Book review of the biography "Mfinyanzi Aingia Kasri – Siti Binti Saad, Malkia wa Taarab", written by Nasra Mohammed Hilal (2007)

Kithaka wa Mberia (b.1956) is one of the most innovative Kenyan poets. Until now he has published four collections of poems and three plays. His poems contain a strong political and social criticism, sometimes in the form of animal allegories. He condemns various acts of violence done to women, like rapes of schoolgirls or prostitution caused by poverty. Some compositions seem life-stories of real persons, others are overtly didactic and moralizing, but in all the theme of social justice is almost obsessive. Another group of poems highlights the author’s concern with his surroundings and with the “health conditions” of the Earth in general; thus, for instance, he denounces the devastation of Kenyan soil in order to get foreign currency. His love of nature makes him address affectionate verses to animals, insects and plants. Formally the poems have little in common with the poetic tradition of the Swahili coast as they are in free verse. Kithaka exhibits a rich vocabulary of botanical and zoological terms and is fond of various forms of word-playing like chiming and punning; an important role in his poetry is played by parallelism. Moreover, he introduces into Kiswahili visual poems where typography is relied upon to perform expressive effects. Kithaka wa Mberia, together with other East African contemporary poets, proves that Swahili poetry is able to express universal themes and can reach a high artistic value even without repeating traditional models.

This article will present a short story which appeared in the newspaper Mzalendo on the 15th January 1978, but it took twenty-six years before it was published in a book. Presumably it was written in the same period as both the play Kaputula la Marx and probably also as some of Kezilahabi’s poems from the second collection Karibu ndani (1988). It is a period of his most critical works. In Mayai – Waziri wa Maradhi the author blames, in a highly symbolic manner, the leading classes of his country who became rich at the expense of common citizens during ten years of Independence, symbolized by ten emaciated ghostly children.

This collection summarizes the items on society, history and culture from Krapf’s famous dictionary which may be of some interest to today’s audience. The idea of arranging the sometimes idiosyncratic Swahili for modern use came up during preparations for the Krapf Workshop held on 11 September 2007 at Fort Jesus in Mombasa.1 The lemmas found in this first comprehensive Swahili dictionary were checked against Frederick Johnson’s Standard dictionary of 1939. In addition, the dictionary by Charles Sacleux of 1939 and the revised version of Krapf’s dictionary by Harry Kerr Binns (1925) served as sources of information. With the exception of those entries which Krapf had already marked with a question mark, all others were selected, which are not found in Johnson or which are described differently or in less depth than in Krapf\''s work.:1. Introduction 1 1.1 Krapf’s spelling conventions 2 2. The inventory 7 2.1 Society, law 8 2.2 References to stories and historical events 37 2.3 Language, pronunciation, etymologies, different use according to sexes 41 2.4 Religion, superstition 44 2.5 Attitudes towards neighbouring peoples 54 2.6 Geographical and ethnic terms 55 2.7 The body (body parts, diseases, body care) 62 2.8 Sickness, handicaps, medical treatment and medicine 67 2.9 Agriculture, food (plants, trees, products) 73 2.10 Animals 97 2.11 Season, times, environment 111 2.12 Material culture 117 2.13 Measures 141 2.14 Comparison of meanings 143 2.15 Critical statements and prejudices 151 3. Proverbs and songs quoted in Johann Ludwig Krapf’s Dictionary 153 3.1 Proverbs 153 3.2 Songs 158 4. Indices 165 4.1 Index Swahili – English 165 4.2 Index English – Swahili 189 Sources 203

Vave is generally defined as a corpus of agricultural songs as they are sung and performed by Bajuni farmers - an ethnic subgroup of the Swahili - on the eve of burning the bush, a stage of slash and burn cultivation. Although the song’s main theme is agriculture and each cultivation step in particular is given attention, an analysis of the aesthetics of Vave from the viewpoint of oral literature unearths the secret and sacred dimension of Vave performance. Death, bereavement, resurrection, and spirituality are, besides agricultural cultivation, the basic aspects of the Vave. Indeed the Vave performance may be more correctly recognised as an ancient religious rite which has ancestral worship as a central issue. Although the worship of ancestors is irreconcilable with the Islamic belief system, Vave is still performed by the Muslim Bajuni farmers today. This essay attempts to outline in which way the ancestors are annually remembered, revived or actualised in the present by Bajuni farmers through the performance of an oral tradition.

This article addresses the notion of linguistic meaning with reference to Kiswahili. It focuses particular attention on meaning typology, with the assumption that a discussion of meaning types can enhance the understanding and appreciation of linguistic meaning. The discussion takes its general conceptual orientation from the approach that considers meaning as use, whereby the unit of analysis is the speech act. This is a functional view of linguistic meaning, the tenets of which are contained in functional grammar. From a broader perspective, this article distinguishes conceptual and associative meaning then proceeds to deal with the individual types. Ultimately, five types of linguistic meaning are discussed: conceptual, connotative, social, affective and collocative. From the discussion, conclusionsabout the value of the typology for defining the concept and the scope of semantics are drawn.

Newspaper serials have a long history in Tanzania. Since the privatisation of media in the 1990s, the number of newspapers and tabloids has multiplied, and serials have become abundant. I would dare to say that they are the most popular form of fiction at the moment in terms of quantity of readers. They are especially prevalent in the tabloids, where there often are more than three stories being serialised at a time. Some authors publish serials only occasionally, while there are also established serial writers such as Sultan Tamba, Faki A. Faki and Hamees M. Suba.However, the most prominent writer specialising in newspaper serials is Eric James Shigongo, who probably is also the most prolific author of popular literature of the last decade in Tanzania altogether. In his case, novel writing has reached a new quality as a well organised, apparently successful, self-owned business.

Terminological innovation has a considerable tradition in Swahili. This article takes recent terminology from the domain of information and communication technology (ICT) as a case study. It argues that, despite the principles and guidelines issued by Tanzanian language development authorities, the influence of English in developing new terms is evident. Furthermore, it shows that sometimes terms which are difficult to trace or which are related to different explanations of their origin, can achieve a broad acceptance by Swahili speakers, such as ‘tovuti’ ([web]site) or ‘tarakilishi’ (computer). Analysing terminology issued by the Open Swahili Localization Project in Dar es Salaam, aspects of loan-based translation and different strategies of creating new terminology, such as the use of the connective -a and of (new types of) composita, are discussed. Also here, the question of acceptance by the actual speakers of the language is taken into account.

Si les documents rédigés en kiswahili à l’aide des caractères arabes provenant d’Afrique de l’Est sont bien renseignés depuis longtemps, qu’il s’agisse de correspondance ou de littérature, l’existence de tels documents provenant d’Afrique Centrale, et en particulier du Congo, est encore très mal connue. Pourtant, outre les témoignages de divers observateurs ou acteurs européens des débuts de la colonisation, plusieurs documents conservés pour la plupart en Belgique ont subsisté jusqu’à nos jours. Il s’agit essentiellement de la correspondance de marchands swahilis établis dans l’ancien district des Stanley Falls, mais aussi de traités, d’échanges «diplomatiques» ou de notes personnelles, remontant essentiellement aux deux dernières décennies du 19ème siècle. Ces documents se révèlent être une source intéressante à la fois pour l’Histoire du Congo précolonial et pour l’étude diachronique du kiswahili et de son expansion géographique. / Though the existence of Swahili documents in Arabic script originating from East Africa – mainly Tanzania and Kenya – has been well documented for a long time (see for instance Büttner 1892, Allen 1970, Dammann 1993 and the recent Swahili Manuscripts Database of the SOAS), very few things regarding such manuscripts in Central Africa, and especially the Congo, have been reported up to now. However, several museums and archives in Belgium and elsewhere hold documents written in Swahili with Arabic script coming from what is today the DRC, along with other documents in the Arabic language.1 All of them date back to the two last decades of the 19th century. Most of these documents are to be found in the Historical Archives of the Royal Museum of Central Africa (MRAC), Tervuren, but some other Belgian institutions like the African Archives (AA) of the Belgian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Library of the University of Liège (ULg) and the Army Museum (MRA) in Brussels, also contain some examples of these documents. Other possible sources should be explored, like the personal archives of families whose ancestors worked in the Congo during the colonial time – most of the Swahili documents in Tervuren are personal papers belonging to former Belgian officers, which were donated to the Museum after their death – as well as the archives of Christian missionary orders. Nevertheless, nothing is known about the presence of such documents in DRC today, but we can suppose that some of them have been preserved in places like mosques, Koranic schools or personal archives.

After being for a long time in the shadow of its Tanzanian counterpart, Kenyan fiction has recently come into the foreground with writers such as Kyallo Wadi Wamitila, Rocha Chi-merah, Mwenda Mbatiah and Ken Walibora. The paper deals with his second novel Kufa kuzikana. Although Kufa Kuzikana is a powerful accusation of how ruthless ethnic feelings still inform many people from the intellectuals and top politicians to the uneducated villagers, the novel does contain a positive message as well in that it shows how true friendship can overcome ethnic and other differences and survive even in the most adverse circumstances.