Swahili and Imperial Britain: Colonial Creation/African Appropriation

Abstract

Outside the context of the world wars, we see in this chapter how British engagement with linguistic diversity was part and parcel of its colonial project in East Africa. In time this led to the “discovery” of Swahili as a potential tool of regional control. As Joseph Errington points out in his book Linguistics in a Colonial World (2008), colonial agents turned “alien ways of speaking into objects of knowledge, so that their speakers could be made subjects of colonial power” (Linguistics in a Colonial World: A Story of Language, Meaning and Power, Blackwell, 2008, vii). We also examine how British colonial functionaries sought to reconfigure, even reinvent, Swahili, to better serve the colonial project, with the colonial education system as an important crucible. But as the chapter demonstrates, far from rejecting it as a linguistic product of colonialism, sections of the East African community appropriated it and transformed it into an instrument of resistance through political organizing, trade union mobilization, and publication of both colonial and anti-colonial periodicals.