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The issue of the national language has generated a lot of controversy and debate in this country over the years.
In the government's White Paper on the Constitutional Review, Swahili was put forward as the second official language.
Swahili is widely spoken over a wide region in this part of Africa and considering the government's move towards the East African Federation, and the fact that it is the national language in both Kenya and Tanzania, it was the language that lent itself as the obvious choice over the other local languages. There are, however, a few things that should be taken into consideration before we jump on the Swahili bandwagon.
The first is that language is the receptacle of culture. In other words language is culture and culture is language. Now the language one speaks to a greater or lesser extent influences the cultural orientation of a person. Thus people in Anglophone countries like Uganda want to behave like Englishmen (or Americans by extension), dress like them, eat like them, speak like them etc.
Why, because we have in effect been transformed into black Englishmen by the fact that English, for the educated at any rate, is the major language used here.
That also affects the books we read, the music we listen to, the movies we watch, the radio and the TV programmes we tune in to. The same applies to people in Francophone countries and their desire to ape things French.
Though the question is not replacing English with Swahili but making the latter a second official language, Swahili would soon supplant English in every day usage as it is easier to learn even by the unschooled.
Being forced to assume a culture foreign to one's own is not a desirable thing and is a form of cultural slavery, but because of our colonial history and the fact that Uganda like many African countries is comprised of many ethnic groups speaking diverse languages, English was chosen as our official language.
Ideally, the best language for anyone is one's mother tongue. But much as we resent the fact, colonialism, with the attendant subjugation of indigenous cultures has been going on from the dawn of history, not only in Africa, but throughout the inhabited world.
The coming of the white man to colonise Africa in the 19th Century was just a larger manifestation of what had been going on in all the ages past and still continues today. Cultures and languages have been merging, being submerged or displaced by others either through political conquest or by more peaceful means, throughout recorded history. Indeed all cultures and races in the world without exception are products of colonialism in one way or the other.
Bearing that in mind, it is time that we accepted that the various European languages that the white man brought with him to Africa must now be considered, for all practical purposes, as "African languages."
With all the disadvantages of having to use English as our official language it has however, got some advantages.
English is spoken by many countries across the world, and has also practically become the global language. Thus knowledge of English is absolutely necessary in the modern world.
In addition, more than 50 per cent of the books in the world are in English as is 60 per cent of all the radio programmes, and more than 70 per cent of all the computer text. This makes available to us a large fund of information as English speakers, quite an advantage when one considers that in the modern world information is power.
By introducing Swahili here it is quite naturally going to orientate us to Swahili speaking lands that is to say Kenya and Tanzania, where hails the indigenous speakers of the language. Now the question is, what benefits are going to accrue to us by making that switch to Swahili? What things or what ideas are we going to copy from the Kenyans and Tanzania, seeing they are as underdeveloped as we are?
Living in Kenya some years back, I discovered that compared to his Ugandan counterpart, the average educated Kenyan is not as informed, and is more parochial in outlook. The Ugandan education system is also rated very highly. I tried to figure out why this should be until I discovered that it had something to do with the major languages spoken in the two countries, Swahili in Kenya and English in Uganda.
I found that the average Kenyan is oriented to the coast, because that is where the indigenous Swahili live, while the spiritual home of most Ugandans is the UK and other English speaking lands.
Secondly, information in Kenya had to cross a language barrier (English to Swahili) whether the information is coming in via print or electronic media, for it to reach the average man in the street.
Now since they are very few books in Swahili and there are not as many radio and TV programmes worldwide in that language, it severely limits the information that the population is exposed to. This also applied to things like fashion, music, and movies, that people in Kenya will get after they have become outdated here.
Ugandans schools were also rated higher because the perception was that students here had a better mastery of the English language at an earlier age than their Kenyan counterparts and so were able to understand better what was being taught. And it is one reason, I believe, that Ugandan schools are full of foreign students from neighbouring countries. It is a fairly simplistic view of something so complex, I must own, but it gives a rough picture.
If one wants to make a case for an indigenous language for Uganda, Luganda easily suggests itself as the language that most qualifies. It is already spoken or understood by the majority of Ugandans, unlike Swahili which in Uganda, with the exception of the armed forces and security guards, is usually only used between a group of illiterate people speaking mutually incomprehensible languages and who do not know Luganda.
It is also popular among the general populace (at least for the Bantu speakers), and more importantly because it is a Ugandan language.
Over the years many Ugandans have resisted the idea of Luganda as the national language because of perceived fears of Ganda domination, politically, culturally and economically.
I fear that bringing in Swahili is only going to make us culturally subservient to the Kenyans or Tanzanians.
For purposes of regional integration, the question of a common language for East African can be addressed by English which is already spoken by all the three countries, not to mention its international usage, and would thus serve that purpose admirably.
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