KiSwahili

Because my mother went back to working for the Tanganyika government as soon as possible after I was born, I was entrusted during her working hours to an ayah, Fatuma, who, in due course, was also given my younger brother to look after.

There seemed to be an unwritten rule in East Africa that one communicated with the servants in KiSwahili, the lingua franca of Eastern Africa. The use of the local language wasn't general in British colonies: in Rhodesia we communicated with our servant, Titus, in English.

As a result, my brother and I learnt the language very quickly, and I do wonder whether, at times, because we spent so much of our waking hours with Fatuma, our KiSwahili was better than our English.

As I grew up, and after we left Fatuma in Dar-es-Salaam when we moved to Kenya, I kept up my KiSwahili through conversations with our servants, but things started to deteriorate when I was sent 'home' to school in England, with the result that I only used the language in the eight week summer holidays. 

That said, KiSwahili did pop up at odd moments, the worst being in French lessons where I was constantly inserting KiSwahili words where I meant a French word.

KiSwahili has in common with English an ability to be flexible and to absorb new words, but its main strength is in the simplicity - certainly compared to English - of its grammar. Not that we bothered too much about KiSwahili's grammar when we were using it: the language we spoke day-to-day was called Kitchen Swahili which, while mangling the rules of its grammar, was nevertheless a very effective means of communication. 

The only person who spoke grammatically correct Kiswahili was my father, who attended KiSwahili classes when he first moved to East Africa. We always maintained that his KiSwahili was so perfect that no-one understood it.

The last time I spoke KiSwahili was on our three visits, as tourists, to Tanzania in the early 2010s. Before I went, I bought books and worked hard to repair the damage the decades had done.

I did have some conversations in KiSwahili but I struggled - and of course many of the guides and waiters and others one came across preferred to speak English.