Swahili vs. Kiswahili
One of the weapons used comes from those who teach Swahili, a so-called language created to expedite the East Afrikan slave trade
By Kwaku Person-Lynn, Ph.D.OW Contributor

Lacking knowledge of self can cause great confusion. This was illustrated while watching an Afrikan film directed by Ossie Davis, which centered on the conflict of Christianity and Islam in Afrika. The topic itself could cause many fiery discussions, but that is not the focus here. The drama began when an elder man in Afrika transitioned to ancestorhood. One of his sons, who lived in Paris, France, arrived home for the funeral. The critical moment came when the brother from France was talking with his brother in Afrika. During their discussion on identity, the brother in Afrika told his brother from France, You are an Afrikan. The brother from France, with a snare on his face, pulled his passport out of his back pocket, opened it, putting it in the face of his brother saying, I am not Afrikan, I am French.This illustrates the kind of sickness that can follow when one has absolutely no knowledge of ones own history and culture. This issue became personal while engaged in a conversation with a really good brother from Sudan, who was dark as midnight. He was a proud Muslim. We were having an intense conversation about Afrikans on the continent and Afrikans in America. There was a topic that had to be brought up, but was discussed later so that we could develop a bond of brotherhood. But even in this brotherhood, we both knew that we were going to have to deal with the subject of Arab Muslims enslaving Afrikans in his country.When we got to that, he did not go off or get into denial, as some Muslims tend to do. Painful as it was, he admitted that it was happening. He had first hand knowledge of this. That wasnt the bombshell though. Somewhere in the conversation we got to the point of discussing how we saw ourselves. Without hesitation, I mentioned that I was an American-born Afrikan, an American Afrikan. With the same directness, he stated that he was Arab. There was a two second mental hesitation. All my historical knowledge failed me for a moment. Afrikan world history, being one area of specialty, it was known that during the Arab encroachment on the continent, assisting Afrikans expulsion of the Romans, the Arabs, through the vehicles of warfare and Islam, conquered large areas and began to forcefully prohibit the practice of Afrikan culture, including Afrikan languages.When the brother from Sudan said he was Arab, he was asked where his parents were from. He promptly said, Sudan. The next question, If your parents were born in Sudan, you were born in Sudan, all of you were black, how could you call yourself Arab? He explained by stating that he was a Muslim, but never gave, to my satisfaction, any clear response. Sensing his discomfort with the subject, it was not pursued any further. Later, analyzing the conversation, the historical reasoning revealed itself. It centers on the reason for slavery in his country today, Arab Muslims feelings of superiority over Afrikans, not to mention the Arab effort to control Afrikan land. This same sentiment was reflected in the American Europeans obsession of privilege and control over people of Afrikan descent.Ali Mazrui, one of the prominent Afrikan historians in the world today, and a Muslim, explains this Afrikan/Arab dichotomy regarding a Swahili town in Kenya, East Afrika, where many of the Afrikan Muslims believe that the foundation of their civilization is Arab. Some of the confusion was self-perpetrated, in the sense that many Muslims, among the Swahili people, preferred to identify themselves in Arab terms. They added the racist tendencies of outsiders, who wanted to deny Afrikans any credit anyhow. These Muslims had quasi-religious reasons for self-Arabization. Western observers had, for racist reasons, credited the Arabs with Swahili civilization. The two forms converge to create the confusion.Dr. John Henrik Clarke, the late distinguished Afrikan world historian gives a detailed perspective. There are Afrikan Muslims and there are Arab Muslims. The Arab fundamentalist Muslims wish to deny the Afrikan the right to be an Afrikan, in Afrika. They wish to deny him the right to have Afrikan loyalties that takes precedence over Islamic loyalties. Theres a great cultural and religious struggle going on in Afrika. Some of it is being imposed from the North by the Arabs, who intend to Islamize Afrika and destroy every aspect of indigenous Afrikan culture. They are for sale to the highest bidder. The Arabs, on sight, were forbidden to move into the hinterlands of Afrika. He moved down the coast of Afrika cohabiting with Afrikan women. After a generation or so, he had produced an Afrikan-looking Arab. These Afrikan-looking Arabs facilitated the spread of the East Afrikan slave trade. They even created their own language for trade.Lets end some confusion here and put the language of Kiswahili aside for the moment, then we can give an explanation. The language Swahili is not a language at all. Its a lingua franca. Its a mixture of several languages. It was a traders language. You can create a language with the bits and pieces of several languages. You could be understood by several types of people who spoke several different languages.When you say Kiswahili, that means the Swahili that was spoken before its Arab intermixture. This is spoken in parts of the Congo, even right now, along with Lingala. Kiswahili really is pure Swahili. Swahili is that mixed with Arabic terms.This simply illustrates just one of the areas of perplexity many Afrikan world peoples have to solve. Conquest, slavery and colonialism have done masterful jobs on the control of the global Afrikan mind. We imitate things without even understanding the damaging effects it has on our own self-esteem and our vulnerable young.One of the first things one would see while entering the ancient educational institutions in the Nile Valley, was the phrase, Know Thyself. If we understood what that really meant, the greatness of who we are and what we have done in the world, we would reject anyone teaching false Swahili.Minister Malcolm X once stated, The worst thing the white man ever did was to teach us to hate ourselves. That lesson was so thoroughly mentally penetrated that we actualize its meaning in various ways. The most striking example is how we have allowed to our youth to turn the most insidious word ever used against us as a word of endearment, the N word.Dr. Kwakus critically acclaimed film, Afrikan World Civilizations, is available at Eso Won Books