In this Spotlight on Swahili, the Berkeley Language Center sits down with Dr. David Kyeu, who teaches Swahili through the Department of African American Studies. The department offers a PhD in African Diaspora Studies; currently, students are able to enroll in full-year Elementary and Intermediate Swahili classes. The Center for African Studies works hand in hand with the Department of African American Studies on campus. This year, the center welcomes new director Dr. James Davies and new associate director Dr. Duncan Omanga.
Dr. Kyeu will also be teaching a course in spring ‘26 on language and social issues in Africa, to be taught in English. You can follow Kyeu's YouTube lecture series here.
What can students expect who take Swahili classes at Berkeley?
We try to make it as communicative as possible, where we really encourage the student to be able to speak the language; we do emphasize grammar proficiency as a student progresses, but the primary stress is on the student being able to communicate in the language at every level.
The other thing that students can expect is we have a Swahili language table on a weekly basis, Thursdays from 4 to 5 on the benches of Lower Sproul Plaza. This is an opportunity for students to practice what they learn in class—native speakers and heritage speakers, students who are on campus and from around the community, get together and it’s a chance to continue speaking their language together. This semester, we have an anonymous person who is sponsoring pizza every Thursday. Students lead the table, we try to make it as student coordinated as possible.
What is something you think might surprise students about Swahili?
Swahili happens to be the de facto lingua franca of the African continent. It has 300 million speakers and is the leading African language out of the 2000+ languages that are spoken in the continent. And it is the African language that is taught by most African American U.S. institutions. When students learn Swahili, they have access to more than seven countries of east and central Africa. That is, Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, Rwanda, Burundi, South Sudan, Somalia, Malawi, and Zambia–and then there’s the Middle Eastern countries of Oman and Yemen, which both have native speakers. Swahili is listed as one of the Critical Languages by the Department of State; those are the critical languages that Americans have been encouraged to study because of security issues and American interests abroad.
When we talk about the LGBTQ+ community, Swahili is the one of the only African languages that tends to have gender neutral pronouns. Whereas in English the pronouns specify he or she, Swahili doesn’t have that. You can't tell, when someone is speaking, whether they're talking about a woman, a male figure, etc., and so it's considered a gender neutral kind of a language.
Lastly, Swahili connects with the American populace. When you look at the seven pillars of the Kwanzaa holiday, for example, they are all defined in Swahili. So it's a language that really relates to the African American community and Americans in general.
What resources are available to students interested in pursuing African studies on campus?
The Center for African Studies co-sponsors the Swahili language table, helps promote courses and events like International Swahili Day (July 7), and funds instructors through Title VI. Even now, when Title VI has been frozen, it is the Center for African Studies that is working with the Dean of Social Sciences Raka Ray to find resources to have these lecturers paid. It also sponsors the Rocca Dissertation and Pre-Dissertation Fellowships, which I recently helped one of my students apply to in order to do research in Tanzania and Kenya.
What is your favorite thing about teaching?
I would say teaching is like a calling to me. I feel like that's what I was created to do, to teach. I was initially trained as a high school teacher, and went on to get a master’s in Swahili studies and a PhD in African languages and literatures, with an emphasis in Second Language Acquisition. And with Swahili being my native language, I get to teach something that is dear to me and that I have been trained at higher learning institutions in how to teach.
My teaching philosophy is to make sure that when students are learning the language, they are also learning all the cultural nuances that come with it. You want to prepare someone who, at the end of the semester, can easily travel to Nairobi, Dar es Salaam, or Uganda, and be able to interact with native speakers of the language. I try to flavor the entire teaching of the language with lots of cultural elements so that students can feel comfortable positioning themselves in those East African African countries.
The other important thing to me in terms of teaching philosophy is tied to respecting students' limits and being able to offer accommodations, because I know students come in with different experiences and backgrounds. Students’ interests are at the very center of my teaching, because it doesn't really make any sense to just have one way of doing things for all the students that I have in my class.