What about Linguistic Liberation? The Case of Prepositions in Kiswahili Grammar

It is now 162 years since the first grammar book on Kiswahili Bantu was published. A great deal of progress has been made to improve on the descriptions of the pioneers. How adequate is the progress made and can we say that Kiswahili Bantu grammatical description is, at last, liberated? By liberation, we mean the extent to which native speakers and others who claim Kiswahili Bantu heritage in East and Central Africa have control over the grammatical description of their language. This control is called Linguistic Liberation. This paper takes a look at the perpetuation of misanalyses in Kiswahili grammatical studies and dictionaries in the name of universals of grammar. We focus on a group of so-called prepositional adverbs. We point out that in order for Kiswahili Bantu to complete its liberation, native speakers and their East and Central African stakeholders ought also to own the linguistic description of the language. In our view, to be truly liberated, Africans need to control and dictate the direction, the course of description and analyses of their languages in accordance with the internal mechanisms of these languages.