Still probably not really part of anyone's daily life except as some shiny whiteness on the top of the big mlima, so the fact that they borrowed the word from Arabic is not surprising.
Yeah. Generally when I hear people talk about snow with Tanzanians, they say ice instead ("barafu") since they have more exposure to that than actual snow.
I find it quite funny that a lot of Slavic languages have a single-syllable word for "elephant" ... eg. słoń in Polish ... To me there don't seem to be enough elephants in Poland to justify this. Apparently it's probably decended from the Turkic word for lion.
along the same lines, it's pretty funny that swahili doesn't have a simple word for "zebra" (a native animal) - they just call it a "striped donkey" (non-native animal) - but we do in english..