In this rich and compelling study, Morgan J. Robinson recounts the story of the making of Standard Swahili. Drawing on deep research grounded in manuscript and printed sources, she focuses on the 1864 to 1964 period, and primarily on the region now corresponding to Tanzania, including Zanzibar. Standardization, she argues, emerged from the interplay of top-down and bottom-up forces: through the engagement of British and German missionaries and colonial officials, and African students, teachers, and language users at large. Starting in the early Islamic era, Swahili had evolved as a language of ‘merchants, enslaved people, and other migrants with deep connections to eastern Africa. But by the mid-twentieth century’, she continues, ‘Swahili began to find traction in perhaps unexpected places, made increasingly portable through the development of a tangible, commensurable infrastructure built of dictionaries, grammars, newspapers, literature, syllabi, et cetera’ (179).

Readers curious about the deeper history of Swahili before the nineteenth century, or about debates in historical linguistics regarding Swahili's relationship to Bantu languages, Arabic, and cultures of literacy in the wider Islamic world, should look to other specialized studies, because Robinson provides limited context. She suggests only a brief history as follows: Swahili developed as a coastal East African language (as its name, from the Arabic word sawahil, meaning ‘coasts’, would suggest) in the context of Indian Ocean trade. It first appeared in writing during the eighteenth century, recorded by Muslim merchants in Arabic script. In the mid-nineteenth century, British and German Christian missionaries adapted it for use in schools and churches but wrote it in Latin, not Arabic, letters. At the same time, missionaries established presses that transitioned Swahili to print. After the First World War, British colonial officials promoted Swahili in schools and offices to meet increasing demand for literate employees and workers. Later, they established an entity called the East African Literature Bureau (EALB), which instructed students on how to craft Swahili essays, stories, novels, and poems. To encourage reading, the EALB published books and opened libraries. By decolonization in the early 1960s, Swahili was sustaining a rich literary culture as reflected in works by the celebrated poet Shaaban Robert (1909–62) and others. At the same time, charismatic leaders like Julius Nyerere promoted Swahili as a vehicle for pan-Africanist thought in ways that inspired Black civil rights activists in the United States.

Robinson's chapters trace major episodes in this history. She starts by considering nineteenth-century missionary efforts to develop devotional texts, especially Bibles. An early leader in this process was the German Johann Ludwig Krapf, who in the 1840s worked for the British Church Missionary Society (CMS) in what is now Kenya. Favoring the Mombasa dialect (Kimvita) as he translated Genesis, Krapf decided to use the Latin alphabet to render Swahili. Krapf's Latin orthography prevailed, but the Mombasa dialect did not. Rather, the Swahili spoken in Zanzibar, at Kiunguja, proved more influential in Swahili's standardization, following efforts from the 1870s by another British Anglican mission, the Universities’ Mission to Central Africa (UMCA). Missionaries like Edward Steere and Richard Lewin Pennell became active translators and publishers, and helped to make Swahili into a lingua franca among young men and women who came from diverse language backgrounds and who, in many cases, had been freed from enslavement. Students from this cohort, Robinson observes, ‘had often encountered the language somewhere on their forced march to the coast’; for them, ‘the language [became] a crucial component of their social rebirth’ (29).

These early mission-school students in Zanzibar — who frequently became teachers themselves — shaped literary Swahili in critical ways. British missionaries reported how students sometimes pushed back against their choices in wording and spelling to affect conventions-in-the-making. For example, missionaries reconsidered their use of the verb kukoma, which they had intended to mean ‘to stop’ or ‘desist’, after students repeatedly declared that its connotations were bad and improper (35).

Literary Swahili took hold as it became routine in writing and printing. Robinson shares a few vivid examples that point to this trend. In 1888, the UMCA mission press in Zanzibar published the inaugural issue of a Swahili magazine called Misumilizi, which contained articles by the mission's African students and British teachers. In the 1890s, to earn money, the same mission press did small jobs for local businesses, such as printing Swahili labels for bottled soda-water. Between 1898 and 1912, a mission-school teacher in southeastern Tanganyika named Agnes Sapuli (known before her conversion to Christianity and marriage as Ajanjeuli Achitinao) sent her missionary mentor, who had returned to England, handwritten Swahili letters (now preserved in an archive in Oxford) sharing news about her life and her children. While the magazine shows how a highbrow Swahili print culture was developing, the soda-water labels and Sapuli's correspondence — through their very mundaneness — attest even more powerfully to how a popular Swahili culture of writing was beginning to stick.

Although German colonial officials did not contribute substantially to Swahili's development, the process of linguistic consolidation continued during their tenure. After the First World War, when the League of Nations passed Tanganyika as a mandate to the United Kingdom, British colonial authorities consciously engineered Swahili's expansion across Tanganyika, Zanzibar, Kenya, and Uganda, for use in schools and government offices, and in the private sector. After 1935, the East African Literature Bureau aimed to develop Swahili as a trans-sectarian and supra-ethnic print language, by hosting writing contests with prizes attached. One contest, for example, invited students to discuss the meaning or practice of either Christmas or Id al-‘Fitr; another solicited entries on ‘changes … in your clan and tribe since … 1914’ (125). The contests became more ambitious, and eventually included novels. In 1961, the winner of the Swahili novel competition was none other than Ngũgĩ wa-Thiong'o, then a student at Makerere University in Uganda, who years later in Kenya famously urged his fellow Africans to repudiate English and to engage in ‘linguistic decolonization’.Footnote ¹

While tracing the history of Swahili standardization, Robinson charts the late nineteenth- and twentieth-century growth of Swahili print culture, with implications for the development of nationalisms and other forms of ‘imagined communities’. Historians of modern East Africa will appreciate this book, but so will scholars from fields like historical sociolinguistics, world Christianity, colonial and postcolonial studies, and translation studies and book history.

Near the end of her account, Robinson mentions the postcolonial history of Swahili in North America. These details are so fascinating that they could warrant expansion into a book of their own. In the United States, she writes, amid the Cold War, the US Congress passed the 1958 National Defense Education Act, which paved the way for Title VI Foreign Language and Area Studies centers of the kind that flourish even today. By linking US defense-related funds to language instruction, she suggests, these provisions had the effect of making Swahili the most commonly taught African language in American universities along with Arabic. Swahili thereby became — as the title of this fine book affirms — a language not just for Tanzania and East Africa, but a language for the whole world.