Language and Law in Tanzania

For three years work has been in progress by a committee in Dar es Salaam on the compilation of a list of Swahili equivalents for legal expressions in order that the Swahili translation of existing statutes and the drafting in Swahili of new statutes could proceed apace. Professor A. B. Weston, Dean of the Law School in Dar, has described this project in the Journal of the Institute of Swahili Research, Vol. 35/2, September, 1965. In December, 1961, the Tanzania Minister of Education called together a committee of Swahili “experts”, which also included expatriates experienced in law and administration, and one of the central recommendations in the report of this committee was that a state language corporation should be set up, one of whose first committees should be charged with the task of compiling a Swahili vocabulary of legal words and phrases. For reasons not explained by Professor Weston, the committee's report failed to gain official sanction so the Minister of Justice at the time, the late Sh. Amri Abedi, formed his own committee in August, 1963, to compile “a law dictionary” in Swahili. Whether or not the Minister's action received official sanction is not clear, but work undertaken with the leadership of the Minister of Justice could not fail to have some value at least in defining the linguistic situation more clearly in relation to the expression of legal terms in the Swahili language.