We all know the adorable story of first generation immigrant Mom who learns English by watching Sesame Street. Well, there is a new generation of people learning English by watching HBO apparently. We were taking our Swahili lesson this afternoon in a bar on the beach. There are a ton of locals about and we met many. Our teacher is from the West but has been in Tanzania since 1988. He knows everyone at the bar. One in particular met our greeting with “hey, motherfucker”. Then our teacher explained that he had learned English from watching American tv (side note: at least before 1995, when average folk couldn't get a tv, the kids weren't walking around with their "pants on the ground").
The language class was good. Soon after I used my first full sentence on an unsuspecting local. She laughed but understood. I’m so money and I don’t even know it. And the bill came. Which is what I asked for, I think. Ninaomba bili. Bili is one of those words that arrived late to the language. Like "everybody's working for the wikendi" (hint: week is wiki).
Since we had our class at the beach I noticed that even though there where many locals frolicking in the surf none were pulling any round-off, cartwheel full back flip madness like they were in Stone Town. In Stone Town, the kids were doing this in the hour before sunset (I cringed at every wrench). Now, it wasn’t before sunset when we had our lesson, so maybe they sparked this here in Dar. I will have to check if they do it here or not. If not, why not. Our Swahili teacher will know.
Also, we got some cultural background at our lesson (I had heard part of this before). The Tanzanians put family first, long before country but not tribe at all. Other Africans put family then tribe then country. Tanzanians don’t have much bond to their tribes anymore. When the first, and immensely popular leader, Nyerere came to power in the 1960’s he was a communist idealogue. One of the policies that he implemented completely devastated the economy. He forced most Tanzanians to move to small, rural communities that we’re not based on the traditional lands of the tribes. The creation of these artificial communities made the economy struggle but it also removed the tribal loyalties and rivalries that have so harmed other African nations (like all of them surrounding Tanzania). Rather than tribal languages, the official language was Swahili. And while you could speak your tribal language in your home, it was illegal to speak it in public. Further, because the economy was so terrible, it built a common bond in these newly created communities that had been thrown together.
Of course, if none of the above is accurate, well, I'm not really going to look it up. I'm just repeating what I'm told.
usiku mwema
3 comments:
It's very interesting. Did the breakdown of tribe facilitate family breakdown? Or, rather, the formation of national loyalties in its place? And have you read Benedict Anderson's Imagined Communities? Not that it mentions Tanzania at all, but what you describe made me remember it.
I don't think the family broke down at all. The family is by far the most strong with national loyalties far behind. But in most African nations the tribe commands people's loyalties more strongly than the nation. That has been avoided in Tanzania so they have also avoided the tragedies like the Rwandan genocide.
Family and nation don't tend to conflict, maybe, the way that tribe and nation so often do... or not in the same ways? Don't know. Two (conflicting) views on the establishment of national loyalties: on one side, that they are exclusive -- drawing lines to keep people out. On the other, that they are inclusive -- drawing lines to join people together (like tribes?). I've never seen why both can't be perfectly true; surely nations, if not states, tend to occur organically and through different trajectories, right?
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