Swahili was introduced to Wave I TEAs by British-East Africa educator Arthur Bull at TC in the summer of 1961. Lessons continued during our ongoing orientation at Makerere, but use of the language began only when I arrived at my posting to Kakamega High School, where I shared a house with John Basinger, who had come to East Africa a few months earlier.
Michael, John’s cook and “house boy,” knew no English. And very little about cooking. The daily list he took to the duka regularly included, chungwa na ndizi na papai (oranges, bananas, and papaya) for the mixed fruit that was his standard dessert. Once, when he was too inebriated to get a fire going, he reported to us, “Kuni ni choka” (The firewood is tired). Nevertheless, Michael was the victim of my earliest attempts to use Swahili.
There were a few places to go for a beer in the evening. Among them, the Kakamega Hostel, which had a bar in a corner of a large hall, and Mohammed’s duka, a mud and wattle structure plus several small rooms off a central courtyard for private groups. At either place, I often tried to come away with a couple new words that I would bookmark in my dictionary before I went to bed. The next day, I made flash cards for the new words on little cards measuring 3/8 by 1 1/4 inches which I stored in match boxes and went through a couple times a day. I still have them.
I eventually reached a level that was serviceable, but I never got proficient or studied the language in a consistent, organized way. In 1983, and again in 1985, I spent six weeks in Kenya conducting stove building workshops with groups of church women on a project organized by my good friend Peter Indalo. I always had a multilingual assistant, but my Swahili improved, too.
I did a lot of brushing up in preparation for the 2003 TEAA trip. I used my old edition of Teach Yourself Swahili, which included sentences to translate like, “Sir, there is no charcoal for the iron.”
In Arusha, when we were asked to do an interview in Swahili for Tanzanian television, I was the only one in the group to volunteer. I had trouble understanding some of the questions, so asked that they be repeated in English. I hope my answers in Swahili were comprehensible.
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