HAKUNA MATATA

Means no worries… sort of. You have all seen the Lion King. Great story (although I will readily admit that I cried tears of grief and terror when Mufasa was brutally crushed to death by a stampede of Wildebeest; bit traumatic for a three year old) and great songs make one of Disney’s finest latter day productions. There also some words of Swahili used in the film that was inspired by the great African savannahs of the Serengeti and Masai Mara in Tanzania and Kenya. Rafiki the wise Mandrill is your friend in the lingua franca of East Africa and Simba is simply a lion. But hakuna matata...

“I am porter rafiki, hakuna matata hakuna matata. I am porter.”

I have been in Tanzania for almost two months and this is the first time I had heard this phrase, either from a Tanzanian to a Tanzanian, or to a tourist. I managed to buy a ticket for the Zanzibar ferry without any unwanted help, but now after I asked where to take my bicycle onto the ferry an unsolicited helper took my bicycle without asking and there was a feeling of inevitability about the scene. When we got to the ferry entrance my porter repeated again “Hakuna Matata” and then asked for 20,000 shillings ($10) for an unnecessary favour. I gave him 3,000 when 2,000 produced a hangdog expression, but I have developed a deep suspicion that hakuna matata really means gimme gimme.

And so it proved to be. On Zanzibar itself I went to see an old Omani mosque that was badly neglected, covered in moss and badly discoloured and cracked from weather damage. Two men lounging in an unmarked shack assured me, “Hakuna Matata, we are official hakuna matata, we are official hakuna matata,” then charged me over two dollars to see a ruin that nature was retaking in a country where a meal can cost as little as fifty cents. I should have negotiated the price or flat out refused to see this shabby monument, but the cheek of it and the use of this fabled ‘no worries’ just made me laugh. I handed over the cash and tried to explain my skepticism for this phrase, but they were not listening in the slightest.

So what was this phrase that Tanzanians appeared only to utter to tourists as they ripped them off? A Zimbabwean friend told me it was ‘Kitchen Swahili,’ a bastardised and ungrammatical version of the language spoken in Kenya. A quick scan of the internet and Google Translate reveals that it roughly translates as ‘There is no troubles here’ (although bizarrely ‘matata’ as a stand alone word in Google Translate comes back as ‘dreadful’).

But still nobody says it. I was then informed that the more common phrase was ‘Hamna Shida’ and I started to pick this out of people’s conversations with my extremely limited Swahili (greetings, food and numbers seem to help me get around OK). Finally in Arusha, the largest town near the plains of the Serengeti, a man saw me looking for directions on my bicycle and asked me “You looking for safari? Hakuna Matata rafiki.” I snorted in derision and told him that was tourist nonsense and that he should speak Tanzanian and not Kenyan Swahili. Unsurprisingly, he was not really listening and started vigorously protesting that the Kenyans learnt their Swahili from its birthplace in Tanzania. True, but besides the point, so I just rode off laughing.

Still my Tanzanian friends’ attempts to squeeze a few pennies out of me were not the most egregious abuses of the word. There was a hostel in Malawi called ‘Hakuna Matata’ run by a virulently racist South African man. He would openly declare his contempt and hatred for black Africans and Arabs, while using a phrase from a mixed Bantu-Arab language as an advertising slogan for his business.

So if you are in the area and someone utters the phrase, put on your cynic’s hat. You can feel smug about your meagre language skills and see through the attempts at phoney sincerity by someone who wants your shillings. And for your future and hypothetical thanks, I say hamna shida.

Marcus Macdonald is currently riding a push bike across Africa and is sending dispatches from the field.