ABSTRACT
F e w people would deny the importance of language in the recent history of East Africa, but fewer still have probed the nature of this importance in any detail. The reasons are not difficult to discover: language has not played the
dramatic and dominant role in the rise of East African nation alism of the kind that captured the attention of historians of nineteenth-century Europe ; the triumphant emergence of Czech, Hungarian, or Finnish finds no parallels in East Africa.1 Here, language plays a more elusive role, being one of a num ber of variables and not easily isolable as the critical variable in any given situation. For this there are again a number of reasons. In the countries of Uganda, Kenya, and the United Republic of Tanzania, with a total population of around 26 million, more than 160 languages are spoken. A majority of these are, it is true, Bantu languages, with a range of relation ship to one another probably comparable to that in other language families, e.g. that of French, Portuguese, Spanish, Italian, and Roumanian to one another, but there are, addition ally, important groups of quite different Nilotic and Cushitic languages, especially in Kenya and Uganda. None of these languages is spoken as a first2 language by many more than a million speakers, and only a handful of languages (Sukuma/ Nyamwezi, Kikuyu, Luo, Kamba(?), Ganda) are spoken by even this number of speakers,3 though a majority among
the population probably ‘speak5 two of these languages and an increasing minority have some command of English. Swahili, on the other hand, is spoken as a second language by per haps ten million speakers, mainly in Kenya and Tanzania, after its spread inland from the coast during the nineteenth century. Thus, while each of these countries shares the same general problems as multilingual states elsewhere on the conti nent and Asia,4 there is no question here of any of these small language units being coterminous with a viable political unit. Yet, if a Biafran situation is unlikely, there are real dangers that progressively greater recognition of regional languages could lead also to progressively greater demands for forms of political decentralization of an uneconomic and impracticable nature. It happened in colonial times and it could happen again, e.g. the Rwenzururu movement among the Konzo of western Uganda (infra, p. 121). Not unnaturally, Govern ments view with suspicion any undue interest in local languages as being likely to encourage political as well as linguistic frag mentation. In such cases it matters little whether the fragments are viable or not; they constitute a threat to the effective authority of the central Government.
