muafrika:
I agree. You just need to spend time with coastal neighbouring tribes pokomo, Taita, Mijikenda tribes are closely related to Swahili linguistically. Then consider other far flung tribes like Zulu who share words with Swahili.

Are you kenyan (from the coast) ?

Can't remember who said this but Swahili isn't an amalgam of Bantu and Arabic, it has a Bantu core, the only thing Arabic about it is it used to be written in the Arabic script and it has quite a number of bantunized Arabic loan words of technical terms and other concepts not found within Africa at the time of the interaction (e.g talak-divorce becomes talaka, qisas-revenge becomes kisasi, qariib-near becomes karibu, muhandis-engineer becomes mhandisi). In fact English is more Latin than Swahili is Arabic, so the grammar, sentence structure, proverbs, etc are Bantu. There are several tribes in coastal Kenya known as the Mijikenda whose languages are mutually intelligible with Swahili. Africans need to educate themselves about this, this Arabic-Bantu mixture propaganda was started by European scholars who thought that black people couldn't be as advanced as the Swahili were at the time.

Yes the Bantus interacted with the Arabs but the population was and still remains predominantly African Bantu. When the first Arabs landed in East Africa (circa 300-700 AD) they met the Bantu Wangozi people (from Southern Somalia and coastal Kenya) who spoke Kingozi, those were the first Swahili people. So when they landed on one of the islands, they sought to know who inhabited those lands and the Wangozi people told them: Sisi ni wa siwa hili which means, we are of this island, so wa-siwa-hili (of-island-this) became the name that the Arabs called these people. Western scholars say that swahili derives from the Arab word sahil or sahel which means island, but the Bantu argument is much more satisfactory. The Arabs couldn't advance inland because of hostile trbes like the Kalenjin, Maasai and the Kikuyu. Due to the success of the language in trading with the Arabs, the language spread south throughout the East African coast and since many tribes spoke similar languages, they decided to adopt it, leading to the death of many languages at the coast, most of those tribes have now completely assimilated into that culture. So the Omani Arabs who had already assimilated with the Swahili (they barely looked like Arabs) controlled the city states (Lamu, Malindi, Mombasa, Kilwa, Dar-es-Salaam, etc) along the large coastal strip from Zanzibar due to its strategic location, you won't find this in many western scholarly journals/publications cause many African scholars from East Africa are choosing to write authentic Swahili history in the Swahili language.



For the Zanzibar-Tanganyika union, it was possible because the people in the mainland already spoke Swahili and shared similar cultures (the coastline from Somali's Kismayu to Northern Mozambique, parts of North western Madagascar and the Comoros islands harbours the Swahili people) and due to the politics of power, the smaller island which is quite close to the mainland had to be absorbed into the union after independence. The leaders in the mainland didn't want to have to deal with the aristocrats who were more pro-Arab in Zanzibar so they had to possess the island by force.

In East Africa we have the East African Community which aims to be like the EU, but Tanzania is stalling on this issue because she also belongs to SADC. The community is looking to do away with visas and to cross the borders you only have to have your ID. Currently we are composed of Kenya, Uganda, Rwanda, Burundi, Tanzania and possibly South Sudan and Somalia. Also the governments of these countries are looking to make Swahili Education compulsory, a state enjoyed by only Kenya and Tanzania. The EAC has a government, a court, a president, ministers and judges and even an anthem. Tanzania are also looking to do away with teaching in English and teaching it as a second language, however Swahili doesn't have as large a vocabulary, so it may take decades to achieve that.

As for the Somalis, currently the whole Somalia territory is composed of Somaliland, Jubaland, Puntland and the Mogadishu controlled territory, so it isn't even a united republic as we speak. Further the Somalis are found in Kenya, Ethiopia and Djibouti/Eritrea, so IMO I think that the Al-Shabaab and their warring clan counterparts still lay claim over these foreign-owned territories, they are large territories although they are semi-arid regions, so while tribalism escapes them, they suffer from religious extremism and a somewhat "racial superiority complex". A significant number of Somalis, Ethiopians, Djiboutians, Eritreans and Northern Sudanese or people from the horn suffer from this complex, whereby they believe that they are better than their neighbouring Bantus and Nilotes, or any other group with similar customs, due to issues like religion, culture, slavery and even beauty. This is East Africa in a nutshell, but we are still soldiering on in the spirit of pan-africanism.