MIT’s Swahili Studies Initiative, led by Per Urlaub, Director of Global Languages at MIT, will offer intensive Swahili language instruction and interdisciplinary studies during the January Independent Activities Period for at least the next five years. The Swahili Initiative both emphasizes and helps fulfil the need for MIT students to be able to interact with Africa’s array of diverse cultures without solely using languages brought to the continent by colonizers, such as English, French, Portuguese, or Arabic. Mugane, an historian of Swahili (The Story of Swahili, Ohio University Press, 2015), pioneer of the academic study of African languages, and expert in teaching methods based in African cultural traditions, officially inaugurated the Initiative with a lecture entitled “Silent Voices: The Invisibility and Inaudibility of African Languages in the Disciplines and the Professions”.

Mugane’s lecture style, matching his philosophy of language teaching and learning, centers around ubuntu, a non-hierarchical, participatory kind of social engagement in which people focus on seeing, hearing, and understanding one another. He asked the audience to read the text of one of his slides aloud back to him in unison as a demonstration of the way this naturally brings up questions and engages students with the material. His interactive presentation began with an overview of the history of Swahili and its rise to prominence as a pan-African lingua franca. This led naturally into a brief history of the academic study of African languages and a discussion of the many ways content in these languages is all too often subordinated to content about them in colonial languages– the first conference on African languages to take place in the continent of Africa did not occur until the year 2000. Mugane described common situations in which native speakers are disregarded in favor of those who can produce Western-style academic prose, and suggested ubuntu and other teaching styles based around African traditions as a possible solution. He ended with a display of advanced machine learning, in which, as he spoke aloud in English, a computer transcribed his speech onto the screen, and then translated and displayed it in four separate mutually unintelligible African languages at the same time, with a lag of only seconds.

Mugane’s presence and an enthusiastic audience from all parts of the MIT community served as a welcome, celebration, and prominent start to MIT’s Swahili Studies Initiative.