Hakuna Matata

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“Hakuna Matata” on a motorboat in front of Zanzibar .

Hakuna Matata is a saying from the African language Swahili . Literally translated it means “there are none” (hakuna) “problems / difficulties” (matata) , or more freely “everything in the best order”. Matata also stands for palaver, brawl or argument.

Definition and history

The saying is especially by the Walt Disney - Cartoons The Lion King and the subsequent animated series Timon & Pumbaa become famous. Hakuna Matata is the title of a song that is performed in the film and also in the musical based on it by the characters Timon and Pumbaa . The lyrics of the song were written by Tim Rice , Elton John composed the music. In the American Film Institute in 1998 compiled list of the 100 best American film songs ranked Hakuna Matata at No. 99. The on VHS , DVD and Blu-ray Disc published the third part of the animated film The Lion King 1½ , in which the characters Timon and Pumbaa played the leading roles, was marketed in the German-speaking area under the title The Lion King 3 - Hakuna Matata .

The idiom has been used in African songs before, for example in the French film Der Buschpilot (L'africain) from 1983. In the meantime, the slogan is being marketed as a leitmotif in the Kenyan tourism industry to propagate that one can also go on vacation in African countries without any problems. Thus, this formulation is also common in the movie Paradise: Love by Ulrich Seidl before, in which the female sex tourism is discussed.

The saying Hakuna Matata first appeared in the West in the form of the Swedish comic series Bamse in the mid-1980s, in which the first words of Brumma , Bamse's daughter , are "Hakuna Matata", which no one except Skalman understands. This made it a secret motto between Brumma and him. So the sentence appeared several times in this cartoon series.

In the 21st century, the phrase found its way into German youth language : The band Genetikk uses "Hakuna Matata" for example in their rap song DNA. When they voted for the youth word in 2013 , Hakuna matata took fifth place after Babo , fame , dignified and in your face .

Individual evidence

  1. Peter Scholl-Latour: Murder on the great river: A quarter of a century of African independence. dtv, 1991, ISBN 3-423-11058-9 , p. 30.
  2. AFI's 100 Years… 100 songs . Archived from the original on August 14, 2006. Retrieved August 15, 2006.
  3. Federal Patent Court, decision of October 28, 2014 - 27 W (pat) 536/14 ( Federal Patent Court ).
  4. www.jugendwort.de