[Kenny Bunk]

Swahili is a lingua franca, that is it is a pidgin potpourris of Arabic,Indian, French, English,Portuguese and what-not based on Arabic grammar up to a point. It's like other made-up languages in that it's very easy to get into, but turns into the real thing as you get more into it. r Read local papers and you'll have to study it like any other language.

People in Kenya mostly but NOT ALL speak Swahili (Kiswahili). The Masai would have your guts for garters if you tried it on them. The Luo, the Kikuyu, the Kamba, the Luhya tribes, are pretty much tri-lingual in that they speak English of a sort, Swahili, and their native language.

Swahili is pronounced sort of like Italian or Spanish with its "Rs" and vowels, etc., You can actually learn a lot from Berlitz on the flight over. Rosetta Stone? Finish that and you'll be talking like a native in two weeks. (Well OK, 6)

A good start for me? Tarzan Comic Books. You laugh? Twiga=Giraffe, Simba=Lion, Tembo=Elephant, Toto=Child, etc. E.G. Pain=Inaringa Sample Swahili Sentence. Ma tumbo inaringa. "My stomach hurts." "chest"= Matitty. NSS. Hard to take altogether seriously. We ain't talking Latin here.

[Kenny Bunk]

Pardon the digression. Meant to say spent years in Eastv Africa (OK 2) and never heard of Kwanzaa. Perhaps I should go back and introduce it. Believe it or not, the young men (much to the disgust of their elders)are unbelievably into American ghetto “culture,” so maybe they could rap about it.