Mak varsity founded Kiswahili research
What you need to know:
On August 14, Makerere University, the oldest public university in East and Central Africa, presented its opinion on the Bill.
Since August 13, the Parliamentary Committee on Gender has collected public opinions on a Bill seeking to establish the first Kiswahili Council in Uganda.
On August 14, Makerere University, the oldest public university in East and Central Africa, presented its opinion on the Bill.
On reporting this event, one of the news outlets in the country reported some incorrect facts as a continuation of earlier fallacious statements from research studies on the different epochs under which Kiswahili pedagogies have been executed at Makerere University, which this essay would wish to correct and inform accordingly.
It should be noted that in 2022, Makerere University celebrated 100 years of existence. Thus, since 1922, it has evolved from a technical school to an epitome of international-standard education in continental Africa. In 1931, Makerere University provided initial spaces for Kiswahili research executed by the then Inter-Territorial Language (Kiswahili) Committee of East Africa (1930-1964), now the East African Kiswahili Council with its Headquarters in Zanzibar. The committee was supposed to standardise a single Kiswahili dialect and enable its formal use in educational institutions in Kenya, Tanganyika, Zanzibar, and Uganda.
Thus, by providing spaces for Kiswahili research by the 1930s, Makerere University was the first educational institution in the region to consider researching this language. This is because, by then, the existing education institutions in the East African region had yet to contribute towards providing spaces for Kiswahili research.
While the headquarters for this committee were rotational in the above countries, from 1952-1962, they were located at Makerere University.
The committee’s headquarters at Makerere inevitably contributed to intensifying the Kiswahili research agendas, mainly at the university, in different uninterrupted epochs. This is because, by 1952, the formal teaching of Kiswahili in mainstream schools had been withdrawn from Uganda’s education systems, which were constituted essentially by primary and secondary schools.
While outside the university, the formal teaching of Kiswahili was non-existent, by 1979, the introduction of its pedagogies at the university was substantiated. Many thanks to Prof Ruth Gimbo Mukama, lecturer of Linguistics and English language, for designing the initial programmes for Kiswahili pedagogies at the university.
Therefore, since 1979, Kiswahili pedagogies have been realised at the university, although with some interruptions in the 1980s, e.g., due to shortage of staffing coupled with the need for adequate instructional materials. Nonetheless, the (re)introduction of the same programmes occurred in 1995.
Presently, the university offers Kiswahili courses for undergraduate and postgraduate students with ‘competent’ lecturers within two interrelated departments. One is the Department of African Languages in the College of Humanities and Social Sciences (CHUSS), and the other is the Department of Humanities and Language Education of the College of Education and External Studies (CEES).
Thus, for years, the two departments have directed research orientations and Kiswahili pedagogies that have nurtured students and other practitioners of this language from within and outside Uganda who are now serving in different capacities across the globe
Dr Caesar Jjingo is a Kiswahili Pedagogies and Materials Development lecturer at the College of Education and External Studies, Makerere University.
