It is strange that a sample of “ungrammatical” Kiswahili has become arguably the best-known word in our language. “Jambo”, used as a greeting, is “Kisetla”, the Pidgin that the colonial settlers used to address the natives. Among us Waswahili, the proper greeting is, “hujambo?”, and the answer is, “sijambo”. But settler Kaburus hijacked it to “jambo” (pronounced with a very tight, flat “a” and an “ou” at the end) and “jambo” it became all round.
Then, Teddy Kalanda Harrison, the founder and leading musician of the Them Mushrooms pop band, playfully took “jambo” up and made it the key word in his song of welcome, “Jambo Bwana”. The song became an international best-seller, with versions of it in almost every country one can think of. You probably heard of the entertainment giant, Disney, making a trademark bid for “Hakuna Matata”, a composition based on a line from Harrison’s song and used on the soundtrack of the “Lion King” movie.
Disney’s move was bitterly opposed by African cultural activists, who saw it as an unethical and neo-colonial appropriation of Africa’s cultural heritage. My friend and former KU colleague, Prof Kimani Njogu of Twaweza Communications, was in the forefront of the protest against Disney. We see here the international significance of “Jambo Sana”, Harrison’s song.
I have many hypotheses about the phenomenal success and popularity of “Jambo Bwana”. One of them is the resistible warmth of its composer and performer, which radiates through his original rendition. I never met Teddy Kalanda Harrison, who is being laid to rest at his family’s Mushroom Villa in Kaloleni, Kilifi County, this Saturday. But we became friends on social media, and I was always deeply moved by the friendliness of his posts, even in the final months of his struggle against a terminal malignancy.
Many of us who corresponded with him these past few years have confessed that what they will miss most on his departure is his unfailingly regular pair of messages, one on Fridays and the other on Mondays. The Friday messages would celebrate our end of the working week and urge us to proceed and enjoy the weekend with good, clean fun. The Monday one, on the other hand, warmly welcomed us into the new week and wished us success and joy in all our endeavours. Simple, plain words, but oh, how dear and precious, as we now know in this hour of loss.
Another hypothesis I have for the tremendous success of Teddy Kalanda Harrison and his now 52-year old Them Mushrooms band, and indeed, many other Coastal or “Mwambao” music groups, is the generally genteel elegance (uungwana) of their acts. I may not be an entirely impartial judge, since I fell for the Pwani ways at a fairly tender age. But I feel that anyone analytically following Coastal pop music all the way from the elders, like Fundi Konde, John Mwachupa, through the succeeding generations of modern classists, like Fadhili William and the Maroon Commandos, cannot fail to detect that streak of “suitability” or decency that endears their performances to us.
This brings me to the most important point I would like to make about “Jambo Bwana” as we bid Teddy Kalanda Harrison “kwaheri” (goodbye) today. The point is that greetings and other related expressions are important in our lives as social beings. “Jambo” matters, period. If this simple ditty by Them Mushrooms has captured the attention of the world, it must have in it something that our world needs.
Expressions of welcome, greeting, appreciation, apology and parting are called “formulae” (or “formulas”, as the Americans put it). This is because they are generally fixed and invariable in form, often couched in deceptively simple and obvious words. The morning greeting in Marama, for example, is “Bushiere” (has the day dawned), comparable to the Icirundi (Burundian) “Bwacheye”, which means the same thing. To the shallow literalist, who is incapable of looking behind the letter or listening beyond the sound, such a greeting may sound banal.
Anybody can see that the day has dawned, the literalist thinks. Why do you ask me if it has dawned? The poor “savage” does not understand that a lot of strange things can and do happen during the night, and the “bushiere” greeting is an appreciation of the fact that you mercifully survived all these eventualities. “Good morning”, on the other hand, is a forward-looking greeting, wishing you a safe, positive and productive time of day. In whatever form they come, these expressions are gestures of care, concern and goodwill among their users.
I have often, in my discourses on oracy, the skill of the spoken word, lamented the rise of what I call the “dumb generation”. These are the rude and crude people unable and unwilling to communicate orally with their fellow human beings, even those close to them, like relatives, housemates or work colleagues. The dumb generation people are a sour and sullen lot, imprisoned in their “inoracy”, the inability to share their experiences, feelings or aspirations through the easiest tool of communication, the spoken word.
When you board a matatu, why don’t you say “hello”, “how are you” or “jambo” to the person next to you? It might, quite likely, lead to a lively sharing of experiences that would light up your day. If it does not, you have nothing to lose. In any case, the greeting will have helped you to practice the most basic principle of our “utu/ubuntu” humanism: acknowledging and respecting a fellow human being, because they are there.
I have argued elsewhere that our inability to talk to one another, starting with the formulae, like “how are you”, “welcome”, “please”, “thank you”, “excuse me” and the like, has led to growing vices, like violence and corruption. If people cannot talk over matters, they will fight over them, and “money talks” (kitu kidogo) where men and women with mouths, and tongues in them, cannot use them.
To Ndugu Teddy Kalanda Harrison we say, “Jambo Bwana, ahsante sana, na kwa heri.”
