We discuss the open question of the relation between semantics and nominal class assignment in Swahili. We approach theproblem from a computational perspective, aiming first to quantify the extent of this relation, and then to explicate its nature,taking extra care to suppress morphosyntactic confounds. Our results are the first of their kind, providing a quantitativeevaluation of the semantic cohesion of each nominal class, as well as a nuanced taxonomic description of its semantic content.