Kikongo-Kituba

Kikongo-Kituba, also called Kikongo ya Leta orKileta (“the state’s Kikongo”), Kikongo ya bula-matari or Kibula-matari (“the stone-breaker’s speech”), Ikele ve (“be not,” in the infinitive), Mono kutuba (“I say”), or (by linguists) Kituba, according to some linguists, a creole language of Central Africa that evolved out of the contact between Kikongo-Kimanyanga and other Bantu languages in western Democratic Republic of the Congo and southern Republic of the Congo. Kimanyanga is the Kikongo dialect of Manyanga, which was a centre for precolonial trade routes that extended from the Atlantic Ocean to the interior, past Kinshasa, the present-day capital of the Democratic Republic of the Congo. The dialect was used as the trade language.

The initial syllable ki- in the various names for the language is the Bantu prefix that denotes instruments and languages. Two of Kikongo-Kituba’s alternative names, Kileta and Kibula-matari, allude to the circumstances of the creole’s development in the late 19th century. At that time, it became associated with the colonial administration and the builders of the railroad extending from the coast to Kinshasa, whose work involved blasting rocks. The colonial administrators hired workers from all over Central Africa for this project. While appropriating Kimanyanga as their lingua franca, the workers unwittingly modified it into a new language variety. During the same period, as they expanded their rule, the colonial administrators took Kimanyanga-speaking auxiliaries with them to other parts of the interior. The dialect quickly evolved into the vernacular of new colonial posts and trade centres, the precursors of towns where the restructured variety, Kituba, would function as a vernacular.

In contrast, the name variants Ikele ve and Mono kutuba allude to the fact that Kituba’s verbal forms are less agglutinating and invariant, lacking subject-agreement prefixes, than they are in the ethnic Kikongo vernaculars, especially Kikongo-Kimanyanga. For instance, Ngé/Béto kéle dia ‘You/We are eating’ (literally, ‘You/We be eat’) in Kituba corresponds to U-/Tu-t á-dí-á ‘You/We [progressive]-eat-[final vowel]’ in Kimanyanga.

Having developed primarily from contacts among Bantu-speaking peoples, Kituba raises interesting questions about the extent of structural homogeneity in the Bantu language family. Kituba is now one of the four major indigenous lingua francas, known also as “national languages,” in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Like the others, it is also spoken as a vernacular in urban centres. As with other African lingua francas, it is part of a stratified repertoire of languages in which it enjoys more prestige than the indigenous ethnic vernaculars but less than the colonial official language (in this case French).