In November 2021, at its 41st Session in Paris, the General Conference of UNESCO declared July 7th World Kiswahili Language Day. According to Professor Kennedy Gastorn, former Tanzanian’s Permanent Representative to the UN headquarters in New York, the day was chosen because on 7 July 1954, the Tanganyika African National Union (TANU), the ruling party of then Tanganyika, led by Mwalimu Julius Nyerere, declared Swahili as an important tool in the fight for independence.
Already in the 1950s, the United Nations established the Kiswahili language unit of United Nations Radio, and today Kiswahili is the only African language within the Directorate of the Global Communications at the United Nations.
