Rebecca Campbell

Research Paper

December 2, 2011

‘Slaves have no words of their own1’: Attempts at using modern Swahili linguistic features to

inform on the presence of pre-colonial social structures

Introduction and Background

Dialects of Swahili, a Sabaki language, are spoken by farmers, fisherman, and people in

towns on the coastal strip and islands of East Africa ranging from Barawa to Mozambique. In

their book The Swahili, Nurse and Spear (1985) trace the African and Arabian influences on

Swahili and reconstruct the history and language of Swahili speakers. For example, they explain

that there are a large variety of dialects of the Swahili language because early speakers were

sailors and traveled vast distances from the 9 to 12th centuries (Nurse and Spear, 1985). “Bantu

languages” is the term sometimes used to refer to a traditional sub-branch of the languages in

some Niger–Congo regions. Swahili is the Bantu language that has the most speakers, and two

decades ago there were 80 million speakers of the language spreading across eight countries

(Nurse and Spear, 1985).

Swahili town-states developed rapidly between 1100 and 1500 A.D. However,

periodically they suffered economic attacks from the Portuguese (for example, during the latter’s

attempt to monopolize the gold trade). Though Orma and Somali invasions caused many

Swahili settlements to be abandoned during the 1500 to 1600’s, neither the Orma, Somali nor

1 This is a Swahili proverb (Glassman, 1995) meaning that slaves are not independent or act on their own selves

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Portuguese were successful in ruling the coast. Later, between the 1700 and 1800’s, these

Swahili towns prospered again and it was then that greater numbers of Arabic words entered the

language. However, scholars know little of Swahili social organization, values, or beliefs during

pre-colonial times (Nurse and Spear, 1985).

Carol Eastman (1994) outlines the continued, post-colonial development of words

signifying servitude in Swahili in her article “Service, Slavery (‘UTUMWA’) and Swahili Social

Reality.” Eastman’s background on the Swahili people is quite informative and she sets up her

article well. Eastman explains that Swahili culture is neither totally African nor entirely Arabian.

In fact, there has been a lengthy debate on who exactly “the Swahili” are. Researchers generally

consider that the Swahili-speaking people on the East African Coast ranging from the Lamu

archipelago to Zanzibar and the Comorian islands share cultural attributes that are considered to

be ethnic.

As will be demonstrated, this research seeks to add to the historiography by providing

evidence to support or refute the three main theses in the debate of pre-colonial African slavery.

Specifically, this work uses original and secondary data to address the debate on the antiquity,

transformation, and absorption of slavery in African history. The two research questions driving

this enquiry are centered on finding out the following:

1. What can language tell us about the current and past presence of structures in a society

or culture?

2. What can Swahili reveal about the past and present saliency and nature of servile

institutions in Swahili speaking regions as relative to the three central debates in the African

historiography regarding slavery (antiquity, absorption, and transformation theories)?

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This research seeks to fill the gap in the corpus of the literature by examining how

particular words and language structures illuminate our understanding of people’s social

experiences. Specifically, this research focuses on ascertaining the saliency and prevalence of

words relating to institutions of slavery or servitude in the Swahili language, including all the

dialects spoken in various regions such as Kenya and Tanzania, in order to add to the literature

about pre-colonial Swahili experiences.

Literature Review

Regarding language studies in Africa, linguistics does provide models on language that

can be used in conjunction with other historical evidence to reconstruct the past. Scholars have

analyzed current lexicon as a basis for conclusions about earlier geographical locations of

speakers of Bantu, Khoisan, and Afrikaans speakers (Nurse and Spear, 1985). For instance,

researchers “isolate groups of related language and use them to posit the existence of earlier

language communities,” this data is then cross-checked “to parallel lines of archaeological and

historical data of historical peoples and cultures” (Nurse and Spear, p15). For example, prior

research has used linguistic data from today to make conclusions about servitude in the past.

Specifically, Perbi (2004) argued that modern proverbs provide insight into pre-colonial slavery

in Ghana. Perbi, on page 118, posited that the Akan proverb “wo nkoa suro wo anim asem a,

wonni nim mma wo (if your slaves/servants fear to speak to you, they will not gain victories for

you)” relates to the historically customary rule of slave treatment which strongly encouraged the

owners of slaves to make themselves available to their slaves.

Research has not fully examined how memories of social oppression are preserved

through idioms in Swahili. This is of particular interest since scholars (Rodney, 1966) posit that

language embodies people’s experiences and even their history. Historians have argued that if

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there is no word, or perhaps only a few words, for an idea then chances are it never existed, an

argument I will revisit in this work. Vansina (1985) counters this with the argument that these

ideas may be preserved figuratively. However, this research will investigate more literal

instances of these words meaning servitude. Researchers operate under the assumption that

loanwords do not become loaned or travel without the objects or ideas they denote (Dalby,

1970).

In the text Archaeology, Language, and the African Past, Roger Blench (2006) discusses

issues relating to Swahili such as Swahili and language shift, morphology, and Portuguese and

other loanwords. Specifically, Blench illustrates how morphological reconstruction can be used

to rebuild protolanguage trees using lexicostatistics across languages. Blench (2006) claims that

this can provide pointers on how people thought in these regions. This type of analysis coincides

with broader linguistic theories, such as the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, which states that a

language’s structure influences the way its speakers perceive and conceptualize the world.

Further, Schoenbrun utilized linguistic evidence to study ideas around honor, scorn and hierarchy

and concluded that violence and marginalization within East African societies occurred before

contact with people during the coastal trade (Merdad and Doyle, 2007). On the other hand, one

might question to what extent violence and marginalization equals slavery.

Cooper (1997, p218) contends that “for all the variants of Swahili that exist there is no

slave version, comparable to the Creole languages of the descendants of slaves in the

Caribbean.” However, “slaves were closest to being pure economic objects in the sugar islands

of the Caribbean” (p2) whereas historians show that slavery was different in pre-colonial Africa

(Miers and Kopytoff, 1977; Perbi, 2004). Thus, Cooper’s point is revealed to be only specious

when one considers that because he is comparing two systems of servitude that are quite

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different conclusions about the similarity of their effects on language are questionable. Further,

Cooper (p218) also argued that “virtually all slaves learned Swahili” so the language itself could

be considered the African version of the language of subjugation.

A large issue to consider regarding the validity of my research is a point raised by Cooper

(226); he states “masters generally avoided the harsh words for slaves…and used… [words

meaning] ‘children’ or…‘my people.’” In the same regard, according to Miers and Kopytoff

(1977, p187), addressing someone using lok which means is a great insult. Even before slavery

was abolished, the term was still usually not used out of concern for the feelings of a slave. In its

place the term of address used to refer to slaves was ta (meaning son) or wa (meaning daughter).

Cooper and Miers and Kopytoff’s points lead to the questioning of how well linguistic features

can illuminate our understanding of the reality of servile institutions. On the other hand, one

could also argue that a culture which uses words that could be considered polite to refer to slaves

may also construct the personhood of a slave differently than a culture which uses more harsh

language.

Vansina (1999, p469) argues that “linguistic sources contribute much to the recovery of

aspects of the past, which would otherwise remain out of reach.” Eastman (p87) utilizes

“sociolinguistic approach(es) to complement the historical record in order to examine the use of

the word utumwa itself as it has changed to reveal distinct class and gender connotations

especially in northern Swahili communities.” This tells us about changes in the last centuries but

not about pre-colonial times. Thus, in addressing the first research question, scholars use such

linguistic features as language shift to provide information on how identity and how social

structures in society are related and change through time and across spaces. It is important to

note that investigating this with a focus on pre-colonial times is difficult and necessitates

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utilization of records of the language that existed in pre-colonial times, though oral histories may

provide this data. Later in this paper, I will explain how this study yields valid information

regarding the idea that linguistic data can be used to make conclusions about past and present

social structures.

Methodology: Measures and Participants

To gather data to answer my research questions I firstly consulted two Swahili

dictionaries that have been well received by scholars (Vansina, 1999). The Kamusi Project: The

Internet Living Swahili Dictionary (Martin, Biersteker, and Bertoncini-Zubkova, 2005) is the

first text which is an online, lengthy Swahili-English dictionary cross-checked by many scholars.

Schoenbrun’s (1997) The Historical Reconstruction of Great Lakes Cultural Vocabulary:

Etymologies and Distributions presents word forms and their features such as vowels, tones, and

prefixes as well as their geographical distribution and variants of meaning. The best part of his

text is that he also delivers an etymology of each word and provides the time at which each word

first appeared as a new, distinct word or a loanword. Both of these texts were analyzed to

determine the etymology of words denoting servitude but according to Schoenbrun, these are

unknown. The Kamusi dictionary, though it provides etymology for many other words, simply

omitted that information for these words denoting servitude, most likely due to a lack of

conclusion on this.

For my enquiry, I was interested in finding the etymology of words meaning servitude in

hopes of finding out when these words entered the language. I sought to do this to answer my

second research question to attempt to make a connection between the beginning of the use of

the words and the beginning of the servile institution. For example, if the words had pre-colonial

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etymologies, this would lend support for the antiquity of slavery in Africa thesis. Because this

was not the case, I cannot show evidence that supports or refutes this theory.

However, as is paramount in the study of history, I planned on cross-checking my data

with interviews. I conducted twelve interviews with Swahili speaking persons, the majority of

whom spoke the language for most of their life. These interviews were structured and consisted

of questions, as shown below, aimed at measuring the saliency of words denoting servitude in

Swahili.

Interview Questions

1. What languages do you speak?

2. How long have you spoken them?

3. What is your age?

4. What is your gender?

5. Where are you from originally?

6. How long have you lived there?

7. What do you know about slavery in America?

8. What do you know about slavery in Africa?

9. Do you know of words or phrases in Swahili that refer(s) a slave or slavery?

10. Can you tell me the meaning of each of the words you listed in #9?

11. Do you know any other Swahili speakers I could talk to?

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I obtained a list of interview participants through various means. While I posted calls for

recruitment on the Kamusi.org discussion board, the Swahili Facebook page, and the Kenya

Facebook page, I did not obtain any participants that way. By consulting with my professor, I

secured an interview with a participant who led me to four other people willing to speak with me.

Additionally, I sent out requests for Swahili speaking persons to volunteer to be interviewed

through the Anthropology and USF-Talk listservs. E-mails were also sent to my network of

colleagues and students. I interviewed one of my students who, like most of the participants,

spoke many languages and was able to put me in touch with her parents, whom I also

interviewed. A person off the USF-Talk listserv put me in contact with a participant from whom

I gained yet another participant. A colleague directed me to an associate who was the only

speaker having only a few years of experience speaking Swahili that I talked to. Lastly, I had

been in earlier contact with an academic I met online through academia.edu because of a mutual

interest in Swahili who comprised my twelfth interview. Below is a chart depicting some

characteristics of the interviewees.

Pseudonym 2 or Participant # Languages Spoken and Experience

Age/ Gender From

Hamidi

Swahili (native), English (35 years), Luhya (native), Kinyarwanda (4 years), Basic French (4 years) 40/Male Kenya

2English (native), French (11 years), Swahili (4 years), Spanish (4 years) 23/Female

United States

Abla

Hindi (15 years), Gujarati (16 years), English (15 years), French (5 years), Swahili (14 years) 18/Female Tanzania

ObaSwahili (native), English (native), Setswana (intermediate, ages 2-9), Chiyao (ages 17-22) 29/Male Tanzania

5Gujarati (native), Hindi (native), English (35 years), Spanish (10 years), Swahili (native) 49/Female Kenya

2 Pseudonyms were used for participants who had quotes appearing in the analysis.

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Fikirini

German (native) English (32 years), Swahili (20 years), very basic knowledge of French, Spanish, Hausa, Bambara, Xhosa 42/Male Germany

7English (native), Swahili (native), Nyamwezi and other regional languages for (~20 years) 39/Male Tanzania

8Gujarati (native), Hindi (native), English (20 years), Swahili (25 years) 52/Male India

9Kikuyu (native), Swahili (33 years), English (33 years) 40/Female Kenya

10 Swahili (native), English (native) 30/Female Tanzania

11Swahili (native), Taveta (native), English (34 years) 39/Female Kenya

12English (33 years), Swahili (35 years), Kikuyu (native) 42/Male Kenya

Analysis

Data gathered from the interviews could support the transformationist perspective, a

thesis supported by Miers and Kopytoff (1977) as well as Lovejoy (1983). Though they believe

transatlantic slave trade transformed what was there previously, they have not clearly defined

exactly what pre-colonial social structures were there.

Consider the follow excerpt from an interview conducted with a 40-year-old male native

of Kenya. I will call him Hamidi. I asked him the question: “What do you know about slavery

in Africa?” Hamidi responded:

“I know a lot; there is a theory that Africans used to sell their fellow Africa and I don’t

subscribe to that kind of theory. Africans are very good people, very good-hearted people. I

think they were taken advantage of. If you come [to my country], because you are new,

[someone might offer their children as guides by saying]“my children, you can escort him, you

can show him the way” and maybe they would end up being slaves. I can’t think of an African

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father sending his children to become slaves. [In concern for their children’s welfare, parents

might believe that] Maybe life would be better with someone else and you can go with them

because there was so much trust, and you could trust a stranger, it is not like that here.”

This excerpt supports the transformationist perspective. Perhaps people with values such

as these where a parent is willing to send their child off with someone else because they believe

their child will have a better life with them or offering their children as guides were taken

advantage of by Europeans looking to obtain slaves. In this way, it could be posited that

possibly the transatlantic slave trade transformed these norms and values into a servile

institution. The problem with the data I have is that we do not know the time when these norms

and values started. It could have been after the transatlantic slave trade started that people began

these norms and values.

Further, the interviews cannot be used to support the antiquity thesis because the dates of

the beginning of words denoting slavery are not made clear. On the other hand, they did yield

data not found in the two dictionaries. For example, as mentioned earlier, Schoenbrun (1997)

and the Kamusi dictionary (Martin, Biersteker, and Bertoncini-Zubkova, 2005) do not provide

etymologies for words denoting slave. Eastman (1994) discusses many variations born from

utumwa but focuses on the 18-20th centuries, so we cannot use these conclusions to inform on

pre-colonial matters either. Eastman also does not provide the origins of utumwa in terms of

etymology.

Consider the following excerpt for which a participant explains where utumwa is derived

from. I asked Hamidi, “Do you know of words or phrases in Swahili that refer(s) a slave or

slavery?” and “Can you tell me the meaning of each of the words you listed in #9?” He

responded:

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“Yes Mtumwa/utumwa.” “The word comes from Kutuma meaning ‘send.’ These were

people who were sent by their masters to do all the work be it in the household or in the field.”

I hypothesize that it is possible that the result of utumwa from send could also come from

parents sending their children off with visitors as guides. This claim would need to be further

investigated in other work.

On the other hand, another instance which speaks to the antiquity of slavery thesis in

Africa was provided by a 29 year old male from Tanzania whom I will call Oba. This excerpt

provides evidence which could be used to disprove the antiquity of slavery in African

hypothesis. This is the middle of Oba’s response when I asked him the question: “What do you

know about slavery in Africa?”

“We don’t have caste systems, though we have genocide in Rwanda…we don’t have those

who will always be born as rich people; we have tribalism where one tribe feels superior to

another. If they had slaves they were brought from an inferior group—slavery was introduced

from outside, we would have had lineage of slave but nothing has been told about being born

from family of slave.”

Thus, the participant point out that it is very likely that if slavery has started in Africa,

there might be an indication of that in the oral tradition. Vansina’s (1985) work supports this

conclusion since he contends that social structure can be preserved in language through literal or

figurative oral traditions and lack of idioms reflecting certain social structures may indicate that

these structures did not exist.

Discussion

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These data lend themselves to providing insight into pre-colonial slavery by possibly

supporting for the transformationist perspective and disputing the antiquity of slavery thesis in

the ways I mentioned above. A survey with more participants might tell us more about the recent

changing saliency of slavery if participants were quite varied in age though that would not speak

to pre-colonial slavery.

After conducting twelve interviews, I realize now that there are additional questions I

could have asked my participants. However, I only found this out after speaking with numerous

Swahili speakers. For example, I argue that asking a participant their level of education to learn

how their knowledge was produced could bring insight on related enquiries. This question is

important to ask because it could have told me about the production of knowledge as multiple

interviewees told me that oral tradition is an important part of their knowledge production. Also,

I could have asked them about what information regarding slavery was passed down through

their oral tradition.

This sample is not representative of the broader population of Swahili speakers, though I

if I sought to say something about Swahili speakers in America who are educated, I would have

more appropriate data. A weakness of this work is that it seeks to analyze Swahili without

enough regard to the diversity of its speakers, something a future study could ameliorate.

Eastman (1994, p87) argues that “notions of slavery… [have] evolved distinctly in northern

versus southern coastal Swahili towns.” Nurse and Spear (1985) concur as their book

consistently shows the differentiation in linguistic development between such regions as Kenya

and Tanzania. For example, this is seen when the authors discuss the development of the word

meaning “we will eat,” which is denoted by chutakula in Bajuni (a dialect of Swahili spoken in

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North Kenya), ruchakulya in Vumba (a dialect of Swahili spoken in North Tanzania), and

tutakula the version used in Standard Swahili (Nurse and Spear, p13).

An example of how these interviews yielded valuable confirmations of prior work such

as the salience of slavery differs in different regions, discussed in the above paragraph, is shown

in the following example when I asked participants to cross-check the words denoting slavery

offered by other participants. An 18-year-old woman born in Tanzania, whom I will call Abla,

told me that a word denoting slave was: “Kibarua meaning worker.” When I spoke with Hamidi

he said that Kibarua is really more like a “temporary worker and [it] is not about slavery.”

Another instance of this is seen when Fikirini (this name is a pseudonym), a 42-year-old

male from Germany, offered the words: “kijakazi [meaning] female slave.” Hamidi agrees that

this word is used but it is done so primarily by “people along the coast.” Whereas Fikirini

offered “suria [denoting] concubine,” Hamidi said he had only heard of this used as “a disease.”

Fikirini also presented “mateka” as a slave prisoner of war but Hamidi disagreed saying that

“this is more of a prisoner, to be held hostage—used in a war situation but is not slavery.”

Lastly, though most participants offered forms of utumwa, many offered words not recognized

by others.

A strength of this work is its holistic, triangulative approach which utilized several

methodologies for cross-checking. Further work centering on this topic would be well served to

utilize a similar approach but probably also to add survey and more secondary data analysis

methods. Focus groups may have been better to cross-check participants though that was not

feasible for this project, further research may utilize that method. This project makes a very

good pilot study of which valuable research could be gained.

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One might question the interview measure and ask if a drawback of this research is that

because I do not speak Swahili, I must rely on my participants’ mastery of English; although all

of the people I spoke with had mastered it. However, I am confident that both worthwhile data

and conclusions can be obtained through this work. The goal for these interviews was met as

they provided insight not found in the dictionary and also served as cross-checking, triangulative

measures to ensure valid results.

Additionally, there were many pleasures in this research. First, I was really honored and

I respected the pride with which many interviewees spoke of their history and language. Many

were very willing to share great details of the questions I asked. I was impressed by how much

they knew on the topics discussed.

For example, an interesting point was raised by Fikirini. His point is relative to a larger

discourse which attempts to universalize slavery. When I asked: “What do you know about

slavery in America?” He asked me:

“I guess it did not take long when the first Native Americans were enslaved after the

Spanish arrived. Was there also slavery among Americans of pre-Columbian times? That’s what

I don’t know. As the Native Americans died a lot, Las Casas recommended to ship Africans to

the American plantations.”

What is interesting is the extent of the debate on the antiquity of African slavery but the

virtual absence of such a debate in American history. In this way, this research relates to the

broader interest of this seminar class. It is also relative to the central debates of African

historiography because it adds to the body of literature on issues of servitude in Africa.

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Conclusion

While it is clear that the project is a good pilot study, the interview measure would need

to be augmented in the ways I discussed above. However, with the caveats mentioned earlier, I

have shown that my work is relative to the African historiography because it provides insight on

two of the three main theses concerning slavery in Africa, namely, the transformationist and

antiquity theories. This work also provided additional insight into the development of the word

utumwa. Following the line of this project, further work could yield even more data relative to

my research questions but also other important matters pressing today’s African historians such

as the use of oral tradition in knowledge construction and more.

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References

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2006.

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Dalby, David. Language and history in Africa: a volume of collected papers presented to the

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Eastman, Carol. “Service, Slavery (‘Utumwa’) and Swahili Social Reality.” African American

Perspectives. 1994.

Glassman, Jonathon. “No words of their own.” Slavery and Abolition. 16(1):1995.

Lovejoy, Paul. Transformations in Slavery. Great Britain: Cambridge University Press, 1983.

Martin, Benjamin, Ann Biersteker, and Elena Bertoncini-Zubkova. The Internet Living Swahili

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Perbi, Akosua Adoma. A History of Indigenous Slavery in Ghana: From the 15th to the 19th

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Rodney, Walter. “African Slavery and Other Forms of Social Oppression on the Upper Guinea

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431-443.

Schoenbrun, David. The Historical Reconstruction of Great Lakes Cultural

Vocabulary: Etymologies and Distributions. Cologne, I997.

Vansina, Jan. “Linguistic Evidence and Historical Reconstruction.” The Journal of African

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