Standard Swahili enabled communication in a wide array of situations: it facilitated political cooperation between anti-apartheid fighters from South Africa and their Tanzanian military instructors and continues to give members of the African American community a sense of connection to their homeland.
[1] The first stage of Swahili standardisation was carried out by the Universities' Mission to Central Africa, which was later continued by the specialised organisations such as The Inter-Territorial Language Committee and the East African Literature Bureau.
In 1960-1990s, the Swahili literature had two philosophical schools: a traditionalist one, whose proponents were inspired by the old poetic forms, and a progressive one, that sought the creation of new free verse poetry.
[1] Although both sides unquestionably saw it as a colonial creation, the progressivists such as Wilfred Whiteley, Ireri Mbaabu, Shihabuddin Chiraghdin, Mathias Mnyampala, Rocha Chimerah and David Massamba championed Standard Swahili as a tool of intercultural communication and nation-building.
[1] Their opponents such as Abdallah Khalid, John Mugane, Alamin Mazrui and Ibrahim Noor Shariff criticised it as an artificial imposition with a questionable history.
[10] The UMCA published numerous handbooks for teaching the language with the help of the educated locals and former slaves whom the mission housed despite their inability to convert these Muslims to Christianity.
[13] The most prominent of the interlocutors was Abd al Aziz al-Amawi, a Muslim scholar, qadi and faqih who helped the UMCA with the translations (especially the Gospel of Luke) and debated them about theology.
[14] Others were Zanzibari men named Kassim, Ali, Hamisi wa Kai, Masasa and Muhammed bin Khamis who conducted field research for the missionaries by asking locals whether they understood particular words and phrases.
[31] The work of the Commission drew criticism ranging from disagreements with the Latin basis of the orthography to animosity to the idea that Europeans should be involved in language planning in Africa.
[40] After TANU's head Julius Nyerere became the first president of Tanzania, he promoted the Elimu ya Kujitegemea initiative which established universal basic education and advanced literacy—both in Swahili.