Table Of ContentState Ideology and Language in Tanzania
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State Ideology and Language
in Tanzania
Second and Revised Edition
Jan Blommaert
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© Jan Blommaert, 1999, 2014
Edinburgh University Press Ltd
Te Tun – Holyrood Road
12(2f) Jackson’s Entry
Edinburgh EH8 8PJ
www.euppublishing.com
First edition published by Rudiger Koeppe in 1999.
Typeset in 10/12pt Adobe Garamond by
Servis Filmsetting Ltd, Stockport, Cheshire,
and printed and bound in Great Britain by
CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon CR0 4YY
A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 978 0 7486 7579 1 (hardback)
ISBN 978 0 7486 7581 4 (webready PDF)
ISBN 978 0 7486 7580 7 (paperback)
ISBN 978 0 7486 7583 8 (epub)
Te right of Jan Blommaert to be identifed as Author of this work has been
asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988,
and the Copyright and Related Rights Regulations 2003 (SI No. 2498).
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Contents
List of fgures vii
Preface to the second edition viii
Preface to the frst edition xi
1 Introduction 1
1.1 Homogenisation from above 3
1.2 Diversifcation from below 6
1.3 Te organisation of the book 8
1.4 Note 10
2 Te empirical study of an African ideology 11
2.1 A laboratory of political ideologies 11
2.2 African Socialism 14
2.3 Ideology 18
2.4 Concluding remarks 20
Part 1 Swahili and the state: the macropolitics of language
3 Te cultural philosophy of Ujamaa 25
3.1 Introduction 25
3.2 Socialism or nationalism? 27
3.3 Te national culture 32
3.4 Ujamaa and Swahili 41
3.5 Ideological leadership: intellectuals and society 43
3.6 Concluding remarks 49
3.7 Notes 51
4 Ujamaa linguistics 52
4.1 Introduction 52
4.2 A brief history of Swahili language policy and planning 53
4.3 Continuity in linguistic research: the colonial legacy 65
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vi State Ideology and Language in Tanzania
4.4 Te guiding metaphors: development and modernisation 71
4.5 Te problem of identity: the creation of the new Waswahili 78
4.6 Discussion: politics and linguistics 84
4.7 Notes 89
5 Ujamaa literature: the politics of shape, style and topic 91
5.1 Introduction 91
5.2 Ujamaa and Swahili literature 92
5.3 Ujamaa literature 93
5.4 Ujamaa as a model for writing about society: a case study 99
5.5 Concluding remarks 103
5.6 Notes 105
Part 2 Swahili and society: the micropolitics of register and repertoire
6 Early fragmentation: Campus Swahili 109
6.1 Introduction 109
6.2 From languages to repertoires 110
6.3 Campus Swahili 111
6.4 English in Dar Imenihadaa 116
6.5 A fragmented sociolinguistic system 121
6.6 Conclusion: the failure of a language ideology 123
6.7 Notes 125
7 Enregistering the globalised nation 126
7.1 A changed environment 126
7.2 Visions and missions 129
7.3 Intanet Bomba 133
7.4 Tanzanians @ Facebook 141
7.5 Who is the Tanzanian now? 146
7.6 Notes 149
8 Conclusions 150
8.1 Notes 155
References 156
Index 165
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Figures
1 Te vision and mission of the Ministry of Energy and Minerals, Samora
Street 130
2 Wajanja wa kuperuzi (‘expert Internet surfers’) 136
3 Epiq Nation Moto 137
4 Advertisements in Mikocheni village 139
5 Mikocheni village, detail 140
6 Funny animals on Tanzanian Facebook 144
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Preface to the second edition
State Ideology and Language in Tanzania appeared in its frst edition in 1999 and
summarised research carried out since 1985. Tat start 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. Te 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 disconti-
nuity. While for a time Tanzania became 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), pro-
vided the supreme leadership of the country until the day of writing: Mwinyi was
succeeded by Mkapa and then by Kikwete – all of them CCM.
Te frst edition of this book was driven by a desire to document what I consid-
ered (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. Tis 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 it – to varying degrees of skill and
fuency – part of almost every Tanzanian’s repertoire. Te 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 recognised in Tanzania itself. As I will describe in this book, the overwhelm-
ing 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
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Preface to the second edition ix
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.
Tis curious paradox led me to investigate the phenomenon, and pretty soon
I realised that the contradiction was a language-ideological efect. While the facts
on the ground pointed towards massive success, the particular ideological imagina-
tion 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 to the construction of social, cultural
and political homogeneity in the country. Evidently, this was not to happen – and
this is why language planners never stopped proclaiming the failure of the political
Swahili project.
Tis was easy enough to observe. As I said, my arrival in Tanzania as a researcher
coincided with the formal termination of Ujamaa, and in the following years I
witnessed some of the changes in the country frst-hand. I witnessed the birth of
new political parties and movement, of new entrepreneurial classes and, eventually,
a new middle class, of new forms of popular culture rejecting the mantras of social-
ism, of new forms of scholarship and debate. Well, all of this suddenly very visible
sociocultural and political diversity expressed itself in Swahili – in a range of varieties
of Swahili, many of them innovative and creative and all of them testifying to the
intense dynamics of language, culture and society in the country. What was thus
seen as evidence of the failure of Ujamaa in the feld of language was in actual fact
hard evidence of its lasting success.
For me, Tanzania thus became a superb case through which some perennial
problems of language planning could be exposed and explained, notably some of
the language ideologies that tend to dominate language planning till this day: the
assumption that linguistic engineering stands in a direct relationship with social
transformation, the assumption that ‘language’ was the key concept in all of this, the
assumption of ideally monolingual societies and so on; the chapters in this book will
engage at length with these language-ideological assumptions. Tese assumptions
obscured several critical processes in the reality of sociolinguistic life: that not ‘lan-
guage’ but ‘register’ is the ‘stuf’, so to speak, of language in society; that language is
only to a certain extent ‘makeable’; that as soon as a language is distributed through-
out a large number of users it will tend to explode into numerous new sub-varieties,
and so on. Above all, the language-ideological fundamentals of language planning
tend to obscure the duty of researchers to actually see and interpret what goes on –
how real language is used by real people in real social environments.
While the 1999 edition of this book was welcomed by scholars as a useful contri-
bution to the historiography of Swahili in postcolonial Tanzania and as an example
of perhaps wider relevance, elucidating some key points in the postcolonial story
of languages elsewhere, I did not think that the points made were spelt out with
adequate clarity. I therefore jumped at the opportunity ofered to me by Edinburgh
University Press to quite thoroughly revise the 1999 edition and incorporate both
new theoretical and methodological observations and new empirical material
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x State Ideology and Language in Tanzania
extending the historical coverage of the book to include very recent phenomena.
Tese recent phenomena were collected during a research stay in Dar es Salaam in
September 2012, and I am immensely grateful to my old Tanzanian friends and
colleagues – mentioned in the preface to the 1999 edition – for welcoming me once
again and bombarding me with refections on the continuities and discontinuities in
the Tanzanian sociolinguistic landscape. Te fact that my good friend Koen Adam,
Ambassador of Belgium in Tanzania, ofered to host me provided the most gener-
ous, comfortable and efective working environment I have ever had there, and I am
deeply grateful to Koen, Els, Maarten and Jonathan for their hospitality and care
while I was doing my work there.
While there, I realised that my interest in the socio-political history of Swahili
had, if anything, become even deeper and more intense than before. To a large
extent, this is the result of activities over the past decade, always performed in collab-
oration with some exceptional scholars. I am thinking of Michael Silverstein, Susan
Gal, Salikoko Mufwene and Rob Moore in Chicago; of Gunther Kress, David Block
and Norbert Pachler in London; of Christopher Stroud, Mastin Prinsloo, Anna
Deumert, Quentin Williams and Charlyn Dyers in Cape Town; of my friends in
the Max Planck Sociolinguistic Diversity Working Group, Karel Arnaut, David
Parkin, Steve Vertovec, Ben Rampton, Jens-Normann Jørgensen, Sirpa Leppanen,
Adrian Blackledge, Angela Creese and their many stellar collaborators; and of people
such as Alastair Pennycook, Piet Van Avermaet, Suresh Canagarajah, Stephen May,
Gao Yihong, Lionel Wee, Christina Higgins, Sabrina Billings and many others on
the conference circuit. My own team in Tilburg, of course, provided me with the
most stimulating and creative environment, and I must thank Sjaak Kroon, Odile
Heynders, Ad Backus, Jeanne Kurvers, Piia Varis, Max Spotti, Sanna Lehtonen, Fie
Velghe, Dong Jie, Caixia Du, Xuan Wang, Jos Swanenberg, Kutlay Yağmur and
the others for keeping me in good shape over the past few years and for feeding me
continuously with superb data and ideas from various parts of the world. And there
would have been no book without Karin Berkhout’s titanic editorial eforts to turn
a textual nightmare into a decent manuscript.
Finally, I express my thanks and appreciation to Dr Rudiger Koeppe of Rudiger
Koeppe Verlag, the publisher of the 1999 edition, for releasing the copyright to
the book and enabling me to engage with this subject in new ways – of which I
hope that they will spark for my readers the fascination with this subject that I have
entertained for almost three decades.
Jan Blommaert
Antwerp and Dar es Salaam
September 2013
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