 David Nyapinda, “Conference Standardises Kiswahili, Charts Future of the Language,” Old Africa: Stories from East Africa’s Past 31 (October 2010): 23.

127 Whiteley, Swahili, 80.

128 Colonial Secretary, Kenya, to Chief Secretary, Dar es Salaam, telegram, “No. 43/2/1/70,” March 8, 1928, Early Secretariat Collection, AB 1269: Standardization of Swahili for Schoolbooks, Tanzania National Archives, Dar es Salaam, Tanzania.

129 S. Rivers-Smith to Chief Secretary, Tanganyika, March 15, 1928, Early Secretariat Collection, AB 1269: Standardization of Swahili for Schoolbooks, Tanzania National Archives, Dar es Salaam, Tanzania.

130 S. Rivers-Smith to Chief Secretary, Tanganyika, letter followed by other officials’ comments, March 15, 1928, Early Secretariat Collection, AB 1269: Standardization of Swahili for Schoolbooks, Tanzania National Archives, Dar es Salaam, Tanzania.

131 John Scott, Chief Secretary, Tanganyika, to Colonial Secretary, Kenya, “No. 7702/167,” March 24, 1928, Early Secretariat Collection, AB 1269: Standardization of Swahili for Schoolbooks, Tanzania National Archives, Dar es Salaam, Tanzania.

132 Chief Secretary, Zanzibar, to Administration, Kenya, cablegram, “No. 7,” March 15, 1928, Early Secretariat Collection, AB 1269: Standardization of Swahili for Schoolbooks, Tanzania National Archives, Dar es Salaam, Tanzania.

121

133 William Hendry, “Memorandum by the Director of Education, Zanzibar” (Unpublished, April 1928), Early Secretariat Collection, AB 1269: Standardization of Swahili for Schoolbooks, Tanzania National Archives, Dar es Salaam, Tanzania.

134 W.F. Gowers, Governor, Uganda, to Governor, Kenya, cablegram, “No. 43/2/1/70,” March 20, 1928, Early Secretariat Collection, AB 1269: Standardization of Swahili for Schoolbooks, Tanzania National Archives, Dar es Salaam, Tanzania; Professor Meinhof to Administration, Kenya, telegram, April 19, 1928, Early Secretariat Collection, AB 1269: Standardization of Swahili for Schoolbooks, Tanzania National Archives, Dar es Salaam, Tanzania.

135 A. Isherwood (on behalf of Rivers-Smith) to Chief Secretary, Tanganyika, “Minutes on No. 341 (3520),” April 25, 1928, Early Secretariat Collection, AB 1269: Standardization of Swahili for Schoolbooks, Tanzania National Archives, Dar es Salaam, Tanzania.

136 George F. Sayers, “Minutes on No. 341 (3520),” April 26, 1928, Early Secretariat Collection, AB 1269: Standardization of Swahili for Schoolbooks, Tanzania National Archives, Dar es Salaam, Tanzania.

137 Colonial Secretary, Kenya, to Chief Secretary, Tanganyika, “No. S/LAN.2/1/36,” May 15, 1928, Early Secretariat Collection, AB 1269: Standardization of Swahili for Schoolbooks, Tanzania National Archives, Dar es Salaam, Tanzania.

138 Mazrui and Mazrui, Swahili State and Society, 45.

139 The 19th and final Dar es Salaam resolution was a list of those to whom the Government Printer was to send copies of the final report.

140 Whiteley, Swahili, 80–81; Mbaabu, Historia ya usanifishaji wa Kiswahili, 60–73.

141 P. R. Snoxall, Peripatetic Pedagogue: Some Reminiscences of R. A. Snoxall (Worthing: Self-published, 1985), 30. However, the exact nature of Crawford’s involvement remains in question. He was not on the CMS’s list of official participants, perhaps because he walked out early or because he boycotted the conference altogether in recognition of the inevitable outcome. See Nyapinda, “Conference Standardises Kiswahili, Charts Future of the Language,” 22; Joan Russell, Communicative Competence in a Minority Group: A Sociolinguistic Study of the Swahili-Speaking Community in the Old Town, Mombasa (BRILL, 1981), 55.

142 Quoted in Whiteley, Swahili, 81.

143 Quoted in Gorman, “The Development of Language Policy in Kenya with Particular Reference to the Educational System,” 415–416.

144 Michael D. Callahan, “The Failure of ‘Closer Union’ in British East Africa, 1929–31,” The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 25, no. 2 (May 1, 1997): 269.

145 Gorman, “The Development of Language Policy in Kenya with Particular Reference to the Educational System,” 417.

146 Callahan, “The Failure of ‘Closer Union’ in British East Africa, 1929–31.”

147 Ibid., 269.

148 Joseph S. Nye, Pan-Africanism and East African Integration (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1965), 90.

149 Callahan, “The Failure of ‘Closer Union’ in British East Africa, 1929–31,” 278–285.

122

150 Serwano Kulubya, “Closer Union and Other Questions, 1931,” in The Mind of Buganda: Documents of the Modern History of an African Kingdom, ed. D. A. Low (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971), 90.

151 Ibid.

152 Gorman, “The Development of Language Policy in Kenya with Particular Reference to the Educational System,” 419.

153 Ibid., 417; Theodore Natsoulas, “The Kenyan Government and the Kikuyu Independent Schools...,” Historian 60, no. 2 (Winter 1998): 294–295; Wilfred Howell Whiteley, “The Changing Position of Swahili in East Africa,” Africa: Journal of the International African Institute 26, no. 4 (October 1, 1956): 347–348.

154 Whiteley, Swahili, 81–82.

155 Mbaabu, Historia ya usanifishaji wa Kiswahili, 26; Whiteley, Swahili, 79.

156 Mazrui and Mazrui, Swahili State and Society, 45.

157 Whiteley, Swahili, 82.

158 Mbaabu, Historia ya usanifishaji wa Kiswahili, 62.

159 Snoxall, Peripatetic Pedagogue: Some Reminiscences of R. A. Snoxall, 28.

160 Mbaabu, Historia ya usanifishaji wa Kiswahili, 60.

161 Snoxall, Peripatetic Pedagogue: Some Reminiscences of R. A. Snoxall, 28.

162 Noel Michael and Said Yusuph, “Uongozi na Baadhi ya Watumishi Tangu Kamati ya Lugha ya Afrika Mashariki,” Kiswahili 68 (2005): 16.

163 Proceedings of the Conference of Governors of British East African Territories, May 1934: Appendix II. Constitution and Functions of the Inter-Territorial Language (Swahili) Committee to the East African Dependencies (Nairobi: Office of the Conference of East African Governors, May 1934), 1–2, Imperial and Colonial Government Collection, AB 2226: Minutes of the Governors Conference held at Nairobi, May 1934, Tanzania National Archives, Dar es Salaam, Tanzania.

164 Ibid., 2.

165 “Notes and News,” Africa: Journal of the International African Institute 4, no. 2 (April 1, 1931): 231–42; “Notes and News,” Journal of the Royal African Society 41, no. 165 (October 1, 1942): 267–69.

166 Whiteley, Swahili, 84.

167 Ronald A. Snoxall, “Obituary: The Rev. B. J. Ratcliffe, O.B.E.,” Bulletin of the Inter-Territorial Language (Swahili) Committee to the East African Dependencies 23 (June 1953): 3–4.

168 Thomas Zanzibar, “Foreword,” in A Standard Swahili-English Dictionary (Founded on Madan’s Swahili-English Dictionary), ed. Frederick Johnson (London: Oxford University Press, 1939), v.

169 “Proceedings of the Conference of Governors of British East African Territories, May 1934: Appendix II. Constitution and Functions of the Inter-Territorial Language (Swahili) Committee to the East African Dependencies,” 4.

123

170 Mbaabu, Historia ya usanifishaji wa Kiswahili, 30; Snoxall, Peripatetic Pedagogue: Some Reminiscences of R. A. Snoxall, 29.

171 Ohly, Swahili - the Diagram of Crises, 80, 87.

172 Mbaabu, Language Policy in East Africa: A Dependency Theory Perspective, 77–80.

173 Mbaabu, Historia ya usanifishaji wa Kiswahili, 78.

174 Mbaabu, Language Policy in East Africa: A Dependency Theory Perspective, 78, 80.

175 Mbaabu, Historia ya usanifishaji wa Kiswahili, 79–80.

176 Mbaabu, Language Policy in East Africa: A Dependency Theory Perspective, 79.

177 John White, “The Historical Background to National Education in Tanzania,” in Language in Tanzania, ed. Edgar C. Polomé and C. P. Hill, Ford Foundation Language Surveys (Oxford ; New York: Oxford University Press, 1980), 266–267.

178 Frederick Lugard to Donald Cameron, Governor, Tanganyika, “No. 8073/1,” 71.

179 Roy-Campbell, Empowerment through Language, 56.

180 Cameron and Dodd, Society, Schools & Progress in Tanzania, 191.

181 Gorman, “The Development of Language Policy in Kenya with Particular Reference to the Educational System,” 420–421.

182 Mazrui and Mazrui, Swahili State and Society, 47.

183 Snoxall, Peripatetic Pedagogue: Some Reminiscences of R.A. Snoxall, 27.

184 Whiteley, “The Changing Position of Swahili in East Africa,” 346.

185 Snoxall, Peripatetic Pedagogue: Some Reminiscences of R.A. Snoxall, 27–28.

186 Mbaabu, Language Policy in East Africa: A Dependency Theory Perspective, 95–101.

187 Mbaabu, Historia ya usanifishaji wa Kiswahili, 58.

188 Ali A. Mazrui, The Political Sociology of the English Language: An African Perspective (The Hague: Mouton & Co., 1975), 129–130.

189 Timothy Parsons, The African Rank-and-File: Social Implications of Colonial Military Service in the King’s African Rifles, 1902-1964, Social History of Africa Series (Portsmouth, NH : Oxford: Heinemann ; James Currey, 1999), 114.

190 Ibid., 112.

191 Ibid., 115–116.

192 Ibid., 116.

193 Mbaabu, Historia ya usanifishaji wa Kiswahili, 55.

124

194 Mbaabu, Language Policy in East Africa: A Dependency Theory Perspective, 73.

195 Parsons, The African Rank-and-File, 113.

196 Ibid., 115.

197 Chief Secretary to Governors’ Conference to Chief Secretary, Tanganyika, February 3, 1945, Tanganyika Secretariat Religion and Education Collection, AB 27060: Lingua Franca, Tanzania National Archives, Dar es Salaam, Tanzania; Acting Chief Secretary, Tanganyika, to Chief Secretary to Governors’ Conference, February 22, 1945, Tanganyika Secretariat Religion and Education Collection, AB 27060: Lingua Franca, Tanzania National Archives, Dar es Salaam, Tanzania.

198 Parsons, The African Rank-and-File, 115.

199 Mazrui, The Political Sociology of the English Language: An African Perspective, 141.

200 Parsons, The African Rank-and-File, 260.

201 Msokile, Historia na matumizi ya Kiswahili, 44.

202 Mbaabu, Historia ya usanifishaji wa Kiswahili, 58.

203 Wilfred Howell Whiteley, Swahili: The Rise of a National Language (London: Methuen, 1969), 24–25; Abdallah Khalid, The Liberation of Swahili from European Appropriation, A Handbook for African Nation-Building 2 (Nairobi: East African Literature Bureau, 1977), 131–132.

204 Khalid, The Liberation of Swahili from European Appropriation, 128–131, 156; Whiteley, Swahili, 85; Mbaabu, Historia ya usanifishaji wa Kiswahili, 38–39.

205 Khalid, The Liberation of Swahili from European Appropriation, 155–156.

206 Mbaabu, Historia ya usanifishaji wa Kiswahili, 38–39; Whiteley, Swahili, 85; Khalid, The Liberation of Swahili from European Appropriation, 156.

207 Whiteley, Swahili, 85–86.

208 Ohly, Swahili - the Diagram of Crises, 73.

209 R.A. Snoxall, “The East African Interterritorial Language (Swahili) Committee,” in Swahili Language and Society: Papers from the Workshop Held at the School of Oriental and Arican Studies in April 1982, ed. Joan Maw and David Parkin, Veröffentlichungen Der Institute Für Afrikanistik Und Ägyptologie Der Universität Wien 33 (Vienna: Afro-Pub, 1985), 21.

210 Whiteley, Swahili, 87.

211 Ohly, Swahili - the Diagram of Crises, 80.

212 Mbaabu, Historia ya usanifishaji wa Kiswahili, 30.

213 Whiteley, Swahili, 88.

214 Ohly, Swahili - the Diagram of Crises, 85.

125

215 O.J.E. Shiroya, Kenya and World War II: African Soldiers in the European War (Nairobi: Kenya Literature Bureau, 1985), 155.

216 D. Mkude, “The Fate of Standard Swahili,” in Swahili Language and Society: Papers from the Workshop Held at the School of Oriental and Arican Studies in April 1982, ed. Joan Maw and David Parkin, Veröffentlichungen Der Institute Für Afrikanistik Und Ägyptologie Der Universität Wien 33 (Vienna: Afro-Pub, 1985), 30; Mbaabu, Historia ya usanifishaji wa Kiswahili, 59; Mbaabu, Language Policy in East Africa: A Dependency Theory Perspective, 82.

217 Mbaabu, Language Policy in East Africa: A Dependency Theory Perspective, 82–83.

218 Ibid., 102–104.

219 Ibid., 83–86.

220 Mbaabu, Historia ya usanifishaji wa Kiswahili, 116–118.

221 Whiteley, “The Changing Position of Swahili in East Africa,” 349.

222 White, “The Historical Background to National Education in Tanzania,” 269.

223 Loimeier, Between Social Skills and Marketable Skills: The Politics of Islamic Education in 20th Century Zanzibar, 330–334.

224 Ingrid Detter Delupis, The East African Community and Common Market, Development Texts (London: Longman, 1970), 31–32.

225 Ibid., 36.

226 Ohly, Swahili - the Diagram of Crises, 87.

227 Whiteley, Swahili, 88.

228 Mbaabu, Historia ya usanifishaji wa Kiswahili, 78–81.

229 Ibid.

230 “The 13th Meeting of the East Africa Inter-Territorial Language Committee,” Bulletin of the Inter-Territorial Language (Swahili) Committee to the East African Dependencies 21 (1951): 18.

231 Eustard Rutalemwa Tibategeza, “Language-in-Education Planning in Tanzania: A Sociolinguistic Analysis” (PhD Dissertation, University of the Free State, 2009), 210. See 55-56 of Bulletin 21 (1951).

232 Wilfred Howell Whiteley, “Report of the Secretary to the Committee at the Fifteenth Meeting, 12.12.52,” Bulletin of the Inter-Territorial Language (Swahili) Committee to the East African Dependencies 23 (June 1953): 5.

233 Jan Blommaert, State Ideology and Language in Tanzania, 2nd ed. (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2014), 66–69.

234 Mkude, “The Fate of Standard Swahili,” 30–31.

235 Nuffield Foundation and Colonial Office, African Education: A Study of Educational Policy and Practice in British Tropical Africa (Oxford: University Press, 1953), 58.

126

236 Ibid., 185.

237 Ibid., 81.

238 Ibid.

239 Ibid.

240 Ibid., 82.

241 Quoted in Clive Whitehead, Colonial Educators: The British Indian and Colonial Education Service 1858-1983 (London: I.B.Tauris, 2003), 254.

242 Nuffield Foundation and Colonial Office, African Education: A Study of Educational Policy and Practice in British Tropical Africa, 84.

243 Ibid., 172.

244 Ibid., 178.

245 Ibid., 184.

246 Gorman, “The Development of Language Policy in Kenya with Particular Reference to the Educational System,” 412–414.

247 Mazrui, The Political Sociology of the English Language: An African Perspective, 129.

248 Ohly, Swahili - the Diagram of Crises, 88.

249 Ramadhani Stumai Kishokora Tuli, Chimbuko la Kiswahili: kukua na kuenea kwake Afrika ya Mashariki (Arusha, Tanzania: Utalii Exporters & Publications, 1985), 42–45.

250 Ibid., 42–43.

251 Mhina, Language Planning in Tanzania: “Focus on Kiswahili,” 35.

252 Mazrui and Mazrui, Swahili State and Society, 15–16.

253 Ibid., 117.

254 Mazrui, The Political Sociology of the English Language: An African Perspective, 146.

255 Hashim, Language and Collective Mobilization: The Story of Zanzibar, 183.

256 In Uganda, Kiswahili did not play a major role in the independence movements. English, Luganda, and other vernacular languages were more important.

257 Whiteley, Swahili, 82; Mbaabu, Historia ya usanifishaji wa Kiswahili, 62.

258 Secretary, “Note on the 16th Meeting of the Inter-Territorial Language Committee at Makerere College, Kampala,” Journal of the East African Swahili Committee 24 (1954): 7.

259 Mbaabu, Historia ya usanifishaji wa Kiswahili, 35.

127

260 “Notes on the 22nd Annual General Meeting,” Swahili: Journal of the East African Swahili Committee 29, no. 1 (1959): 8–9.

261 Whiteley, Swahili, 91.

262 “Notes on the 22nd Annual General Meeting,” 8–9.

263 Mbaabu, Historia ya usanifishaji wa Kiswahili, 89–90.

264 Whiteley, Swahili, 93.

265 Mhina, Language Planning in Tanzania: “Focus on Kiswahili,” 26.

266 Mbaabu, Historia ya usanifishaji wa Kiswahili, 118–119.

267 M.M. Mulokozi, “Dibaji Ya Toleo La Kwanza,” in Kamusi Ya Kiswahili-Kiingereza (Dar es Salaam: TUKI, 2001).

268 T. S. Y. Sengo, “The Archives of Kiswahili Language and Folklore,” Nordic Journal of African Studies 1, no. 2 (1992): 45.

269 Mbaabu, Language Policy in East Africa: A Dependency Theory Perspective, 221.

270 Blommaert, State Ideology and Language in Tanzania, 41–43.

271 Snoxall, Peripatetic Pedagogue: Some Reminiscences of R.A. Snoxall, 28.

272 Birgit Brock-Utne, “Education for All - in Whose Language?,” Oxford Review of Education 27, no. 1 (March 1, 2001): 122.

273 See e.g., H. R Trappes-Lomax, Ruth Mfumbwa Besha, and Y. Y Mcha, eds., Changing Language Media: Papers from the Seminar on “The Impact on the University of the Expected Change in the Medium of Instruction in the Secondary Schools” Held at the University of Dar Es Salaam, 14th-15th February, 1980 (Dar es Salaam: University of Dar es Salaam, Faculty of Arts and Social Science, 1982).

274 Only 3 of the 506 articles were predominantly in a language other than English or Kiswahili; 2 were in German, and 1 was in Italian.

275 Mbaabu, Historia ya usanifishaji wa Kiswahili.

276 Abdulla Mohamed El-Hadhramy, “Swahili Intensifiers,” Bulletin of the Inter-Territorial Language (Swahili) Committee to the East African Dependencies 13 (1939): 17–18.

277 Amour Ali Ameir, “Card Games,” Bulletin of the Inter-Territorial Language (Swahili) Committee to the East African Dependencies 19 (1945): 15–20.

278 Oswald Mhando, Bulletin of the Inter-Territorial Language (Swahili) Committee to the East African Dependencies 19 (1945): 8; S. Joel Mdundo, Bulletin of the Inter-Territorial Language (Swahili) Committee to the East African Dependencies 19 (1945): 8–9.

279 Wilfred Howell Whiteley et al., “Book Reviews,” Bulletin of the Inter-Territorial Language (Swahili) Committee to the East African Dependencies 23 (1953): 76–82.

128

280 Oswald Bernard Kopoka, “Swahili Lessons, Ernest Haddon (Book Review),” Journal of the East African Swahili Committee 26 (1956).

281 V.S. Mwanjisi, “Maisha Na Desturi Za Wanyamwezi, N.D. Yongolo (Book Review),” Journal of the East African Swahili Committee 25 (1955): 101–3; Z.M. Salim, “Habari Na Desturi Za Waribe, William Frank (Book Review),” Journal of the East African Swahili Committee 25 (1955): 103–4; Oswald Bernard Kopoka, “Maisha Ya Sameni Ole Kiv Asis Yaani, Justin Lemenye (Book Review),” Journal of the East African Swahili Committee 25 (1955): 105–6.

282 Whiteley, “The Changing Position of Swahili in East Africa,” 349.

283 “Aridhilihali Ya Jumuia Ya Taaluma Ya Kiswahili, Tanga,” Journal of the East African Swahili Committee 25 (1955): 40–43.

284 Juma Mwindadi et al., “Lectures from the Jumuia Ya Taaluma Ya KiSwahili, Tanga,” Journal of the East African Swahili Committee 28/1 (1958): 17–42.

285 M.H. Abdulaziz, “Ukumbusho Wa Marehemu Sheikh Mathias E. Mnyampala,” Swahili: Journal of the Institute of Swahili Research 39/1 and 2 (1969): 1–19.

286 M.H. Abdulaziz, “Tahariri,” Swahili: Journal of the Institute of Swahili Research 40/1 (1970): 1.

287 Ibid. “Baadhi ya wasomaji wetu wametoa maoni kwamba jina la jarida hilo liwe KISWAHILI badala ya hili la SWAHILI kwa vile Kiswahili ndilo jina la lugha hii.”

288 Mbaabu, Historia ya usanifishaji wa Kiswahili, 84; Mkude, “The Fate of Standard Swahili,” 31.

289 Ohly, Swahili - the Diagram of Crises, 86.

290 D. Mkude, “The Fate of Standard Swahili,” in Swahili Language and Society: Papers from the Workshop Held at the School of Oriental and Arican Studies in April 1982, ed. Joan Maw and David Parkin, Veröffentlichungen Der Institute Für Afrikanistik Und Ägyptologie Der Universität Wien 33 (Vienna: Afro-Pub, 1985), 32.

291 David P.B. Massamba, “Ushirikiano: Muhimili Wa TUKI Katika Kukuza Na Kuendeleza Kiswahili,” Kiswahili 68 (2005): 36.

292 M.M. Mulokozi, “Miaka 75 ya Taasisi ya Uchunguzi wa Kiswahili (1930-2005),” Kiswahili 68 (2005): 1–28.

293 Wasserman, Politics of Decolonization: Kenya Europeans and the Land Issue, 1960-1965.

294 For an overview of trends in Kiswahili, see Blommaert, State Ideology and Language in Tanzania, 52–90.

295 Whiteley, Swahili, 116.

296 Nuffield Foundation and Colonial Office, African Education: A Study of Educational Policy and Practice in British Tropical Africa (Oxford: University Press, 1953), 183.

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