A Walt Disney trademark on “hakuna matata”, a Swahili phrase meaning “no worries”, is stirring up controversy in Africa where a petition demanding the US entertainment company rescind its intellectual property is rapidly gaining signatures.
The petition on the change.org website likens the trademark on hakuna matata, the title of a song in the 1994 Disney animation The Lion King, “to colonialism and robbery”.
Westerners have for centuries exploited people and raw materials from Africa, say supporters of the petition, which has gathered more than 100,000 signatures. Africans, they say, are drawing the line at language. Shelton Mpala, an activist who started the campaign, said Swahili speakers were “shocked” at Disney’s actions.
Swahili, a Bantu language infused with words from Arabic and more properly known as Kiswahili, is a lingua franca for up to 150m people in Africa’s Great Lakes region. It is spoken in Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda, the Democratic Republic of Congo and pockets of Mozambique and South Africa.
Although the Disney trademark was granted in 2003, the controversy has gained force recently because of next year’s planned Disney release of a computer-animated remake of The Lion King, starring Beyoncé, Seth Rogan and Chiwetel Ejiofor.
Several newspaper op-eds and blog posts have been written in east Africa in recent weeks, with some Kenyans even fretting whether they could say hakuna matata in the street without being tracked down by Disney’s lawyers, according to Patrick Gathara, a cartoonist and commentator.
Kenya’s most famous novelist, Ngugi wa Thiong’o, has added weight to the controversy, wondering aloud on Facebook what to call Disney’s legal manoeuvre, “Language-Piracy? Kiswapiracy, appropriation or just good old-fashioned exploitation?”
Reached by phone in the US, where he is professor of comparative literature at the University of California, Irvine, Mr Ngugi said: “It is appropriating a proverb in common collective use like ‘a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush’.” Using an everyday expression “was different from developing your own phrase, like ‘Just Do It’,” he said, referring to the Nike slogan.
According to statistics from Box Office Mojo, The Lion King film has made $968m worldwide. Forbes said the franchise, including the successful stage production, had grossed $8.1bn, more than all the Star Wars films combined.
Disney denied its trademark would prevent ordinary use. “Disney’s registration for Hakuna Matata, which was filed in 1994, has never and will not prevent individuals from using the phrase,” a spokesman said. “For many years, trademarks have been registered for popular words and phrases such as ‘Yahoo!’, ‘Vaya con Dios (Go with God),’ ‘Merry Christmas’ and ‘Seasons Greetings’ without impeding the use of these phrases and words in any cultural way.”
Intellectual property lawyers said Disney’s trademark covered only use of the catchphrase on T-shirts to prevent adulteration of the Lion King brand.
Liz Lenjo, an intellectual property lawyer at Kikao Law in Nairobi, defended Disney’s trademark, saying it protected the company’s creative use of the phrase for the particular purpose of clothing. A Kenyan company, she said, could equally trademark the phrase “Good Afternoon, Sir” if it had established it as a brand, say for a chain of coffee shops.
Christine Mungai, a writer, said she happened to be wearing a non-Disney T-shirt with a hakuna matata logo when the FT called. “If I get on a flight and travel to the US with the T-shirt I am wearing today, am I walking into a possible trademark violation?” she asked. “It worries me when corporations have so much power.”
Disney is not the only company to have trademarked hakuna matata. Tim Maggs, a chiropractor in Schenectady County in New York state, has a range of “children’s chewable fruit and veggie multivitamins” called Hakuna Matata. On the company’s website, Mr Maggs says the name came from a Kenyan running team that competed in marathons in his area in the 1990s.
There is also the Hakuna Matata Weddings & Events company based in Delray Beach, Florida — “Our motto: We mean no worries for your wedding/event day!” — and a Hakunamatata Spa and hotel outside Johannesburg in South Africa.
Ms Lenjo said Swahili speakers should be proud its influence had spread so far. It is commonly said of the language’s supposed bastardisation in its march across east Africa, “Swahili was born in Zanzibar, grew up in Tanzania, fell sick in Kenya, died in Uganda and was buried in Congo.” Now, according to some speakers, it has been stolen in California.
