Well, today is day 75 since we left the UK (75 of 99)…it suddenly feels as though time has sped up and we’re rocketing towards our return date. In general, it feels as though we’ve been here long enough now to have made it through the novelty stage…and then through the frustration stage…and have now arrived at a ‘this is normal’ stage. I say ‘in general’, because I think we’ve all done this at different speeds and some of us are definitely more keen to return than others!
Anyway, as we draw towards the end, some initial reflections on languages:
Before coming, I had assumed that the English and other languages situation here would be broadly similar to the Spanish and other languages situation in Peru (where I spent a couple of years as a student). Perhaps this was a crass assumption, but it seemed reasonable given the relatively similar histories of relationship between the countries. Turns out, I was totally wrong. In Peru, EVERYONE speaks Spanish, it’s not just the lingua franca but also the genuine first language of everyone I met, from tribespeople in the amazon to bankers in Lima to 4 year old children in the Andes (up your sleevies…sorry). Other languages do exist, indeed Quechua is pretty widespread in the mountainous areas, but it feels a bit like the relationship between Welsh and English in Wales (let the reader understand).
Here, by contrast, (and by here, I mean Kampala), Luganda is very much the first language. I play football every Wednesday night with a bunch of guys from church and I would say that, when on the pitch, it’s 90% Luganda with the occasional smattering of English vocabulary partly from necessity (I’m not convinced Luganda has a word for ‘ref’) and partly from sympathy for me! Similarly, some Luganda is key to proving your credentials as someone who vaguely knows what’s going on in Uganda. E.g. we were stopped by the police yesterday (a pretty regular occurrence) and the policeman spoke to me in Luganda and seemed pleased that I could respond, albeit fairly basically, and waved us on! English, on the other hand, has a slightly more bourgeois feel to it…the posher the place, the more English you tend to hear. It’s more akin to the way that French is used in Morocco, though again, for reasons I’ll explain, that doesn’t do justice to it. My experience of schools here is that, the older the children, the more English they will speak. We did a live zoom assembly last week between the secondary school in Buikwe (as per the video on a previous blog post) and Eltham and, as far as I could work out, everything was understood on both sides. We’re going to try the same tomorrow with the respective primary schools but I predict some serious translation will be needed for much comprehension to take place!
So far so good, but this is essentially the way French is used in my experience in North Africa. The big difference here is the intensely tribal nature of the country (if country is even the right term given the way that languages and tribes transcend national boundaries). Whenever I have met someone, within a minute or so they have told me the tribe they come from, Busoga, Toro, Ankole, etc. * Some of these languages are mutually comprehensible (e.g. it seems that there is only a hairbreadth between Lusoga and Luganda) but some are not, e.g. Langi and Kuksabin and Luganda are all mutually incomprehensible. As such, the lingua franca becomes English; so when we travelled to Sipi and Lira recently, people from Kampala with us had to speak English to be understood.
But this is bizarre – a country with over 50 languages ends up using a totally different language with a complicated history and a descreasing link to the country because it can’t agree on a native official language.
Apparently there was a suggestion a number of years ago that they might make Luganda the official language of Uganda but this was met with hostility from the other tribes, and from the president who is himself from Ankole. As such, by necessity, the two official languages of the country are English (which obviously has a complicated history here) and Swahili (which, in my experience is barely spoken or understood here and which seems to be associated with Kenya and therefore not a popular choice).
All in all, a pretty complicated scene!
*As an aside – most of the Bantu languages we’ve come across here seem to use prefixes more than suffixes as markers, e.g. famously a Muganda speaks Luganda in Buganda in the same way as a Musoga speaks Lusoga in Busoga and a Muzungu speaks Luzungu in….Muzunguland!
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