Thoughts about the Language Question in Uganda

It is obvious that Uganda, despite its country name that is derived from Buganda, is not a national state of the Baganda. On Uganda these biblical words are not applying: “Indeed the people are one and they all have one language.”¹ Instead Uganda is more like Babylon after the Confusion of Tongues²: There is no native language that could even closely claim to be a majority language.

I agree with most points of Comrade Joseph´s important interview on fundamental questions. Most points means that there are some exceptions. The handling of the language question is such an exception. Comrade Joseph says:

“We aim at developing and adopting a common language from the numerous existing local languages in Uganda that can work as a national language and act as a bonding factor between various ethnicities in the country.”³

What Comrade Joseph lacks, is a concept of how to bring this into action. Which local language (also called “vernacular”) should turn into a national language if there is no majority ethnic group at all? The Baganda are about 17% – and they are even the biggest ethnic group in Uganda. They are very far away from a majority. Luganda is an important language besides English in the South of Uganda, but adopting it as a national language would surely create an uproar among the ethnic groups among the North; vice versa adopting a northern language like Luo as a national language would for sure create a similar uproar in the South.

In short: Comrade Joseph´s proposal seems to sound good for the development of a Ugandan nation on the basis of a local language as the language of the entire nation, like it was done with Swahili in Tanzania, at first glance. The longer you look at his proposal, the more you see how this will not work on the conditions of Uganda without unnecessarily heating up ethnic conflicts again, without getting accused of tribalist siding with one ethnic group by adopting its local language as national language. Uganda´s national conditions are different from those in Tanzania, this is what we need to accept.

There is also one big issue Obote already pointed out in 1967: “It is possible today for the people of Uganda to communicate with the people in the neighbouring countries in broken Swahili but it is not possible for the people of Uganda to communicate with the neighbouring countries in broken Luganda.”⁴ A local language as national language would therefore not only cause the already mentioned problems of heating up conflicts, the language would also be of little use outside of Uganda itself.

There is a reason why English was kept as the main official language until today, more than six decades after the end of British colonialism in Uganda: There is no realistic alternative to English as lingua franca. Even Obote said:

“We find no alternative to English in Uganda’s present position. We have, therefore, adopted English as our national language.”⁵

That status exists today and was unchanged as well by Idi Amin and Museveni. What we could do today is to define English as the “language for inter-ethnic communication” (like Russian is defined in Tajikistan) to not call it “national language”. This would just be a change in words without any practical change.

It is true that Obote spoke in 1967 also about Swahili as a potential official language, but nothing came out of it during his two governments.

In 2005 Uganda introduced Swahili as a second official language at the national level besides English. The problem until today is that very few Ugandans speak Swahili and the willingness to learn Swahili instead of English is low. The reason for that is that Swahili is an important regional language in East Africa with native speakers in Tanzania and Kenya, but not in Uganda, while English is also the global lingua franca. When you learn English, the gates to the world are open to you; when you learn Swahili, only the gate to the East African coast is open to you. Of course people then prefer that their children learn English as well as possible in schools instead of Swahili. Swahili is therefore impractical due to its limited use.

Instead of focusing on Swahili, Uganda should preserve its local languages and develop them more into modern languages with scientific terminology that is not just loaned from English. The coexistence of English and the local language as an official language can be probably best observed in Buganda. This example can be followed in the entire Uganda.

My concluding proposals are the following:

Keeping English as the national lingua franca;

Abolishing Swahili as an official language (which does not mean that it could not be offered as a non-mandatory 3rd language in some schools among other languages);

Strengthening local languages as official languages next to English on district level;

Making higher education available also in local languages, not only in English, by creating native scientific terminology in the local languages.