3 - Many paths lead into the forest: Historical spread and synchronic variation of Western Swahili (from 1850 to the present)

In 1830, Arab-Zanzibaris moved from Tabora in present-day Tanzania north and northwest to the royal courts in present-day Uganda, establishing trading networks around the kingdoms of Rwanda and Burundi, with Swahili as the main medium of communication. Beginning in the mid-1850s, these Swahili-speaking traders moved far into the interior of the continent, establishing trading centers in present-day DRC. I trace these different movements and explain how the stunning synchronic variation we find today along the western periphery is related to processes of expansion and diffusion initiated by different actors over the course of only one century (1830-1930). It is necessary to show how all these varieties actually evolved from the same Zanzibari varieties. The synchronic diversity found in this variationist setting today reflects the complex socio-political events and major ruptures in the age of enslavement, imperialism, and emerging colonialism. I plan to show that the narrated "story of Swahili" (Mugane 2015) is often more complex than linguistic overviews show – and that crucial events in the interior are often blurred, ignored or left out of these coastal-focused narratives. The spread and diffusion of Swahili throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to the present day, with the language's expansion to Kinshasa in western DRC in the mid-1990s, can serve as a useful showcase for the dynamics of multilingual ecologies in Central and East Africa.