CELEBRATING THE SWAZI LANGUAGE

This week is siSwati Week in Swaziland – an opportunity to celebrate Swaziland’s indigenous language.

The Times of Swaziland on Monday (18 February 2008) told readers it ‘joins the nation in celebrating our mother tongue’.

To show its commitment to the siSwati language, throughout the week it intends to publish some of the winning entries in a national schools siSwati writing competition.

Well, thanks very much Times of Swaziland, but it is being a little bit dishonest when it says how much it wants to celebrate the siSwati language. In November 2006 it closed down indefinitely the only newspaper in Swaziland in the siSwati language. It did this because the newspaper, called Tikhatsi TeMaswati, wasn’t making the African Echo, the company that owns the Times, any money.

Ever since its closure, people living in the rural areas of Swaziland (and that’s about 75 percent of the kingdom’s population of nearly one million people) have been asking for its return.

According to the African Media Barometer – Swaziland 2007 report, published by the Media Institute of Southern Africa (MISA) Swaziland Chapter, Tikhatsi TeMaswati was a translation of articles already published in English in the Times. Had it carried original reports in siSwati it might have done better, the report stated.

It goes on to say that its main obstacle was attracting advertisers who assume people reading siSwati are poor and are, therefore, not worth advertising to.

That’s true. To make money a newspaper has to be attractive to advertisers. Just about every newspaper in the free world gets more of its income from selling advertising space than from the price people pay to buy it.

In Swaziland, about 70 percent of the population have an income of less than one US dollar a day (E7) and most of these people live in the rural areas. They have no money to spend so it follows that advertisers are not interested in them. If advertisers aren’t interested then a newspaper company is not going to make money by supplying poor people with a newspaper.

That’s how it works in Swaziland. The only newspapers published in the kingdom are in the English language and they circulate mostly in urban areas, which is where people with money live. Very few people in the kingdom are what you could call rich, but there are enough people with some money to attract advertisers.

Commercial companies whose only real interests are in making profits will not produce loss-making newspapers, even if there is a demand for them from poor people.

So, the Times can congratulate itself all it wants about supporting the siSwati language, but if it is genuine in this support it will open up Tikhatsi TeMaswati again.