It was an empire united by language. It died under the boots of the barbarians in 476 AD when a Germanic tribal chief deposed the last Roman emperor. The language that bound the empire survived Rome’s destruction.
The Latin linguistic realm held together. That is why we speak today of the Latin West in a civilizational and linguistic sense. Language determines the historical evolution of civilization in a geopolitical sense as we shall see.
Today in the Ukraine, we see from the Russian perspective, a battle for the borderlands of what they call the Russian world (Russki Mir). The people of the Eastern Ukraine are battling for the right to remain part of the Russian world. A world united by language and a Eurasian culture.
One of the insurgents fighting in the East of Ukraine said we will never allow our lands to join NATO, as it will pit us against the Russian world, against our civilization and we can never allow that. For us, the use of Russian as a state language in our regions is nonnegotiable.
Today, we see the contours of an African world emerging. This is a world running along the southern regions of North Africa and dropping down the continent through what is known as Sub-Saharan Africa.
This is a world contiguously inhabited by the black peoples of Africa. The African world has had its tentacles reaching beyond the great oceans to lands where the children of African descendants who feel a spiritual and cultural connection to Africa live and work.
This emerging African world consciousness has its historical roots in the great civilization of Kemet (Ancient Egypt) and is its successor. This African world is both spatial and cultural. It occupies our minds. We belong to the African world. But there is an internal contradiction.
The Roman world was united culturally and intellectually by language. The Russian world is united culturally and intellectually by language. The African world is culturally united but intellectually disunited by language. The intellectual languages of Africa are English and French and to some extent Portuguese. None of which is African.
This raises the question, the role of language in the construction of state and civilizational identity. We will apply the lessons gleaned from the fast moving events in the Ukraine to the language issue acting as a barrier to the development of a truly independent Africa where the intellectual super structure of African thought can be imbedded in an African language which is acceptable to all.
Currently in Africa more than 2000 languages are spoken. The linguistic balkanization of the continent is distributed within and without countries. The crux of the matter is this, there will be no genuine African intellectual independence if African thought is constantly expressed in a European language like English, French, Spanish and Portuguese.
These languages are the main official languages spoken all across Africa. They are vestiges of the colonial past, the linguistic umbilical cord that still links Africa to her former colonial masters in the West.
Could there be an African language which could serve as the linguistic frame of reference in which high level intellectual thought could be expressed, and will that language be acceptable to the African peoples and serve as the linguistic base of the emerging African world?
The Swahili language is spoken by about 5 million people as their native language in eastern Africa. It is further spoken as a common lingua franca by about 150 million people in eastern and southern Africa.
Hence Swahili has 30 times more speakers than the genetic owners of the language. It is spoken in Kenya, Tanzania, Zanzibar, Uganda, Democratic Republic of Congo, Zambia, Mozambique, Malawi, Rwanda and Burundi, Somalia, and the Comoros Islands.
Swahili has enjoyed such wide distribution since it is not associated with an imperializing force and it has not been imposed by a xenophobic nationalism. It is the most widely spoken language in Sub-Saharan Africa and the second most widely understood language again in Sub-Saharan Africa.
We now propose that Swahili which is the only indigenous African language that is an official language of the African Union (AU) be adopted as the lingua franca in Africa.
The process by which that could occur could be through the establishment of Swahili language institutes in Sub-Saharan African countries. These institutes will serve as nucleation sites for the study of Swahili in the primary, secondary schools and the higher education institutions in Sub-Saharan Africa.
Gradually a new generation will grow up speaking a common lingua franca Swahili acting as the linguistic glue binding the black peoples of Africa in a common cultural and civilizational matrix called the African world. China already has Confucius Language institutes in Africa. We are far behind.
The adoption of such a language like Swahili will boost the self esteem and self confidence of Africans in the capacity of their languages to express complex ideas and processes.
We note that scientific texts and complex philosophical terms already exist in Swahili and such texts have been used in the educational systems in east Africa. This will serve as a booster to accelerate the sovereign intellectual development of Africa and hence serve as the linguistic foundation of the African World.
Can this be done? The State of Israel was established in 1948. The Jews who had come from all over the world spoke different languages. They resurrected Hebrew, a language which had not being spoken for more than 1500 years, reconstructed it. Today all in Israel speak Hebrew.
It is the year 1945, Indonesia after a bloody war of independence from Holland is declared independent by Sukarno. There are more than 350 languages and dialects spoken throughout the Indonesian archipelago.
Most Indonesians are of Malay stock. Sukarno comes to the realization that Indonesia needs a common language which will unite the various Malay people of the islands with different cultures. He gathers an international team of linguists to devise a common language.
Bahasa Indonesia was born out of that effort. The language Bahasa Indonesia was based on Malay. Most Indonesians spoke it by the early 1970s. They did not lose their native languages. They still spoke it and Bahasa Indonesia. It had taken almost 25 years. But it was done.
Swahili is not a dead language that needs to be resurrected. It is not a language that needs to created. It already exists and is spoken by more than 150 million Africans. It can be done. Swahili is the logical choice. Most of the languages spoken in Africa are Bantu. Swahili is a Bantu language.
We all can learn and speak Swahili.
