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Swahili on the Road
How did Swahili become an East African lingua franca? It was not by accident. In March 1960 Julius Nyerere – then leader of the Tanganyika African National Union (TANU) – sat down with former first lady Eleanor Roosevelt on her roundtable discussion programme Prospects of Mankind.
In March 1960 Julius Nyerere – then leader of the Tanganyika African National Union (TANU) – sat down with former first lady Eleanor Roosevelt on her roundtable discussion programme Prospects of Mankind. Starting in 1864, schools run by the Universities’ Mission to Central Africa on Zanzibar took in formerly enslaved children and produced a series of handbooks that, decades later, would be adopted by the British colonial regime as the basis of its administrative Swahili. The Kenyan-born, US-based scholar Ali Mazrui wrote an article in 1967 titled ‘Tanzaphilia’ in which he sardonically described what he regarded as the self-indulgent fascination of Western intellectuals with Tanzania and its eloquent president.
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