Swahili Lesson: Mzungu

Mzungu is the Swahili word for "person of European descent" but it literally translates to "one who wanders around aimlessly" which actually fits quite well into our goals for our trip. The word was originally coined because of the white explorers, missionaries, and slave traders who wandered around in previous centuries generally mucking up things in the region (yes, I know it was more complicated than that but that's where we'll leave that). Interestingly, based on our guidebooks, mzungu does not mean "white" but anyone of European descent because people of Central and East Africa don't categorize people by colors and even if they did, they would think of our skin as pink or red, not "white".

While we're not foolish enough to think that we could blend in (especially in less than a year), we are hoping to learn a significant amount of Swahili. Almost all Kenyans speak their own ethnic language (there are 9 main ethnic groups in Kenya that split into 42 tribes) as well as Swahili and English which are the official national languages and the languages of educational instruction. Attempts to speak Swahili are generally received very positively so we are hopeful that we'll pick up quite a bit. We've already gotten greetings down and the verbs "to be" and "to have" though it's difficult to learn from only phrasebooks so we're going to look for some textbooks this weekend.

Swahili is a language of prefixes. So, for example, the root word is -zungu and mzungu means "person of European descent" and wazungu means "people of European descent". This is why the top of the blog says "wazungu". Also, PETA would be thrilled because people and animals use the same prefixes [m-/wa-] while objects get different prefixes [n-/j-]. There are actually 7+ classes of prefixes but you can make yourself understood with just those two so right now we're sticking with those.

Kwaheri for now! (Goodbye)