Swahili must be the language?

York City, America’s commercial capital, a children’s centre bustles with life as vivacious teachers take their little charges through their paces in Swahili.
And here, there, and over there on the vast courtyard, other children romp around, talking or shouting to each other in Swahili with much merriment. Leading black American writer Imamu Baraka who has brought me here from New York City on a conducted tour of the centre, pauses and turns round to steal a glance at me and

my marvel is recorded in his eyes.

“I can’t believe what I see,” I say, my eyes transfixed on Baraka’s own smiling eyes. “You had better believe what you are seeing and hearing brother Steve,” Baraka says emphatically. “You are at home here, away from sweet home Africa.”
These people are descendants of blacks abducted centuries ago from different African countries, chained, crated and shipped away into slavery in the West, I tell myself. They are busy founding a new African nation in absentia with Swahili as its national language and in hopes of returning to the land of their ancestors one day,

I conclude and a warm sensation touches my heart.
The year is 1974 and I am in the United States from exile in Zambia on a sponsored study of newspaper production in that country where computerisation of the media has just begun. Back home the winds of change are buffeting and roaring across Africa, felling dysfunctional racist political systems and leaving behind in their wake fledgling democratic institutions popping up to give freed natives a brave new future.

However, some more deeply-rooted regimes, especially in Southern Africa merely sway or just bow down a little but remain firmly entrenched but not for long as armed fighters get the AKs to work to complete the unfinished job to bring Uhuru to the rest of the continent.
In retrospect, I wonder now if those African-Americans working on a universal language to unite themselves as a nation scarcely peeped over the lattices of time to see that today, nearly 40 decades on, their brothers and sisters back home in Africa would still languish under a linguistic imperialism so debilitating it has kept

Africans divided and weakened just as the colonial conquerors had always wanted.
A biblical example will perhaps explain more succinctly why Africa continues to be divided along pervasive linguistic barriers which make it difficult for quick-fix political and economic solutions to be implemented for speeded-up development across the continent with African policy makers and technocrats pooling their resources as a team to redeem the continent of its underdevelopment status.

After the Israelites, freed from long years of slavery in Egypt had crossed their own Rubicon and were poised to enter the Promised Land of milk and honey, God instructed them to destroy every idol and any other ungodly paraphernalia in sight. But depravity got the better of some of them and they kept some of the idols to themselves.

The failure to observe God’s order demonstrated a level of acceptance and appreciation of their deliverance and freedom which was lamentably low. Similarly, on entering their own “Canaan”, African countries embraced and continue to worship a linguistic idol that has become synonymous with their divided countries.
Take, for instance, a country previously colonised by the French and where their language is the official medium. The name of the country is Francophone, Anglophone where the idol English reigns supreme, and is known as Lusophone in countries formerly colonised by the Portuguese.

Today because African countries are divided by different languages and cultures, they scarcely boast similar social circumstances and this makes it difficult for the countries to enter a state of inter-subjectivity and walk the same road as one black people, particularly in the spheres of political and economic development — witness cases of insularity in some cases of trade and aid between African countries that have and those that have not much to offer.
You also find that African leaders speaking different languages have to resort to the technology of their former oppressors and dividers, microphones, in order to

understand one another. And tempus fugiti, indeed “time flies” as they say in Latin and time lost in decision making processes to quicken the pace of Africa’s development is surely lost, and done so for good, while the speaker pauses to have his rhetoric interpreted in a different language and the audiences prick their ears mulling over the gist of the speaker’s message.

The above scenario questions the level of Africa’s acceptance of independence and freedom which has left the continent’s people as virtual strangers to one another.
It is, however, not too late to deconstruct the foreign languages imposed by colonisers of Africa as official communication superstructures, and a good start has already been made with the introduction of Swahili as one of the official languages of the Pan-African Parliament, along with English.
Swahili contains many words from Shona, Ndebele or Zulu as well as from other Bantu languages and this makes it a typically African language with the potential for being as much as continental lingua franca as it is universally used and understood in East Africa.