Julius Sello Malema, the founder and leader of South Africa’s third-largest political party, the Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF), in July 2022, proposed, during an interview with Standard Digital that Africa’s desire for unity could be bolstered with the adoption of a common bridge language – Kiswahili – which is already the most widely-spoken African language on the continent.
These were Malema’s words: “Swahili is the most practical language not because it’s big or it’s one of the big languages; no, it’s not, but it’s already being spoken in different countries. So, you might say Zulu is big but it’s only spoken in South Africa, but once you go with a language that is already in different countries, then you are not going to start from zero” coupled with the fact that Kiswahili even has some loanwords from other languages such as Zulu and even closely resembles others such as Shikomor (or Comorian), the official language in Comoros and spoken in Mayotte (Shimaore).
“So, we have made a call to the minister [of education], in the past, as EFF, for Swahili to be taught in schools and once we start teaching Swahili as South Africa, then we’ll be able to call on all of the African continent to start teaching Swahili; and once we’ve got a common language that we can use to communicate amongst ourselves and not use colonial languages, the unity of Africa is going to be easy”, Malema argued.
He believes a bridge language will blur the colonial lingua divisions of the continent and make Africans see themselves only as Africans. “Now, we are divided between the Francophones and the Anglophones. We are divided through colonial languages. Let’s push this language and make sure that we’ve got some starting point”.
In Malema’s view, “the most practical thing to do now – which the minister and the president should support if they are interested in uniting the African people – is to say, ‘Let’s teach Swahili and encourage other countries to start teaching Swahili”.
Swahili stands out as the most extensively spoken African language in Sub-Saharan Africa. Serving as the national language in Tanzania and Kenya, it holds significant influence across borders, resonating in Mozambique, Uganda, Rwanda, Burundi, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and the Comoros. Current approximations indicate a substantial speaker base, with around 200 million people conversing in Swahili across the region. It has a lot of loanwords from mainly Arabic as well as Portuguese, English and German.
Thanks to the efforts of the Tanzanian government, Kiswahili is now one of the three official languages (along with English and French) in the East African Community (EAC) countries, which include Burundi, Kenya, Rwanda, Tanzania, and Uganda. Swahili is also widely used in the African Great Lakes region, East and Southern Africa, and even in some parts of the DRC and the southern tip of Somalia.
Swahili is not only recognised regionally but also globally. It is one of the working languages of the African Union and the Southern African Development Community. To further promote Swahili, the East African Community established the East African Kiswahili Commission (EAKC) in 2015. This institution plays a crucial role in fostering the language’s development and usage for regional integration and sustainable development.
In recent times, countries like South Africa, Botswana, Namibia, Ethiopia, and South Sudan have introduced Swahili as a subject in schools or have plans to do so.
Recognising the growing importance of Swahili on the international stage, the United Nations declared July 7 as Swahili Language Day in 2022. This date commemorates the day Julius Nyerere adopted Swahili as a unifying language for African independence struggles.
The Journey To A United States Of Africa
The idea of a United States of Africa emanates from Marcus Garvey, who fiercely pushed for a Black renaissance of sorts by advocating a return to the motherland – Africa – by all Black people in the diaspora. He gave meaning to the concept in his 1924 poem, ‘Hail, United States of Africa’. Garvey’s idea of a federal African state influenced African fighters for independence and pan-Africanists such as Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana, Ahmed Sékou Touré of Guinea and Modiba Keita of Mali.
At a meeting in Accra, which took place from April 27 to 29, 1961, Nkrumah, Touré and Keïta signed a charter formally establishing a tripartite Union of African States. The charter came into effect upon its simultaneous publication on July 1 in the capitals of Ghana, Guinea, and Mali after the three heads of state had met at Bamako, Mali, on June 26, to examine the extent to which decisions reached at their April meeting in Accra had been implemented.
The drafting of the charter evolved out of a decision announced by the three government leaders at Conakry, Guinea, on December 24, 1960, envisioning common diplomatic representation and the creation of committees to draw up arrangements for harmonising economic and monetary policies. The Ghana–Guinea–Mali Union was birthed in 1958 with Ghana and Guinea as members of a new Union of Independent African States. Mali joined in 1961. The Union, however, disbanded in 1963.
Its legacy was largely limited to longstanding political relationships between Nkrumah (President and Prime Minister of Ghana 1957–1966), Touré (President of Guinea 1958–1984), and Keïta (President of Mali 1960–1968). The union again came into the news when Nkrumah was named as the co-president of Guinea after he was deposed as President of Ghana by a military coup in 1966. Nkrumah, a staunch Pan-Africanist, had intended the Ghana-Guinea-Mali Union as the nucleus for his oft-preached United States of Africa.
Decades later, other African icons such as Muammar Gaddafi took up the task of forging the 54-nation continent into a federal nation. “I shall continue to insist that our sovereign countries work to achieve the United States of Africa,” Gaddafi told the AU in 2009 after he was elected to chair the regional body. Gaddafi even went ahead to propose the formation of “a single African military force, a single currency and a single passport for Africans to move freely around the continent”.
Zimbabwe’s Robert Mugabe revived the idea following the killing of Gaddafi in the Battle of Sirte in October 2011. After the death of Mugabe in 2019, following his ouster through a coup d’état in 2017, that led to his resignation as president, the idea of a United States of Africa seemed to have died, until recently when it was resuscitated in the Sahel.
The military leaders of Mali, Niger and Burkina Faso, ahead of their joint announcement of a common currency, the Sahel, had revealed their intention to form a confederation with the ultimate aim of morphing into a federation à la United States of America. A confederation is a type of government made up of a league of independent nations or states in which each state is independent and has its authority and autonomy, but they come together for some sort of shared government.
The foreign ministers of the three francophone neighbours, who are part of the Alliance of Sahel States, made the recommendation on Friday, 1 December 2023. The three ministers met in Bamako for two days where they discussed how to operationalise the alliance with emphasis on the importance of diplomacy, defence and development “to consolidate political and economic integration”.
In November 2023, the economy and finance ministers of the three countries proposed the creation of a stabilisation fund, an investment bank and a committee that would study an economic and monetary union. The army heads of the three countries also signed a mutual defence pact in mid-September this year. The Liptako-Gourma Charter, named after the eponymous historical region, established the Alliance of Sahel States (AES).
Will A Common Language Do The Trick?
Language is a strong identifier and unifier. It easily makes people feel they belong to a particular group once they can communicate. It breaks down cultural, social and religious barriers instantly. With as many as between 1,000 and 2,000 languages spoken in Africa, according to the African Language Programme at Harvard, adopting one common language as a bridge would be a herculean task for a continent whose cultural diversity is so richly diverse and deeply innate. The implementation, even if the idea is accepted by the individual countries, would mean committing huge amounts of financial resources to tweak and disrupt the education curriculum of each country. And as is obvious, learning a language is not an overnight event. It’s a process that can take many years. Also, learning the same language cannot easily and automatically translate into a willingness to integrate or identify with other cultures. And then there are the myriad political hurdles that need be crossed. The continent is dotted with leaders who may not necessarily be enthused about the whole idea, as they may see it as cultural imperialist venture by their fellow Blackman. And would 54 African leaders be willing to give up their presidency with all the power and trappings that come with it, for just one president of a United States of Africa? Already, the continent is divided on colonial lingua lines – Francophone (French-speaking), Anglophone (English-speaking), Lusophone (Portuguese-speaking) and Arabophone (Arabic-speaking); and also regionally balkanised into the Arab Maghreb Union (AMU), Community of Sahel-Saharan States (CEN-SAD), Common Market for Eastern and Southern Africa (COMESA), East African Community (EAC), Economic Community of Central African States (ECCAS), Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS), Intergovernmental Authority on Development (IGAD) and Southern African Development Community (SADC). Perhaps, each of the eight regional blocs should first morph into a country so as to reduce the 54 countries to just eight before strategising to aim for a United States of Africa. Like each country, every regional bloc has its own political, cultural, and economic interests, therefore, starting with eight rather than 54 countries could lessen the complexities involved. However, with this plethora of blocs harbouring different countries of varying colonial and political histories and cultures, settling on a nucleus within each around which the other countries could collapse to form nation-states, will be a daunting task. Is Mr Malema’s proposal, no matter how idealistic and elegant it may sound, just too simplistic, or is such simplicity exactly what is needed to clear all the complex hurdles that may confront a heavy task as federalising the African continent.
