East Africa - An Overview
In
recent years a vast body of knowledge
about Africa has emerged. There are
a great many languages, cultures,
and histories on the African continent,
and people who wish to penetrate this
large body of learning and information
- and gain a cohesive sense of African
peoples, their arts, and their histories
- are faced with a bewildering task.
This Living Encyclopedia of East Africa
is intended to provide information
on the countries that primarily make
up Swahili-speaking region of East
Africa in a concise form. These countries
are Kenya,
Tanzania,
Uganda, Rwanda,
and Burundi.
The Swahili-speaking area also extends
into southern Somalia,
eastern Democratic
Republic of Congo, and parts of
northern Mozambique
and the Comoros
Islands. We have chosen the East
Africa region for a number of reasons:
1. Geographically, the region is well
known for its magnificent physical
features. The two highest mountains
in Africa are located here: Mount
Kilimanjaro and Mount
Kenya. The River
Nile, the longest river in Africa
has its source from Africa's biggest
lake, Lake
Nyanza also known as Lake Victoria.
The region is also famous for its
game reserves located at the Serengeti
and Ngorongoro
crater in Tanzania and Masai
Mara in Kenya. East Africa's governments
recognize the value of their natural
resources and have set aside large
areas as national parks. Twenty-five
percent of Tanzania's land is designated
as national parks or game reserves.
The largest, Selous
Reserve, is larger than the country
of Denmark. 2. East Africa is at the
center of speculation over human origins.
Anthropologists like Louis
S. B and Mary Leakey have indicated
that human ancestors may have lived
in Tanzania's Olduvai
Gorge at the edge of the Great
Rift Valley, over two million
years ago. 3. The region is also famous
for the research on Chimpanzees by
Jane
Goodall. Jane Goodall conducted
over thirty years of research in Tanzania
and established a primatology research
center known as the Gombe Stream Research
Center at the shore of Lake
Tanganyika in Tanzania. 4. Politically,
the region is famous for its hospitality
to refugees and other politically
dispossessed peoples. It was known
for its involvement in the fight against
apartheid in South Africa and for
providing refugee facilities for freedom
fighters from Zimbabwe, South Africa,
Mozambique, and Angola. More recently
it has befriended refugees from Rwanda,
the Sudan, and Somalia. The region
also is known for its political innovations.
African socialism Ujamaa as advocated
by Mwalimu
Nyerere, the first president of
Tanzania, is a policy that attracted
attention of people world wide. Pre-colonial
East Africa was important politically
in that several large kingdoms dominated
regional affairs. Two of them were
the Kingdom of Uganda, which now constitutes
the core of contemporary Uganda, and
the Kingdom of Rwanda, which also
is the core of a modern nation-state.
The coastal regions were dotted with
powerful city-states--settlements
that brokered trade between the interior
and the Indian Ocean. 5. Historically,
East Africa was known for the extensive
trade networks that penetrated the
region and linked together people
of various backgrounds, reaching deep
into the interior of Central Africa
and eastward across ocean as far as
India. At various periods the valued
trade items were ivory, gold, slaves,
beads, salt, and foodstuffs, especially
spices grown in Zanzibar. Indian Ocean
trade meant that Swahili and Arabic-speaking
merchants were interacting for at
least 1,000 years, and eventually
brought Islam to the shores of East
Africa. Traditional economies were
based on hunting, farming, animal
herding, and even fishing in coastal
areas. Iron-making was practiced as
early as 500 B.C. Local textile manufacture,
using cotton, began during the 11th
century. 6. In terms of language,
East Africa is united by the common
lingua franca known as Swahili. This
language is both the native tongue
of a specific people - "the Swahili"
- and a lingua franca spoken by more
than 50 million people throughout
the region. Swahili is one the few
lingua francas among the more than
1,000 languages spoken on the African
continent, and therefore one of the
most widely used. Thus, although "Swahili"
denotes a specific people, a cultural
way of life, a literature, and a geographical
region, its status as a lingua franca
means that it is used in many communities
that embrace diverse life styles,
economic and aesthetic practices,
religions and ideologies. Within the
linguistic rubric of Swahili, an entire
region - a diverse and complex spectrum
of landscapes, peoples and world views
- is accessible. In the United States,
Swahili is classified among the less
commonly taught foreign languages.
Such languages are rarely taught below
college level, Swahili being the rare
exception. It is one of the most accessible
African languages in terms of difficult
of learning and availability of learning
resources. A Swahili
Dictionary, Swahili
Listserv, and Swahili
Club (interaction in real time)
exist on the Internet; videotapes,
illustrated story books, visual aids,
supplementary materials for computer-assisted
instruction, and radio
programs on the internet are available.
Swahili is already used in African-American
communities during their annual celebration
of Kwanzaa,
a festival which uses Swahili words
and expressions. Language is one of
the best lenses through which to view
the life ways, cultures and practices
of other peoples. Languages are not
simple communicative systems; they
are cultural phenomena in and of themselves
and at the same time mediators of
other forms of culture. As such they
serve as powerful tools for understanding
the human groups that speak them.
For example, the basic greetings in
Swahili are more complex and time
consuming than greetings in most European
languages. They demonstrate the importance
of human interaction and mutual respect
in Swahili-speaking societies. The
identification of loan-words (Arabic,
English, neighboring African languages,
etc.) in Swahili also shows the importance
of history: trade, conquest, religious
movements, and global currents in
the region. While the exploration
of Swahili history and culture is
important in an of itself, the contexts
in which Swahili is used as a second
and third (and fourth ...) language
are also important. For most of its
non-native speakers, Swahili is a
language not of tradition but of modernity.
It is used in situations of migration
and urbanization, and it is spoken
to facilitate communication with other
ethnic and national groups. An examination
of the dynamic and diverse situations
in which Swahili is spoken as a lingua
franca serves as an excellent introduction
to contemporary Africa and goes a
long way toward dispelling essentialist
myths about a perpetually rural and
traditional Africa.
Resources researched
by
Abdelaziz Marhoum, & David A. Samper
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