When it is culture, courtesy, try the Swahili

Although ustaarabu — the Kiswahili word for “civilisation” — has always intrigued me, I have never established its etymology.

But I will not be surprised if it literally means “the Arab way of life.”

For, although Kiswahili is basically Bantu, its higher thought content is almost entirely Hamito-Semitic.

Almost all its words connected with cosmology, cosmogony, religion, philosophy, time, mathematics and natural science have been borrowed from Arabic.

To be sure, there are important lacings of Persian, Hindustani, Portuguese and English, but they are not as central as Arabic.

From Kenya’s Malindi and Mombasa through Tanzania’s Tanga, Dar es Salaam and Kilwa Kivinje to Mozambique’s Sofala, our coastal Bantu peoples have a system of courtesy that is not only uniform but also markedly different from the systems of East Africa’s upcountry peoples.

Led by the Mombasa-Tanga-Zanzibar triangle — which is acknowledged as the navel of Kiswahili — all our littoral Bantu communities are sticklers for mila and good manners. Is it possible that our Mijikenda and other Coastals owe this to a common external factor — the Arabs?

Fired with a new missionary fervour following the rise of Islam in the eighth century AD, the Arabs of the Hejaz bestrode the narrow Old World of Europe, Africa and Asia like a colossus.

Their empire soon encompassed Syro-Palestine, Mesopotamia, Persia, India, Mongolia and Indonesia to the east.

To the North, they swallowed Anatolia (modern Turkey), Balkan Europe and the Central Asian lands that would later become Soviet republics.

To the west, they overran the entire North African coast (the Maghreb), the Nile valley, Malta, much of the great West African Bulge, Spain and a large swathe of France.

By the 10th century AD, the Omanis had captured the whole of the East African coast up to the border of what is now Swaziland.

The African empire was called Zenj or Zanj, from an Arabic word which means “black” and which is what has spawned the term Zanzibar, said to mean “island of the blacks”.

The subsequent mixture of Arabs and Bantus was what produced Swahili — the people as well as the language and the culture.

The system of courtesy — the cultural, religious and linguistic sanctions — would have been imposed and dominated by the upper classes of the Yemenites from the Hejaz and the Omanis.

Such sanctions are typical of all conquerors.

They are basically self-contradictory values.

Every empire imposes a system of “dos” and “don’ts” that, on the surface, look morally unimpeachable, but that, within, are aimed at defending a programme of brutal economic exploitation and tyranny.

As the older generation of East Africans may still remember, Pax Britannica was the epitome of this pernicious moral duplicity.

Before it, Pax Arabica was what would have been sold as ustaarabu to pacify the natives.

The Arab nobles would have sought to use the narcotic of religion to induce the natives into acquiescing in their capture as slaves to be sold back to Arabia.

The slave trade was a highly lucrative business.

But it was also extremely cruel.

And many Africans still refuse to forgive the Arabs for it.

This is ironic because those same Africans almost worship Europeans, even though Europe committed atrocities against Africans that were a hundred times more inhumane.

But evil systems can yield positive results that were never intended by their perpetrators.

Although I abhor British colonialism, I have to acknowledge that it armed me with the English language — a weapon without which I would have grown up quite unable to take on the world effectively.

We can say the same thing of the Arabs. Just as, in Spain, Arabic helped to produce Andalusian (one of the most expressive languages in Europe), and, in India, it helped to produce Urdu (by far the most poetic language in Asia), so, in Kenya, it helped to produce Kiswahili (the most vital language in Africa).

Which brings me back to the influence of Arabic on utamaduni (“culture”) and courtesy in East Africa.

When I first arrived in Dar es Salaam in 1969 to work for the Standard Tanzania (the newspaper now called Daily News), I was constantly bewildered that whenever I went to a bar for a beer, no waiter was ready to serve me.

It was a newsroom colleague (was it Felix Kaiza, Kusai Kamisa, Scholastica Kimaryo, Costa Kumalija, Nsubisi Mwakipunda, Ulli Mwambulukutu, Abdalla Ngororo, Ferdinand Ruhinda, Pascal Shija, Jenerali Ulimwengu or the Malawian Reginald Mhango?) who informed me that I myself was the entire problem.

I had arrived in that Indian Ocean city with the upcountry arrogance — still typical of Nairobi even in 2009 — of treating waiters like slaves.

In the coastal towns of Tanzania — and probably throughout the country — it did not matter if you were “loaded” — you just could not order a barman or barwoman around.

You could not shout like a kaburu: “BRING SNOWCAP!” or: “LETE KONYAGI!” You had to ask politely: “Naomba Snowcap moja tafadhali” (“I beg you kindly to bring me a Snowcap…”)

The boorishness, the colonial mannerlessness, with which we still treat each other here in Nairobi simply appalled Tanzanians, especially when “educated” Kenyans invaded Dar es Salaam to take up senior posts in the service organisations of the East African Community.

This philistinism, this absence of fine culture, has always characterised every walk of our life.

That it is most pronounced in politics is not the surprising thing.

For, in all countries, politicians do not think that their business is possible without pouring mud, mire and matusi on each other.

What is surprising is that a highly educated man from Coast Province should embrace this vulgarity.

I am speaking of Chirau Ali Mwakwere, the Transport Minister, who, after Prime Minister Raila Odinga had complained — rightly or wrongly — that no toilet arrangements had been made for him during a recent visit to Mombasa, mocked him in public, saying the government should build a toilet in the PM’s official car.

For many years, Mr Mwakwere was Kenya’s ambassador in important countries. He also served as foreign minister. In both capacities, he was the personification of our image abroad, a spokesman for this country.

What’s more, from time to time, he also claims to be the spokesman for the Coast — a community celebrated for its insistence on polish (especially in front of children and mothers-in-law).

Do my mwambao brothers and sisters mean to tell me that this is the best manifestation of their ustaarabu?