Background: Human African Trypanosomiasis (HAT) also called sleeping sickness is an infectious disease in humans caused by an extracellular protozoan parasite. The disease, if left untreated, results in 100% mortality. Currently available drugs are full of severe drawbacks and fail to escape the fast development of trypanosoma resistance. Due to similarities in cell metabolism between cancerous tumors and trypanosoma cells, some of the current registered drugs against HAT have also been tested in cancer chemotherapy. Here we demonstrate for the first time that the simple ester, ethyl pyruvate, comprises such properties. Results: The current study covers the efficacy and corresponding target evaluation of ethyl pyruvate on T. brucei cell lines using a combination of biochemical techniques including cell proliferation assays, enzyme kinetics, phasecontrast microscopic video imaging and ex vivo toxicity tests. We have shown that ethyl pyruvate effectively kills trypanosomes most probably by net ATP depletion through inhibition of pyruvate kinase (Ki = 3.0±0.29 mM). The potential of ethyl pyruvate as a trypanocidal compound is also strengthened by its fast acting property, killing cells within three hours post exposure. This has been demonstrated using video imaging of live cells as well as concentration and time dependency experiments. Most importantly, ethyl pyruvate produces minimal side effects in human red cells and is known to easily cross the blood-brain-barrier. This makes it a promising candidate for effective treatment of the two clinical stages of sleeping sickness. Trypanosome drug-resistance tests indicate irreversible cell death and a low incidence of resistance development under experimental conditions. Conclusion: Our results present ethyl pyruvate as a safe and fast acting trypanocidal compound and show that it inhibits the enzyme pyruvate kinase. Competitive inhibition of this enzyme was found to cause ATP depletion and cell death. Due to its ability to easily cross the bloodbrain- barrier, ethyl pyruvate could be considered as new candidate agent to treat the hemolymphatic as well as neurological stages of sleeping sickness.

Die Dissertation befasst sich mit der Fragestellung der Tenazität sowie Desinfektion des Virus der Afrikanischen Schweinepest in verschiedenen Waldböden bei Kontamination durch infiziertes verendetes Schwarzwild. / The dissertation deals with the question of tenacity as well as disinfection of African swine fever virus in different types of forest soil in case of contamination by infected dead wild boar.

The aim of this article is to analyse allegories in the first four novels of the Swahili-writing author Euphrase Kezilahabi who is one of the most renowned authors in contemporary Tanzania. This analysis will be based on allegory as it is defined in literary studies. What is aimed at with this study is a hermeneutical interpretative approach to the allegories found in Kezilahabi`s early novels which shall be based on as much contexts as available: text-context, intertextual context, cultural context, historical context, only to mention the most important (cf. Mohlig 1994: 257). The text-context or co-text, however, is considered as the most reliable basis of such a study.

Saad Yahya, born in Zanzibar in 1939, studied architecture and town planning in Great Britain and in Canada; since 1968 he has lectured at the University of Nairobi. He portrays everyday life of typical inhabitants of Zanzibar and Nairobi, displaying a penetrating understanding of their problems and of their state of mind, linked with a remarkable stylistic ability. He is an acute observer who presents his characters with humour and irony, but also with a profound insight. Furthermore, in his stories, under the surface of everyday activities there is always some hidden antagonism or passion, never spelled out, but only alluded to. Several years ago Yahya sent me the manuscript of two other stories which I hoped to translate and publish in Italy, but ultimately it was not possible. I have included one of them, called Nyoko-nyoko and consisting in five typewritten pages, in the syllabus of my literary courses in Naples and in Paris. It is a rare - if not unique - Swahili story in which the main character is a Mzungu, a white man: the British governor of an imaginary East-Aftican country called Nyalia, who has to abandon his post suddenly for unspecified reasons. He regrets to must leave the country he has learned to know and to like; however, behind the mask of liberality and tolerance is hidden a self-conceited racist. The story describes his last day in Africa after a long stay.

This paper argues a case for the preparation of reading materials in Kiswahili and other African languages in order to enhance adult education in Kenya. Adult education clientele are defined as those aged over 15 who (a) were either never enrolled in primary schools or dropped out before completing and (b) `graduated` and currently participate in community extension services. Cognisance of mothertongues as the best languages to begin basic literacy is taken. However, since the literacy so acquired should be useful to the individual at both local and national levels, one needs Kiswahili for wider communication. Therefore, reading materials, especially for post literacy and adult literacy teacher training should be in Kiswahili. This will not only guard against relapsing to illiteracy and misinformation but will also alleviate the scarcity of reading materials in the face of hard economic times in Kenya.

As is well-known, there are presently several archives of old Swahili manuscripts: in Dar es Salaam, Halle and Hamburg, London etc. These collections and separate manuscripts are being studied from various points of view by both European and African scholars. Beside the vast collection of old Swahili manuscripts kept in SOAS, there is another collection of Swahili works at the British Library in London, which has been considerably expanded recently by acquisitions from Jan Knappert. There, one of the most interesting manuscripts which I have ever seen is kept. I am talking about the manuscripts (OR 4534) received in 1884 by a well-known expert of the Swahili language and literature: W.E. Taylor, who was a missionary in East Africa. In 1891 they have been acquired by the British Museum. It is a roll that is 200 cm long and 16-17 cm wide. Seven sheets, glued together, of a thick paper of special quality (2-3 sheets put together) which even resembles a kind of skin, it is skillfully written on in stable ink.

A mention of name in literature is almost always likely to recall the question Juliet posed to Romeo about his family name Montague in William Shakespeare´s Romeo and Juliet. In reading creative works we tend to identify characters basically by the names given to them. It is on this basic premise that some character analysis methods tend to define characters by taking recourse to their names and sometimes identifying them in metaphorical terms or as speaking names. Names play a very central and important role in any reading exercise and so would certainly the names given to characters be of importance to us. These are linguistic or semiotic signs that play a very crucial role in the overall linguistic structure of a literary text or its signification. Decoding of the names therefore becomes an important critical engagement in as far as it helps the reader in his deciphering of the text in which the names are. Characters´ names, as this article will show, can be used artistically to achieve a number of goals like encoding a central trait in a particular character´s signification, embracing crucial thematic motifs, ideological toning as well as even showing the particular writer´s point of view. Some of these qualities are easily lost in translation.

Mass communication through the print and the electronic media has not been spared by the post-Cold-War wind of change that is sweeping across Africa and the rest of the world. According to Wilcox (1974: 37), in 1974 over 70 percent of all the newspapers that were printed in Africa were government-owned; in the same year, almost all radio and T.V. stations were owned by government. In the changing socio-eonomic climate, however, a state monopoly of the mass media in many Sub- Saharan African countries is now a thing of the past (see for instance, Bourgault 1995). Where, for example, there used to be only one or two newspapers owned by the government or the ruling party, there now exists a plethora of privately owned competing newspapers and other publications; and where there used to be only one sycophantic radio and T. V. station owned by the government, there now exist several radio and T. V. stations, many of them privately-owned commercial broadcasters. The general philosophy behind the liberalization of the mass media is what has come to be called `the freedom of speech`. Citing the liberalization of the electronic media in Kenya, this paper argues that the liberalization of the media in many Sub-Saharan countries has not been matched by policies that encourage the entrenchment, spread and full utilization of African indigenous languages. It is further argued that the lack of media policy that favours African indigenous languages is likely to lead to negative consequences for the languages of Africa.

This study aims at studying one of the most important contemporary Kiswahili writers: Euphrase Kezilahabi. In a way this paper can be seen as a continuation of my earlier articles on the same writer. It is definitely different from the other ones though a certain thread links them: the interest in Kezilahabi`s philosophy. In this paper my interest is with two main motifs namely contemptus mundi and carpe diem. Contemptus mundi is a Latin expression for contemptible world, world as a bad place and one that is perceived contemptuously. I intend to explore the said motifs in Kezilahabi\''s prose works: Rosa Mistika, Kichwamaji, Gamba la Nyoka, Dunia Uwanja wa Fujo, Nagana and Mzingile. The latter two works are slightly short, lacking the novel length of the other four works. I do not, however, want to entangle myself in the polemics of genre as to what a novel or novella is. I will, however, regard the two as novellas at least by the virtue of their length.

Reading Mohamed´s novels Kiu (`Thirst´; 1972) and Nyota ya Rehema (`The Star ofRehema´or `The Destiny of Rehema´; 1976), one is struck by abundant use of `implication´ technique. Implication is regarded as a feature that is statistically more frequent in poetry than in prose, hence the presence of this technique in abundance in Mohamed´s idiom, renders it a quality of poetic prose. The purpose of this paper is therefore to show how various linguistic features are used as vehicle for the realisation of the implication technique used to create exponents for the semantic structure in his novels. Exponents as literary devices need not be implicit as in Mohamed`s idiom, however if used implicitly, they form an artistically engineered correlation with literary substance of the novel and gives it a certain quality that affects our `attitude´ and `judgement` towards it. Hence in this paper we hold it that the reader`s involvement in the interpretation of the novel eventually entails the decoding of the corpus for the externalisation of the literary substance. A reader who is fully involved in the interpretation and processing of implied meaning(s) in the novel, digs into its semantic structure by condation and deduction and comes out with more lasting impressions than he would if he were to deal with a less subtle or totally explicit idiom that may be regarded as plain and spoon-feeding.