Saba Saba

A public holiday today for Saba Saba (Seven Seven) Day. This commemorates the 1954 founding of the Tanganyika African National Union, the principal party involved in Tanganyika’s struggle for independence.

I resumed my Swahili lessons after recent travels. My teacher was an hour late which gave me the chance to cram all of the revision I should have done in the last four weeks into one hour. I wasn’t overly successful today and I think I’ve been very lazy in revising vocabulary.

Learning a language is chaotic but the chaos has to be embraced to avoid getting hung up on measures or a defined pathway of achieving competency in a language. As ever in my lessons, I got stuck into a complex question on prefixes rather than focus on the fact that my vocabulary is very limited. In the end Yusuf and I whipped out our previous flashcards and retraced our steps.

As it was a public holiday I treated myself to some spicy food down by the water.