‘The deaf, the blind and the lame: discrimination or respect?’ In this article we investigate what the assignment of these (and other) words to the KI-class means. We depart from the common explanation which says that the KI-class here signals contempt since it is not the typical class for human beings in Swahili. We then analyse the surprisingly large corpus of nouns referring to people in the KI-class and show how they got assigned to this class. This leads us to a more general statement about the meaning of a noun class. The final section is a case study of one particular word, kigego, and what it formerly stood for in Vuaso (Upare) and other societies bordering the Swahili world.

Naturally occurring dialogue is by far the most frequent manifestation of human speech and therefore has a legitimate claim to being regarded as a prime object of study in the sciences of language. Looking at the factors which determine the structure of natural dialogue, one cannot escape the conclusion that not only what is being said but also what is being inferred from what is said contributes towards determining the sequence and content of moves as well as the choice of grammatical features which are crucial for dialogue cohesion and for the interpretation of utterances in dialogue: `Constellations of surface features of message form are the means by which speakers signal and listeners interpret what the activity is, how semantic content is to be understood and how each sentence relates to what precedes follows.`

Everybody knows the Intemet by now, most of us have had a glimpse into it or use it frequently. Without doubt it offers many possibilities, like sending long documents within a very short time and without any material carrier from one computer to another or to many others. The World Wide Web (WWW) is an important means of finding information on nearly everything, the web sites are often designed attractively and many offer multi-medial information at the same time. Yet, after a time of euphoria about the possibilities people became aware that the web is very vast and one can spend hours and hours looking for something, without finding it. Roger Pfister with his `Internet for Africanists and others interests in Africa` (see the review in this issue), was a first and most useful attempt to help everybody interested in African studies to find information faster.

Review: Yakobo Lumwe: Eine Reise nach Bukoba, übersetzt und bearbeitet von Ernst Dammann, Wilhelm Fink Verlag,München 1996.

Scientists make use of the Internet for quite some time now. In the humanities it has only recently become accepted more widely. The Swiss Society of African Studies reacted sceptically when Roger Pfister first introduced his project. In. his preface, Beat Sottas, the society`s president admits that their committee was `wondering about such a project`but that finally the `initiative turned out to be highly significant at the time being.

Kiswahili language has undergone a lot of changes in the last decades especially at the lexical level. Many lexical items have been coined, adapted, borrowed or modified to express concepts that were hitherto unknown or non existent in the Swahili world view cosmology. One area that has witnessed a lot of these changes has been the area of sciences, or better put science has been a prime causer of many neologisms in this language. This eventuality has gone a long way to disprove the naive assumptions that the language has not come of age to express scientific concepts.

Some time ago I came across a tiny collection of poems called Chungu tamu by Theobald Mvungi. The author was born in Mwanga province (Kilimanjaro) probably in the Fifties, as he graduated from the University of Dar es Salaam in 1975 and gained his M.Ed. degree in Nigeria (Ibadan) in 1978. He published his first collection of poems, Raha karaha, in 1982 and his third one, Mashairiya Chekacheka, in 1995. All Mwangi`s poems deal with social problems, but only those of the second collection are formally innovative. Five of the twenty poems of this collection tell a story and I am going to investigate three of them. It is striking and quite unusual in Swahili poetry to present the narration itself as another story. However, it is not the first time that it occurs in modern Swahili poetry. In fact, for instance Kezilahabi´s poem Hadithiya kitoto (from the collection Kichomi, 1974) opens with the scene of the narrator - the grandfather - sitting close to a fire with his grandchildren who want to be told a story, while roasting birds and potatoes. The last two strophes contain grandfather´s comment, i.e. a moral message. Thus the narrative act itself is represented, as it often happens in prose fiction. But whereas in Kezilahabi it only opens or frames the main story, in Mvungi the narrator´s interferences are intermingled with the main story to such an extent that in fact two parallel stories are narrated. I will call them the frame story and the main story.

This bibliography is an update of Thomas Geider’s comprehensive bibliography of 100 pages which he published in Swahili Forum 10 (2003). Thomas Geider had almost finished it when he fell ill in April 2010. He left the manuscript when he passed away on 15 October 2010. It has been completed and edited by the editors of Swahili Forum, and comprises mainly works published between 2003 and 2009. Also included are some works published in 2001 and 2002 which came to Thomas Geider’s attention after he had completed his 2003 bibliography.

Obituary in memory of Mu'Allim Yahya Ali Omar, a Swahili scholar

Swahili literature provides us with a useful insight into the meanings of the words busara, hekima and utu. Understanding these words helps us to see the relationship between different types of wisdom, intelligence and thought as seen by Swahili speaking people.