Readers of this column who are not news junkies like yours truly may have missed the announcement, made last month: South African schools, both public and private, will be offering Swahili as an optional language from 2020, alongside foreign languages such as French, German and Mandarin, which are already taught in local schools.

How much do we know about that language? Also known as Kiswahili (which means language of the Swahili people, or coastal dwellers), it is a Bantu language that is spoken by five-million people as a native language and by 135-million as a second language. It is an official language in Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania and is widely spoken in Burundi, Rwanda, Mozambique, the Democratic Republic of Congo and Somalia, as well as Oman, the United Arab Emirates and the US.

Being a Bantu language, it bears lexical and linguistic similarities to many other African languages, including those spoken in South Africa, such as Zulu, Xhosa, Swati and Tshonga. Awethu (Zulu for ‘ours’) has the Swahili equivalent of wetu, for example.

The decision to have Swahili as an optional, nonofficial language taught in South African schools would promote social cohesion among Africans, Basic Education Minister Angie Motshekga told reporters at a media briefing. She added that none of the 15 nonofficial languages currently on offer in South African schools had African origins, except for Arabic, the Afro-Asiatic language spoken in North Africa.

“This continues to perpetuate a colonial mentality and necessitated us to take action and rectify this,” she told the gathered scribes, sounding very much like Economic Freedom Fighters makhulu baas Julius Malema, who, barely a fortnight earlier, had bellowed: “We must develop a common language that can be used throughout the continent . . . like Swahili – it can be developed as the language of the continent.”

The debate about colonialism and African expression dates back several decades, with the main protagonists back then including celebrated Kenyan writer Ngugi wa Thiong’o, who wrote in Decolonising the Mind, which was published in 1986: “The condition for acquiring the glory of English was humilia- tion of African languages. This was the same in every colonial situation – in New Zealand, too.” From then on, he started writing in his native Gikuyu.

Ngugi’s take on Africans’ use of English to express themselves differs sharply from that of another African literary titan, the late Chinua Achebe of Nigeria, which he started expressing in the 1960s. Achebe argued that, although English had been imposed on him, he was glad to use it as the vehicle of his literary creativity, adding: “English carries the African experience.”

While the planned introduction of Swahili as a school subject attracted a good deal of attention, there was not much reportage on the other announcements Motshekga made at the same media briefing. These included approval by the Council of Education Ministers of the introduction of two other school subjects: marine sciences and coding. Both are good choices, given the increasing importance of the ocean economy and the rise of artificial intelligence.

The ocean economy contributed R54-billion to South Africa’s gross domestic product (GDP) in 2010 and sustained about 316 000 jobs. Recent studies have indicated the GDP contribution could be as high as R177-billion by 2033, while the number of jobs in the sector could increase to about one-million.

As regards artificial intelligence, the uptake in Africa is still very low, but there is no doubt the picture will change radically in the not-too-distant future. And whetting the interest of learners through introducing them to computer coding is a step in the right direction.

Until next week, nzuri bye (that’s Swahili for ‘goodbye’). We have to get used to that language – we could soon be hearing it at every street corner in Mzansi.