Kikuubo “free trade zone” in central Kampala, Uganda, has become a hub
for regional trade and Kiswahili is the medium of trade.
IN SUMMARY
If you enjoyed the old Tanzanian joke of Kiswahili being born in
Zanzibar, growing up in Tanganyika, dying in Kenya and being buried in
Uganda with its ghost fleeing to Congo, you may soon have to revise it
For several decades until a few years ago, if you met a smart
woman who spoke Kiswahili in Kampala, chances were that she was a lady
of the night. They reputedly picked and mastered the language in Mombasa
where they plied their trade.
Well, that was then. A smart girl who speaks
Kiswahili in Kampala today is most likely a Kenyan or Tanzanian student.
But surprise, surprise! she could as well be a Ugandan businesswoman
who has never stepped out of the country.
Such is the power of the profit motive (what Adam
Smith called the baker’s greed that guarantees us our dinner) that it
has achieved what legislation and coercion could not do — making
Ugandans voluntarily learn Kiswahili.
The regional evolution of trade has had a lot to
do with the silent lingual revolution taking place in Kampala. A walk
through the city’s bustling wholesale business hub called Kikuubo can be
quite revealing.
Here, Kiswahili is used by all traders, and
competes with Luganda for supremacy. Actually, in Kikuubo, Kiswahilli is
more than a strong added advantage, it is a necessity.
Kikuubo means ‘alley’ in Luganda and that is what
it started as during the days of economic hardship when the military
government crushed the economy by expelling the Asian business class
from the country in the 1970s.
It was the improvising Ugandan traders who started
congregating in the alley adjacent to the main bus station and Nakivubo
Stadium to buy and sell goods.
With return to normalcy and the subsequent
modernisation of the economy, the supermarket lifestyle finally came to
Kampala and has matured in the past decade or so.
Now almost all consumers get their groceries from
the supermarket. And the supermarket in turn gets its supplies direct
from different manufacturers. So the Kikuubo wholesale market was bound
to die.
It didn’t. Instead it transformed and evolved into
a very important regional trading centre. The alley has in recent years
grown to cover several streets.
The growth has not only been in terms of area
covered, but the shops therein have also been qualitatively styled up.
(And thanks to the increase in electricity supply since last year after
the commissioning of Bujagali Dam, the din of diesel generators that
used to engulf Kikuubo is no more.)
The growing stability, improved infrastructure and
revival of the East African trading bloc are helping Uganda to
re-position from lamenting over its ‘landlockedness’ to capitalising on
its ‘landlinkedness’, making Kikuubo Eastern Africa’s Dubai of sorts.
So traders in the original Kikuubo Lane and those
operating in the adjacent William Street, the nearby Kisekka, Nakivubo
and Shauri Yako markets buy merchandise from different EAC states and
supply to markets in the region.
Cereals from Uganda attract buyers from the region
to Nakivubo while hardware and manufactured domestic goods from Kenya
are collected from Kikuubo by Rwandan, Congolese, South Sudanese and of
course Ugandan dealers.
And the language that brings them all together is
Kiswahili. So the thousands of Ugandans operating in Kikuubo have no
option but to learn the language they previously despised.
If you enjoyed the old Tanzanian joke of
Kiswahilli being born in Zanzibar, growing up in Tanganyika, dying in
Kenya and being buried in Uganda with its ghost fleeing to Congo, you
may soon have to revise it for Kiswahili is slowly but surely getting
reborn in Uganda. Kampala could, in a decade, come be the resurrection
site of Kiswahili.
In the past, Kiswahili in Uganda used to be a
preserve of the armed forces. This is probably due to the fact that the
Ugandan Army was born from the Kings African Rifles which was an East
African colonial force, whose service language was Kiswahili. To date,
it is the language of the army and some senior officers speak the
language so well that even neighbours get impressed.
Many Tanzanians who hear the immediate former army
spokesman, Colonel Felix Kulaigye on the BBC Kiswahilli Service wonder
how a Ugandan can speak Kiswahili so well
