The Waswahili Community Trust UK
(Wadhamini wa chama cha Waswahili)

Ethnicity

Introduction

But who are the Swahilis?

Professor Mohammed Hyder

"The most interesting thing about the Swahilis is that the world at large knows a considerable amount about them. The most unfortunate thing about the Swahilis is that in the land of their birth -- Kenya -- there is more ignorance about them than in the rest of the world put together!"

We shall start by giving a brief geography of the Swahili people, then give a slightly more detailed cultural portrayal and end with a sprinkling of Swahili poetry which will hopefully give you a greater appetite for understanding one of the major cultural forces of our native Kenya.

Who are the Bajunis?| Bajunis as sailors| Bajunis as farmers| Bajunis as fishermen| Bajunis as poets|

OF A LANGUAGE AND ITS PEOPLE

To a number of fellow-Kenyans, there are no such people as the Waswahili. The last fifty or so years of Kenyan history have, unfortunately, has seen a systematic denial of the very existence of the Swahili peoples.

So consistent has the induction of this bit of misinformation been that a couple of generations of Kenyans have grown up with completely erroneous idea that there are no such people called the WASWAHILI. Everyone accepts the existence of the language KISWAHLI but not everyone concedes the existence of the people whose mother tongue is KISWAHILI.

They call the native speakers of Luo, Wajaluo. They call the native speakers of Kikuyu, Wakikuyu. They call the native speakers of Luhya, Waluhya, Kikamba Wakamba, Kitaita Wataita, Kipokomo Wapokomo.

But they resolutely refuse to extend the same piece of plain logic to Kiswahili and the Waswahili. Kiswahili, they say, exists and is 'our own' language but it does not belong to any one people.

It belongs to all of us. When you ask him what his language is, he says it is Dhluo, Kikuyu, etc. But then, why do you call yourself Jaluo or Kikuyu, etc? Because, he says, Jaluo, Kikuyu is my mother tongue. But my mother tongue is Kiswahili. Why do you deny me my linguistic roots?

In some ways, we find some parallels between the English and the Swahilis. English, as a language, is the mother tongue first and foremost of the English. These are the natives of England. But today we can legitimately talk of the English-speaking Peoples, a phrase which was given considerable mileage by that doyen of modern English, Winston S. Churchill.

But within the English-speaking peoples, we find different peoples who could not remotely be regarded as ethnic Anglo-Saxons. North America and the Caribbeans have an interesting mixture of people who can genuinely call themselves English-speaking. Some of these are true genetic descendants of the English (from England, i.e.). Others are political rather than ethnic derivatives of the English.

Both the North Americans (United States as well as Canadians) and the Caribbeans share a common political ancestry but do not share a common genetic ancestry. And such is the power of politics that they can both be legitimately be regarded as English-speaking Peoples since they have no other mother tongues.

The conclusion from all this is this: the original speakers of a language as amother tongue are the people of that language. But in the course of historical evolution, peoples of different ethnic origins can also come to speak a language as their mother tongue without necessarily having any ethnic connection with the original people of the language.

English and Kiswahili are both languages of their original people -- the Englishand the Waswahili respectively. In the course of history, both English and Kiswahili have become vehicles of communication for a broader spectrum of people than the original native speakers have.

The interesting thing is that British colonials played a part in the spread of both English and Kiswahili. This is probably a source of some of the confusion. The Waswahili have never been a colonizing power in that they have never been documented to invade other people's lands and forcefully occupying them.

But when the British came to East Africa, they needed a vehicle for communicating with a wide array of African peoples without necessarily having to learn too many new foreign tongues.

It was the Germans in the first place and the British subsequently -- and even more vigorously -- who propagated Kiswahili in East and Central Africa as a lingua franca. Today some 50 million people of these areas alone speak Kiswahili. In the league of world languages, Kiswahili is 28th in the list of world languages in the numerical order of its speakers.

There is no language in the world without its native speaker. That is a fundamental law of socio-linguistics. No language exists without its people. The converse is not necessarily true. In general, though, any people that still exist in their native ecological surrounds have their own language.

We know of no exception to this general principle but only if the physical as well as the socio-cultural ecology remains the same. However, when abstracted from their homeland, such people may be made to abandon altogether -- in the course of several generations -- their original mother tongues in favour of an imposed or an imbibed mother tongue of the foreign area. This is particularly true of the Africans who were taken as slaves to the Caribbeans and the Americas.

There are sometimes apparent exceptions to the general rule that a people continuing to exist within their original ecological conditions maintain their mother tongue. The exceptions occur when a people become colonized by a foreign power and are forced to abandon their native languages and culture. Over many generations, the offspring of these people come to adopt the language and culture of the colonizing power at the expense of their own original tongues and culture.

Language and culture are after all vehicles of communication and livelihood. If the majority of the people one is communicating with speak a foreign tongue - the same tongue you have become more familiar with than your own native tongue - you virtually have to use that 'foreign' tongue if you are to survive and progress within the new colonized community. In other words, while the physical ecology might be the original one, the socio-cultural ecology has become radically changed.

Such has been the fate of the Amerindians or native Americans and Eskimos who have virtually been made to abandon their native tongues in favour of English because of the colonization of their lands by English-speaking and Spanish-Speaking peoples.

The aborigines of Australia and to a certain extent the Maoris have also witnessed their native tongues reduced in currency even if not completely abolished by the same colonial forces.

In Africa, however, the period of European colonization has been relatively short and there has been little in the way of linguistic supplantation to the point of the original tongues being lost altogether.

The situation in East Africa is that Kiswahili has grown as a source of enrichment but not of exclusion of native tongues

Genetic Homogeneity and Linguistic Integrity

The traditional way of defining a people is through their native tongues.Built into such a definition is an underlying assumption that a people with a given linguistic integrity also automatically have a genetic homogeneity.

This is generally but not necessarily universally true. Here again it might be helpful to look at the English. The original English as native speakers of the English language can be assumed to have had a fairly common genetic constitution. But for hundreds of years,natives of their colonies have infiltrated the English. Take Scotland and Wales and Ireland.

These are surely some of the earliest English colonies. And there are a number of native speakers of the English language that are in fact members of the Scottish, the Welsh and the Irish races.

To the African eye, the Scottish, the Welsh and the Irish look so like the English that they find some difficulty in drawing any ethnic distinctions between them. They are all white, they all have straight hair, and they all speak a form of gibberish that sounds very similar.

Come the Second World War in the wake of which people of wide ethnic derivation went to Britain to settle. First came the West Indians, later the West Africans and the members of the Indian Sub-Continent and later still Asians of East African extraction.

Today, one can find a number of native English speakers who are as black as ebony, as yellow assaffron and as brown as chocolate. They are definitely not ethnic English but they are linguistic English.

The West Indians had of course their native tongues long ago. The West Africans, the Chinese and the Asians still cling to their native tongues but there is no doubt that they will change in the course of the next few generations.

The English may have looked like being genetically homogeneous when they absorbed the Scots,the Welsh and the Irish. But they cannot by any stretch of imagination be regarded as genetically homogeneous with the absorption of the West Indians, the West Africans, the Chinese and the East Indians.

The Waswahili have witnessed a reciprocal process. The peoples who came to settle in Swahililandhave not been from Swahili colonies in foreign lands. The Waswahili have ever been a colonizing power.

But those who came into Swahililand with a view to settling here have been absorbed into Swahilisociety. Unlike the English who have been generally very resistant to inter-marriage with non-white immigrants, the Swahilis have been quite willing to marry off their daughters to immigrant peoples provided the grooms have been Muslims.

It is not an accident therefore that there have been virtually no pockets of foreign communities in Swahililand until the beginning of this century. What happened at the beginning of this century was the building of the railway from Mombasa to Kampala.

It could also be argued that the development of Kilindini harbour was also inducive to the first settlement of foreign communities among the Swahilis or more appropriately in Swahililand. Prior to that point, virtually all those who came into Swahililand were traders, missionaries and sailors.

More correctly, perhaps, they were people who were associated with Indian Ocean trade and religious pursuits. To all intents and purposes, these were men. Because the prevalent religion (indeed, probably the only world religion at that time) of the East African coast was Islam, Muslims who came to Swahililand would have no moral or religious problem of taking on a local wife.

And because they were Muslims, it was quite permissible for them to take on an extra wife if need arose during their sojourns in Africa. The result of this constant intermarriage was growth of a community of people of diverse paternal origins but of a common

In time, of course, this genetic mixture became even more complicated with backcrosses in both directions. That is to say, some of the offspring of this intermarriage would marry into the 'pure' Bantu Swahilis (if 'pure' is the right word) and others would marry into the new mixed origin Swahilis and vice versa.

Thus we see how the monsoons brought not just winds and dhows and worldly materials into Swahililand. They also brought men to Swahililand. Yes, men. That is to say members of the human race of the male gender. Virtually all those that came to settle were Muslims.

Because Islam permits men to marry up to four wives, there was nothing religiously or legally wrong for men settlers who already had wives back home to take on new wives in Swahililand. The children of these marriages grew up with Swahili as their mother tongue despite the diversity of their paternal genes.

In other words, these children had linguistic and cultural integrity but genetic diversity. Thus the Swahili peoples have lived quite happily with a genetic legacy which is a mixture of African and what we might collectively as 'Indian Ocean genes'.

Thus, you will find Malay, Iranian, Singalese, Indian, Pakistani, Afghan, Baluchi, Arab and Somali blood mixed with African blood. The African blood itself is not homogeneous since many tribesmen who sought entry into the Swahili super-tribe did so through the adoption of Islam and inter-marriage with the Swahilis.

Some of these hinterland African neo-Swahilis were the result of conversion and cultural adoption even in the absence of any inter-marriage. Nabhany divides the Swahilis into three groups: those of biparental Swahili (Bantu) extraction; those of Swahili mothers and what we have called 'Indian Ocean' fathers; and those of non-Swahili African origins who have opted to convert to the Swahili cultural life .

Nabhany (personal communication) reminds us that before the use of the term Swahili (derived from Arabic word Sawahili that means people of the coast), they were known as Wangozi and the language as Kingozi. Appendix 1 gives Nabhany's extensive classification of the Waswahili.

Honorary Waswahili