Why ‘Habari’?
Some readers may have noticed that Habari is the publishing name of my books and wonder what it means. Well, Habari is a Swahili word meaning news or information.
Swahili (also called Kiswahili) is one of the two official languages spoken in Kenya, English being the other. Apart from these two languages, there are forty-two ethnic groups of Kenyans who have their own dialects, so both Swahili and English are second languages to most of the inhabitants of the country.
The English language was inherited from Kenya’s British colonial past and is the language of choice in business, academics, and social set-ups in Kenya. Swahili is the national language and is a unifying African language spoken by nearly 100 percent of the Kenyan population.
The purest form of Kiswahili is spoken along the coast where native Swahili people live. It is very complicated in its structure and is considered to be a Bantu language. The up-country Swahili tends to be more colloquial, and this was the Swahili the settlers learned in the early days when they came out to develop Britain’s colony of Kenya.
After being away from your farm, business or house for any length of time, leaving it in the tender care of whomever you had employed for the job, the first question after greeting that said person would be: ‘Ni habari gani?’ (What’s the news?).
Now, in the African culture it would be incredibly rude to launch into all the misfortunes that had occurred whilst you had been away, so inevitably the answer would come back – ‘Oh, everything’s fine, absolutely fine, no problems at all.’ Then there would be a slight pause and the dreaded word you were waiting for would be spoken: ‘Lakini’. Lakini means ‘but’ in English, and after it was said you would hear that your prize bull had died after being bitten by a snake, your dogs had been fighting, the cat hadn’t been seen for days, and the office had been broken into! That was the sort of habari you really did not want to hear!
Find out more about my latest book by reading a preview HERE. It’s on sale on Amazon–check out the two links below:
