State Ideology and Language in Tanzania

Abstract

date is relevant: I was in Tanzania when Julius Nyerere stepped down voluntarily as President of Tanzania and handed the State House over to his successor, Ali Hassan Mwinyi. The new President promptly signed an agreement with the International Monetary Fund, thus terminating two decades of Ujamaa in his country and turning Tanzania into a free-market economy and, eventually, a nominal multiparty democracy. Nominal, because in both cases the post-1985 period showed continuity rather than discontinuity. While Tanzania became for a while a Bonanza for foreign investors, the social and economic structure of the country did not change much; and in politics, the ruling party of Nyerere's one-party state, the Chama cha Mapinduzi (CCM), provided the supreme leadership of the country until the day of writing: Mwinyi was succeeded by Mkapa and then by Kikwete -all of them CCM.The book I wrote in 1999 was driven by a desire to document what I considered and still consider to be a curious but telling case of language planning. What happened in Tanzania since Independence, and certainly since the introduction of a formal model of Ujamaa in 1967, was an outstanding case of linguistic hegemony. It is a well-weathered sociolinguistic fact that Tanzania is exceptional in Africa because of the nationwide predominance of one language, Swahili. This fortuitous situation emerged because of reasons to be explained in this book, the most important of which was Ujamaa politics. Swahili became absorbed into the nation building drive caused by Ujamaa, and its emblematic role as the language that incorporated and articulated Independence and, later, the socialist revolution, pushed Swahili into the most remote parts of the country and made itto varying degrees of skill and fluency -part of almost every Tanzanian's repertoire. The story of Swahili is a story of an overwhelming political-ideological success.What is less well known in sociolinguistic circles is that this success was in actual fact not recognized in Tanzania itself. As I will describe in the chapters of this book, the overwhelming success of Swahili as a language of the nation-state was quite systematically accompanied by an elaborate culture of complaints, in which linguists, intellectuals and politicians alike presented the case for Swahili as a failure and a headache. As soon as I set foot in Tanzania and expressed an interest in the predicament of Swahili, I was deeply exposed to this discourse of failure, expressed by people whose language repertoires in the meantime displayed the deep and lasting traces of the success of Swahili.This curious paradox led me to investigate the phenomenon, and pretty soon I realized that the contradiction was a language-ideological effect. While the facts on the ground pointed towards massive success, the particular ideological imagination in which Swahili was captured -it ought to be the language of the socialist revolution -made assessments of success subject to impossible demands: the spread of a uniform language should have contributed...

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