Habari ya maisha?
on It began in Africa (Kenya), 20/Jul/2011 10:56, 34 days ago
Ninaendelea kusoma Kiswahili na ninajaribu kukariri.That I means 'I am going on studying Kiswahili and I try to practise.' Well, at least I think it does. I'm not a natural at languages (I can order beer, wine and coffee in a few European languages, and luckily it turns out that 'Bloody Mary' means the same thing wherever you go). So I have had to work quite hard to build my confidence with Kiwsahili.I'm having lessons every week with the lovelyLucy Otieno, who is without a doubt the best language teacher I have ever had (although I think my GCSE Spanish teacher experienced some kind of nervous breakdown, so the bar is admittedly not high). She has been great at helping to build the structure of Kiswahili for us, which is based on verb stems, joined to a series of suffixes and prefixes to denote subject, tense, object and so on. We've recently reached the point where we are spending more time on conversation ('Habari ya maisha?', or 'how is your life?'). This part is a lot of fun and we are all enjoying fumbling through sentences while Lucy nods encouragingly.Learning Kiswahili has not just had practical benefits; it helps in trying to understand why Kenyan's communicate and interact with each other in particular ways. In general Kiswahili uses far more passive constructions than English, so "I broke the cup" becomes "the cup it has become broken". Avoiding attributing blame is very important. I also recently found out that there are no words in Kiswahili for "bored" or "interested"; that you can say "I have become late" but not that "Iamlate"; and that there is no way to say "I am early", just that "the time is early". Frankly, that explains a lot about meetings and workshops.Embarrassingly for a poor linguist like me, most Kenyans actually speak at least three languages: their mother tongue (one of Kenya's 42 tribal languages), Kiswahili (and/or Sheng, a kind of slang used by young people in Nairobi) and English. It means that whenever I travel up-country and try out my ropey Swahili, some bright spark always says: "Ai, that is nice! You are learning Swahili? But why are you not speaking Kikuyu/ Luo/ Luhya/ Maasai etc etc?". They are hard task masters!Kenya's 42 TribesPeople will tend to use these different languages for different contexts, so might speak their mother tongue when they visit their parents up-country, speak Kiswahili or Sheng with their mates in the pub, and speak and write in English at work.Kiswahili acts as a kind of lingua franca to enable all Kenya's different peoples to communicate, and is also psychologically important as a move away from English, the language of white colonisers (although somewhat ironically, it actually originates from Arabic and the inland Bantu languages, and emerged on the coast of Eastern Africa where Arab slave traders operated and settled for many centuries).As Kenya's population shifts to urban environments cultural mixing is becoming more commonplace, and marriages across tribal boundaries are emerging. One of my colleagues has no mother tongue, because her parents were from different tribes and so had to communicate with one another in Kiswahili. Her own children have also then grown up without a mother tongue.In a country where tribal conflict is still a very raw topic Kiswahili provides an important trans-cultural bridge and, whatever the disappointment of my colleagues, I will steadfastly refuse to learn any other language. When I first arrived in Kenya and visited a small town just outside Nairobi one girl asked me: "What is your favourite tribe?" The best way I can think of to demonstrate that I have no favourite tribe is to speak Kiswahili.