Learning Swahili

If my father set about doing something, he did it properly. So, when he arrived in East Africa from Port Sudan and decided he ought to learn Swahili, the lingua franca of East Africa and beyond, he went to classes and bought some books....

....into the front of which he wrote his signature, the date and where he bought it - something I used to do with all my books.

The two brown books are very comprehensive dictionaries and the result of the collaboration of a large number of people many of whom came from the churches which had established themselves in East Africa - the foreword is by the Anglican bishop of Zanzibar. They were first published in 1939.

Both on a separate sheet at the front, and in his preface, the compiler, Frederick Johnson, paid tribute to three people. Krapf was a German missionary and explorer who was the first European to see both Mount Kenya and Mount Kilimanjaro. Although of Lutheran background, he is credited as one of the founders of the Anglican church in Kenya. Madan was a linguist and traveller who worked with Bishop Steere in Zanzibar on Swahili dictionaries and grammars.

The green book is a Swahili grammar written by G W Broomfield of the Universities Mission to Central Africa and is very much in the tradition of the solid language grammars I remember from my schooldays when we studied for 'O' level English Grammar exams.

It's remarkable in that it is written entirely in Swahili by an Englishman from Gloucestershire.

The small green book is much simpler, so much so that, when Gill and I first travelled to Tanzania in 2010, I used it in an attempt to polish up my dismally rusty Swahili.

The layout is simple, an English sentence on the left and a Swahili translation on the right.

I hardly ever heard my father use his Swahili. The Swahili which my mother, brother and I used was called 'kitchen Swahili' and lacked most of the very organised and structured grammar of a language which rivals English in its flexibility. When asked, my mother used to say that my father's Swahili was so grammatically correct that 'none of the natives understood it'.