Wananchi: In Search of Earning a Living

In Kiswahili, the East African language spoken by black African people, wananchi means ‘the ordinary people’ or ‘the public.’ The origin in Kiswahili of wananchi, the plural of mwananchi is ‘inhabitant or citizen.’ Kiswahili is the African language spoken, used, and understood by majority of Africans in sub-Saharan Africa. In the view of Arthur Livington, who wrote the introduction section of Gaetano Mosca’s Elementi di Scienza Politica (1939), his “the plain man” fits Kiswahili’s mwananchi.