The words in the heading
of this article were uttered by the Chairman of the Southern African
Development Community (SADC), Tanzania President Dr. John Pombe Magufuli, in
his closing speech to the 39th SADC Summit in Dar es Salaam City on Sunday,
August 18th, 2019. President
Magufuli further said that “accepting
Kiswahili as one of the official
SADC languages means a lot to
Tanzania; and is a big honour to Tanzania’s founding father, Mwalimu
Julius Nyerere, who played a very big role in the liberation
of many African countries, making it
possible for a large number of freedom fighters to be trained in Tanzania, who quickly learnt Kiswahili
and used it as their major language of communication.”
President Magufuli,
of course, gave a lot more details about what had transpired at that meeting of SADC
Heads of State and Government,
but his statement that “the
adoption of Kiswahili as one of SADC’s
official languages is a big honour to Mwalimu Nyerere” gives us Tanzanians, one additional opportunity for paying homage to the departed father of our nation, even if only in respect
of that single Kiswahili aspect, out of the many other aspects
relating to the development of our nation, for which Mwalimu Nyerere is fondly remembered. I have referred to it as ‘an additional
opportunity’ because we already have in place the traditional anniversary
commemorations that are regularly undertaken on the sad anniversary date of his
death, the 14th day of October.
It is for that reason that
I have opted to isolate this one item (out of the many
SADC Summit resolutions), for more extensive discussion in today’s article, in order to
shed more light on Mwalimu Nyerere’s
outstanding contributions to the
development of the Kiswahili language within Tanzania itself.
Mwalimu Nyerere and the
development of Kiswahili.
Mwalimu Nyerere’s
starting point in the development of the Kiswahili language inside
Tanzania, was his decision, taken soon after the achievement of the country’s
independence in December 1961; to make
Kiswahili the country’s official
language; that is to say, the language
to be used in all public business transactions, and specifically, the transaction of government business.
That decision is what made
it necessary, for example, for the National Assembly (Bunge), to also change
from English to Kiswahili, as the language of its proceedings. And, by a
strange twist of fate, it fell upon me to implement that change, which is a
pretty instructive experience that I relish to share with our readers.
It was quite a process, which involved
the setting up of an entirely new system for the preparation of Bunge Hansards
(the official records of the Bunge proceedings). Previous to that, the Bunge proceedings were
conducted only in the English language. (For
that reason, the MPs who were elected in the pre-independence elections of 1960
whose knowledge of the English language was in doubt, were required to undergo an
oral English language test, administered by the British Clerk of the National
Assembly, Mr. Geoffrey Hucks). We therefore
had a team of competent ‘shorthand writers’, also known as stenographers, who
took shorthand notes of all that was being said inside Bunge, and later went
out to transcribe their notes into typewritten scripts.
The immediate challenge
was that no shorthand characters had been developed for the Kiswahili language
at that material time; and thus, there were no trained ‘shorthand’ stenographers
available anywhere in the job market. In
these difficult circumstances, we had to embark on a completely new system
of using
‘audio-typists’, that is to say, a cadre of clerical staff who wound
take audio recordings of all that was said inside Bunge, and later
hand over the recordings to another
cadre of ‘audio typists’, who would then transcribe the recordings into
typewritten scripts.
It
took some time and money to establish this new system, but it was all done and
completed in time, which enabled us to avoid disrupting any of the scheduled
Bunge sessions.
This little story will help
to show that the SADC summit’s adoption of Kiswahili as one of its official languages,
is only the first step. Its implementation will similarly require other steps
to be taken by the SADC Secretariat, before the said decision becomes operative at SADC Summit
level.
Other efforts by Mwalimu
Nyerere to develop Kiswahili.
My own experience of
Mwalimu Nyerere’s personal endeavours
in contributing to the development of the Kiswahili language; is in respect of
two specific events, both of which I can clearly remember. The
first is in relation to his efforts to ‘teach’ Kiswahili grammar to members of
the National Executive Committee of Chama cha Mapinduzi, during the period when
he was its national Chairman. Most
probably out of ignorance, many members of that party Organ had fallen into the
bad habit of creating a non- existence plural form of the Kiswahili word “saa”
(hour), which they christened “masaa”; by saying, for example, “ilituchuka
masaa mawili kufika hapa." This tendency
frustrated Mwalimu Nyerere to the extent that, at one stage, he decided to don
his professional teacher’s hat, and came to a NEC meeting armed with a Kiswahili
Dictionary, to help him teach his audience that the word “saa” has no plural
form. Which means that one hour is “saa
moja”. And two or five hours is still “saa mbili” or “saa tano”, and never ‘masaa
mawili’ or ‘masaa matano.’
The second event is in
relation to his efforts (and successes) in demonstrating that Kiswahili is
capable of being used even in scholastic endeavours and associated achievements.
This is amply evidenced by his undertaking of the herculean tasks of
translating into Kiswahili, some of
the ancient scholastic tomes, such as
the Holy Bible’s Four Gospels (the New
Testament, which he titled Tenzi za
Biblia; plus two of
William Shakespeare’s ancient
plays, Julius Caesar; and The Merchant of Venice. Clearly, these
are pretty heavy scholarly undertakings , especially considering the fact that he carried out these
tasks during the same busy years when he had to invest most of his prime working time to the more urgent
tasks of building the foundations for the development of the new nation, which he had just successfully pulled
out of colonialism.
In
that respect, in addition to admiring his amazing energy, enthusiasm, love, and
commitment to the Kiswahili language; there are two hard and intriguing questions
which appear to need answers. They are the following: (a) Why did Mwalimu Nyerere
choose to undertake the task of translating these scholarly works into Kiswahili? (b) If we may call it a hobby, (i.e. an
activity which you do only for pleasure, when you are not working on something
else), how did he find the time for undertaking such demanding hobby
undertakings?
Mwalimu Nyerere the
person.
For the benefit of the
current young generation, it may be helpful l to give a brief description of
the personality of Mwalimu Nyerere, in order to facilitate their understanding
of the kind of person he actually was. In
the year 2012, I published a book in
Kiswahili, titled “Uongozi na Utawala wa
Mwalimu Julius Kambarage Nyerere (Nyambari Nyangwine Publishers, Dar es
Salaam), in which I presented a small
selection of tributes made by different persons, mostly foreigners who got to
know him reasonably well during his life time. I cited, for
example, a quotation from a book titled “Leadership
for Democratic Development in Tanzania”, whose author, Peter Haussler,
states that “the leadership style of Mwalimu Nyerere may also be referred to as
‘charismatic’ and ‘visionary’.
Charismatic leadership is the ability to influence followers based on supernatural gifts and attractive powers,
whereby followers just enjoy being led by the charismatic leader, because they
feel inspired, correct, and important”. Other comments on Mwalimu Nyerere’s
personal qualities include the following: “Mwalimu Nyerere was an iconic
leader, a man of principle, intelligence, and integrity. He was considered a political prophet by many,
and a man of intelligence, humour and honesty”.
There are many
more comments quoted therein about Mwalimu Nyerere’s personal leadership
qualities and characteristic; but for the purpose of this article, we will
pause there, and go back to our intriguing questions posed above. In relation to this discussion, the most relevant
question appears to be: Why did Mwalimu
Nyerere choose to translate these scholarly works into Kiswahili? My own
answer is as already stated above, that he wanted to demonstrate that Kiswahili
is quite capable of being used even for scholastic undertakings of a
professional nature. The fact that Mwalimu Nyerere was able to find enough Kiswahili
words to render more than five hundred lines of dense Shakespearian verse into
Kiswahili, is alone sufficient evidence of the expansive richness of this
language.
But
I also know, from first-hand experience, that Mwalimu was not at all in favour
of adopting Kiswahili as the language of instruction in our Institutions of
Secondary and tertiary education. I found this out when a small group of us had
been assigned the task of preparing a new policy document for adoption by the
CCM National Executive Committee at its Musoma meeting, way back in 1974.
That group included me, then
Vice Chancellor of the University of Dar es Salaam; and Reverend Simon Chiwanga,
then Minister of National Education (as it was then designated). The envisaged new policy was aimed at
restricting the system of direct entry
to the University immediately after successful completion of Form Six Secondary
education, by introducing an intervening period of two-year National Service training,
plus the acquisition of specified work experience, before qualifying for
admission to the University. Minister Chiwanga had suggested that we include in
the draft of that document, the proposal that Kiswahili be progressively
introduced as the language of instruction in our Institutions of Secondary and
tertiary education. We did that and
submitted the draft to Mwalimu Nyerere for his consideration and comments. He told us to delete that part of the draft. In his words, “we cannot avoid training our
students in English, because English is the Kiswahili of the current World”.
Second question: how did Mwalimu Nyerere find the time to
undertake such demanding hobbies? This
is indeed astonishing, given the
fact that he was at the same time heavily engaged in the more substantive tasks of building a new Tanganyika (later Tanzania) nation; through undertaking the core, day-to-day business of
running the country; plus spearheading the Pan-African efforts to
eliminate colonialism from the whole of the African continent, and to
drive out the obnoxious apartheid regime from South Africa.
This should be taken as
one good and pertinent lesson for the current leadership generation, many of
whom tend to take refuge in the false claim that they “have no time” for
reading or writing books, allegedly because they are much too busy with their
full-time leadership responsibilities!
But if Mwalimu Nyerere, with all his heavy domestic leadership duties
and responsibilities, plus those extra Pan-African engagements, could still
find time to translate those ancient Holy Bible and Shakespearean works into
Kiswahili, why should others fail, and even
succeed so easily in
getting away with it?
piomsekwa@gmail.com/0754767576.
Source: Daily News and Cde Msekwa
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