How Kiswahili dying in Kenya and being buried in Uganda.

 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