“Jambo” may mean hello in Swahili, but a slave brought to the United States would not have recognized that greeting. There may not have been a single Swahili-speaking African brought to these shores amid the slave trade. If there were any, it was very few.
I get to thinking about this during the holidays as we start hearing about Kwanzaa, which starts the day after Christmas and runs until New Year’s Day. Kwanzaa is fine, but it was rooted in a ’60s fashion for treating Swahili as black America’s “ancestral” language. The choice of Swahili out of the thousands of languages spoken in Africa was innocent, and made a certain sense in that it is a lingua franca across several African nations where hundreds of other languages are spoken.
But the nations where it’s spoken are in East Africa. Black Americans’ ancestors came mostly from West Africa. And as we all know, Africa is enormous.
The thing is this: To treat Swahili as meaningfully ancestral to black Americans because it’s “African” is to lump diverse peoples together in a way that might seem less appropriate if done by whites. Or, imagine someone with roots in Wales cooking borscht and toasting with vodka in salute to their “Europeanness.”
If black Americans are to seek an ancestral language, shouldn’t it be one that our ancestors actually spoke?
Picking just one is tough, though. No one African language is used as common coin from Senegal all the way down to Angola, and slaves brought to the United States came from places throughout this stretch. In the past, I have suggested Mende of Sierra Leone, the language of the songs that some Gullah speakers in South Carolina still remember in fossilized form. But there aren’t that many Mende speakers in the U.S., and there are virtually no books in print for learning it (and not many even out of print in libraries). Nigeria’s Yoruba is a tempting alternative, presenting neither of those problems. But its speakers were never a significant proportion of slaves brought to the United States.
If there is one West African language that a great many slaves in America spoke and is also realistically available to us, it is Twi. It’s spoken in Ghana and is the lingua franca there for speakers of dozens of smaller local languages. Many slaves brought to the New World by the English, or sold to them, were from Ghana, then known famously as the Gold Coast, where Twi was a dominant local language. Just as important, a great many Ghanaians have relocated to the United States in the past 40 years, and therefore, someone trying to pick up some Twi could have native speakers to practice with.
SOURCE: http://www.theroot.com/views/let-s-explore-our-real-african-roots?page=0,1
This is I never understood why Swahili, Kwanzaa, and all of these East African traditions are used to represent ancestors of Black Americans. Most African-American ancestors came from West Africa. A nice read read tough.
