Salam

Today, I’m grateful to introduce Salam, the first ever fully indigenous Swahili writing system. It has taken quite some time to devise and refine, and I’m glad to share this with the world today. Salam means “Peace”.

Why did I create Salam?

Essentially, we as Africans need to write our own history, and to have routes that build on solidly indigenous intellectual foundations. Salam adds to culture in a way that supports local cultural creativity and intellectual foundations.

A brief history of Swahili writing

Kiswahili originated as a language of trade between locals and traders from across the world along the East African coast. It is a combination of various Bantu languages and Arabic, with loan words also coming from English, Portuguese, Hindustani and Malay. Swahili evolved as a language of exchange but over time, its material became a language of conquest with colonization. The first written form of Swahili developed by a local was an Ajami script developed by Mwalimu Sikujua¹, who matched Arabic characters to Swahili phonology in a modified Arabic script. This happened through the 19th century, with standardization continuing into the 20th century. However, the German colonization of Tanzania, then called the Republic of Tanganyika, enforced a Latin script in the late 19th century (around 1884-1885). This snuffed out the early beginnings of a local intellectual evolution of the form of the Kiswahili written word from Ajami. The Latin script was then further spread by the British through British East Africa (Kenya and Uganda). With that, cultural agency mostly disappeared.

We are cultural co-creators

Salam is re-seeding the agency of local intellectual traditions and creativity, with a basis on art forms and nature thereby encouraging external observation. This is coupled with internal meditation, understanding that there could have been an alternative history where indigenous knowledge systems developed alongside trade and local schools of thought. With these, it is likely that the codification of centuries’ worth of cultural tradition and history into the written form would have happened. While the realities of history cannot be undone, we can always reimagine and reorient. Salam offers a route towards that.

Importantly, Salam is far from a set of randomly strung characters. The writing system is grounded in architecture and ecology, which I hope enables others to think towards cohesive bodies of work when approaching the co-creation of culture. Motifs of Swahili architecture particularly at the coast are prominent, for example courtyards and forts, alongside more universal ecological elements such as rivers and branches. Similar sounds or syllables also have similar forms, to aid in easier learning and recall.

I hope this enables more people to start questioning the very basics of the cultural environments they have been taught to either take for granted or to take as-is, and to consider that local communities, including neighbors, friends, youth, and elders could possess ingenuity and fresh, viable perspectives to matters within their communities. Many African countries in their current border definitions are only a couple of decades old, yet Africa has some of the oldest civilizations and seeds of intellectual thought. Looking ahead optimistically, there are more centuries ahead. We can still rethink, reseed and rebuild. If the best time to do that was some time in the past, then the second best time to do so is now.

You can try out Salam here. You can type any Kiswahili phrase or sentence and see it in Salam. You can also view each individual character sheet, including each original handwritten character and its current construction. I have also included a Kamusi of more than 14,000 Kiswahili words which you can view both in Latin-based Swahili and in Salam.