KiNgome is a dialect of Kiswahili spoken in the nothern part of Mafia Island. KiNgome is spoken by almost all categories of people in the Ngome area.

Remarks on aspects of taarab such as its history, nature, definition, and change appear prominently and repeatedly in nearly every previous study of the subject. Some of these remarks, however, serve more to expose a clash of interests rather than provide untainted facts about its conceptualisation. This esseay aims at revisiting the notion of taarab in an attempt to concretise its conceptualisation on the basis of various variables that affect change in its structure. The relevant variables are convergence, divergence, linguistic constrains, formal conventions, spontaneity and preparedness in composition, actualisation and performance, instrumentation (i. e. number of instruments and how they are played), the art of vocalisation, the performer/ audience divide, stage organisation, setting, occasion, functions and media influences. For the purpose of avoiding much attention to every category of taarab, however, we prefer to take `group-styles`- hence our concentration on three phases: the period of the inception of taarab in Zanzibar, the period prior to 1905 through the 1920s up to the 1940s when the phonograph record and then the sound film was introduced, from the 1950s to the 1960s when the radio was introduced, and from the 1970s todate - the period of the impact of the tape-recorder, video-recorder, TV - and most recently the period of the influence of satellite television. Our analysis is based on theoretical conceptions of genres by Dubrow (1982), Fowler (1991), Finnegan (1976) and Okpewho (1992) in written literature and `orature`.

In this paper I discuss the distribution of the so-called stem marker -ku- in Swahili, which is found with some, mostly monosyllabic verbs when used with certain tense morphemes. After introducing the data, I show that there are three potential analyses to explain the data, which I discuss in turn. Two of these analyses are phonological in nature and relate the distribution of -ku- to stress assignment. The first stress related analysis, which I call the `prevent-stress`rule is popular in textbooks and teaching manuals of Swahili (e.g. Ashton 1944, Russell 1996, Maw 1999), but turns out to be wrong. According to the second, more satisfactory stress rule, first proposed by Meinhof (1910a, 1910b, 1933), -ku- is deleted throughout except in stressed syllables and before vowels. While this analysis provides a sufficient diachronic account of the distribution of -ku-, I provide an alternative synchronic analysis, according to which the distribution of -ku- results from a number of alternative lexical entries for the relevant verbs.

The present paper discusses the results of a survey conducted in order to receive an answer to the question posed in the title, i. e. how directives are formulated in Swahili in terms of the directness level of the utterance, considering the mutual relationship between the interactants. The data corpus on which I have based my study comes from 82 Swahili-speaking Tanzanian students.

An update of Swahili bibliography and listing of articles of former issues of the Swahili Forum.

Kiswahili hat ein doppeltes System der nominalen Klassifikation. Das erste System ist das aus dem Bantu (Niger-Congo) bekannte System der konkordierenden nominalen und \"pronominalen\" Präfixe; das zweite, jüngere System gründet sich auf das Bedeutungsmerkmal [belebt]. Die grammatische Kategorie NUMERUS (SINGULAR::PLURAL) gilt nur im zweiten System; innerhalb des ersten Systems ist die Bildung der Nominalpaare, z .B. mtulwatu, ein derivationeller Prozeß und bezieht Konkordanz sich ausschlieBlich auf die Kategorie KLASSE.

This paper presents a description of sentential negation in Kiswahili and attempts a partial analysis of sentential negation in Kiswahili within the Principles and Parameters framework, in particular, following Pollock\''s (1989) proposal to split IP into several functional categories including NegP. The main claim is that negation mruking in Kiswahili is an instance of negation projection, NegP. The main evidence for this is found in relative clauses and conditional clauses where negation blocks I -to-C movement. The paper is organized into 5 sections. Basic theoretical assumptions are outlined in Section 1. Section 2 presents a description of the basic facts about four strategies of expressing sentential negation in Kiswahili and highlights problems that the data raise. Section 3 discusses the interaction between negation and relative marker. In Section 4, the location of NegP in IP is proposed. Section 5 presents some general conclusions and summarizes questions for further research.

To refer to the origin of taarab as a direct importation of Egyptian music by the Arab upper class (Topp 1994:153) is a plausibility without solid evidence. To define it as a style of music played for entertainment at weddings and other festive occasions all along the Swahili Coast (153) is to exclude other styles of music, indeed played for entertainment at weddings and other festive occasions all along the Swahili Coast. To say that taarab contains all the features of a typical `Indian Ocean music`, combining influences from Egypt, the Arabian peninsula, India and the West with local musical practices (153) is apparently true but does not adequately capture the ambiguities and complexities of its protean nature. Refening to taarab as the Swahili popular `salon` music whose song may be recorded or, as often is the case, orally transmitted (King`ei 1992:29) is misleading, for taarab is not always `salon` music and the method and process of creating and transmitting a song in taarab is not the same as that of other forms of African music. To state that taarab has transcended its local Swahili boundaries to be consumed in other communities including other cities in East and Central Africa (Ntarangwi 1998: 150) is a valid statement from a point of view of media, change and spread, but still leaves out a lot to be said. Taarab, like so many complex living things, refuses to be thrust into neat bags or squeezed into terse all-embracing definitions. It is an ongoing process whose form(s) are amorphous, assuming different structures, roles, functions and epithets triggered by a number of factors. That notwithstanding - whatever forms, role and function taarab exhibits at different stages, its making consists of five major components or processes: the composition of the lyric, the composition of musical patterns, the extemporized performance of its song, instrumentation and audience.

This article deals with the communicative uses of the printed wrap cloth kanga. Specifically I will show how the kanga is constituted as a communicative sign and is at the core of ambiguation processes that are pervasive to this communicative genre. Because of its high degree of ambiguity the question arises whether we can, for communication by way of kanga, still speak of communication in any sense. In my opinion, we can only do so if it is possible to analyze the communication process within existing models of communication. Starting from the hypothesis that the kanga indeed has communicative potential communication is understood as social interaction, whereby the focus is not solely on meanings in a pragmatic or semantic sense, but rather on social meaning, i.e. the negotiation of relationships between the interactants in an area of tension between individual, social and cultural interests (within which meaning in a linguistic sense does play a role, too) (Anderson & Meyer 1988, Burgoon et aL 1996). This will be shown in the fust part of the analysis. In the second part of this article I will describe and explain the role of the medium kanga within this process of ambiguation. This article is based on material collected during two field periods in 1994/ 1995 and 1996 in Mombasa and, from 1995 onwards, in various archives in the Netherlands and Switzerland.

Once more we can offer our readers some further titles of the Swahili- related research literature, some brand new in publication, others already out since years, yet still not yet put on record for the wider world of Swahilists. Our call for bibliographical references was hardly responded to by the readers of Swahili Forum VII and other possible contributors except for one scholar who much prefers to be `in consultation with` a certain other scholar. Therefore we once more would like to draw your attention to communicate your articles, books and other resources on Swahili studies to us so that the bibliographical section of the next Swahili Forum will be a treasure house again. Atiya koko wangue koma (Tiuow a fruit stone into the tree and you may bring down a doum-fruit). For the present issue we present all the titles which we happened to come across during one year of observation.