Daniela Waldburger
Universität Wien, Austria

Swahili in Eastern Congo – from a dominated to a dominating language or vice versa?

Keywords: Lubumbashi Swahili, Eastern Congo, language ideology, language and politics

In this paper I will address the topic of how the change of political regimes did have an impact on the role and actual use of Swahili in the Eastern Congo region, mainly Lubumbashi until today. Nowadays Swahili is one of the four national languages in the DR Congo, among the others Kikongo, Lingala and Tshiluba, while French is the official language.

After independence of the Congo from Belgium in 1960 it was especially Mobutu Sese Seko, who – during his 32 years of dictatorship from 1965 to 1997 – pursued a language policy which was based on the idea of “Authenticité” (e.g. Blommaert 2013; Bokamba 1976; Mazrui/Mazrui 1995), with a strong preference of Lingala, the language of his region of origin. Nevertheless, beside French, of one the official languages (during most of the times), in the Eastern parts of the Congo, mainly in the mining regions of Katanga and its capital city Lubumbashi, Swahili has been existing since a long time and it had been spoken in the region of Katanga at least since the arrival of the Arabs. It had been equally useful for European traders, missionaries and "explorers". (see e.g. Fabian 1983) The variety which became the dominant means of wider communication in the first quarter of the 20th century was a kind of up-country Swahili, different from the coastal varieties which later became the basis for a (British controlled) "standard" variety. It was spoken (written, codified, thought) depending on the language-user's respective competence. As a result of the specific multilingual situation, the applied colonial and postcolonial politics, the fast growth of the cities, and the high rate of immigration and emigration a creolized central variety/central varieties of Lubumbashi Swahili, a "broken" variety of Lubumbashi Swahili or up-country Swahili, and lexical borrowing from French and Swahili (and also from other Bantu languages) or language switch, and transfer of syntactic structures from "Standard Swahili" to Lubumbashi Swahili emerged as individual and spontaneous phenomena. These cases of interference were often caused by the intention of the speaker to use a more highly valued language variety. Fabian (1986) - referring to the different role of Lingala and Swahili - points out: "Swahili as spoken in Katanga was a symbol of regionalism, even for those colonials who spoke it badly." The status of Swahili changed several times from being a dominating or dominated language, nevertheless, it is used in the region of Katanga since a very long time as a “symbole du régonialisme katangais” (Ferrari/Kalunga/Mulumbwa 2014: 107) especially because the immigrants and their descendants (who lost their parents’ language(s)) and are sometimes called “les sans-ethnie”) share only one langue, Swahili in Lubumbashi (and Lingala in Kinshasa). Swahili in Eastern Congo, mainly in the area of Lubumbashi, always continued to be used, simply under different circumstances, independent from the actual status because “Languages do not always change spontaneously, and neither do they always change according to established laws or regularities.” (Blommaert 2013: 10)

Based on an analysis of published newspapers, magazines, comments of readers, pictures, and narrations of witnesses of that time period I will illustrate how the role of Swahili changed during the past decades, especially before and after Mobutu Sese Seko and I will try to give a brief overview of its current use in Lubumbashi.

References

Blommaert, Jan. 2013. State Ideology and Language in Tanzania. Second and revised edition. Tilburg Papers in Culture Studies, Vol. 80. Tilburg University.

Bokamba, E.G. 1976. Authenticity and the choice of a national language: the case of Zaire. Studies in the Linguistic Sciences, Vol. 6, No. 2. pp. 23-64.

Fabian, Johannes. 1983. Missions and the colonization of African languages: Developments in the former Belgian Congo. Canadian Journal of African Studies, Vol. 17, pp. 165–87.

Fabian, Johannes. 1986. Language and Colonial Power. Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press.

Ferrari, Aurélia/Kalunga, Marcel/Mulumbwa, Georges. 2014. Le Swahili de Lubumbashi. Paris: Karthala.

Mazrui, Ali Al'Amin/Mazrui, Alamin M. 1995. Swahili State and Society: The Political Economy of an African Language. East African Publishers.