Josiah Kibira

Last updated
Josiah Kibira
Born
NationalityTanzanian
CitizenshipTanzanian
EducationBusiness Administration
Alma mater Metropolitan State University
Occupations
  • filmmaker
  • Scriptwriter
Known forBongoland, Tusamehe
Parent(s)Josiah Kibira and Martha Kibira

Josiah Kibira is a Tanzanian independent filmmaker.

Early life

He was born in Bukoba, Tanzania, the son of Josiah Kibira and Martha Kibira. He attended college in Lindsborg, Kansas and graduated with a degree in Business Administration. He later obtained an MBA at Metropolitan State University in Minneapolis, Minnesota. He came to the realization that no movies had been made in Swahili.

After contemplating this for several years, he wrote a script for a Swahili movie. It took him another 3 years to start making the movie. Finally, the movie Bongoland was made. According to him, the arrival of digital video cameras made it easy for independent filmmakers to produce movies cheaply.

After Bongoland, Kibira continued to write and make movies in Swahili. Tusamehe was his second movie, intended to raise awareness of the AIDS epidemic that was ravaging African countries at the time, especially his own country of Tanzania. [1]

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Swahili, also known by its local name Kiswahili, is the native language of the Swahili people, who are found primarily in Kenya, Tanzania and Mozambique. It is a Bantu language, though Swahili has borrowed a number of words from foreign languages, particularly Arabic and Persian, but also words from Portuguese, English and German. Around forty percent of Swahili vocabulary consists of Arabic loanwords, including the name of the language. The loanwords date from the era of contact between Arab slave traders and the Bantu inhabitants of the east coast of Africa, which was also the time period when Swahili emerged as a lingua franca in the region. The number of Swahili speakers, be they native or second-language speakers, is estimated to be around 80 million.

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References

  1. Thompson, Katrina Daly (2008). "Preserving East African Knowledge Through Swahili Moves: An Interview with Josiah Kibira". Ufahamu: A Journal of African Studies (34): 39.