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.

It is a fact that modern science and technology from the west has reached Africa through European languages. Historically, these languages have also served as the vehicles of formal education in Africa to the exclusion of Swahili and other local languages. The deficiency of African languages such as Swahili in scientific and technical registers is both artificial and historically understandable. Secondly, it is easily remediable given that the basic core of the said vocabulary is shared and international in nature (Alexandrie, 1961 ). Therefore such a deficiency should present no barrier to Swahili serving as a medium of instruction in higher education. Whereas English, German and French can boast of self-sufficiency in literature in all fields of study, Swahili is a relatively much younger language of education and lacks literature even in the most basic aspects of the language itself. This situation often forces lecturers in the universities teaching Swahili to undertake `translation´ of concepts or even loan words in order to communicate with their students. Therefore, quite often, lecturing in the Swahili medium entails being able to translate from English into Swahili because most of the material to be taught is sourced from English original publications. As far as the use of Swahili in teaching natural sciences and other technical subjects at the tertiary level is concerned, Chimera (1998) suggests that this should be done gradually as the language grows and develops in its technical domains. If Swahili is to develop and modernise, it has to be more liberal in expanding its technical and scientific domains. The two registers should more or less be of comparable size as is the case with English (Chimera 1998: 37). However, the question that naturally arises here is, how is this ideal to be achieved? Perhaps, by deciding to teach linguistics and literature in Swahili, East African universities want to face the terminological challenge and solve the problems as they occurred. After decades of experimenting, the time has come for all stakeholders to come to terms with the problem.

I his paper examines the music and career of Siti binti Saadi, a famous taarab musician who performed in Zanzibar during the 1920s and 1930s. Relying on four distinctive types of evidence: her recorded music, written documentation produced in East Africa, interviews with men and women who heard her perform and records of company executives I compare perspectives regarding the source of power and authority attributed to her voice as well as the meaning of her music. Siti binti Saadi was the first East African to have her voice captured and reproduced on 78 rpm gramophone disks. The production of these records enhanced her status and imbued her voice with a sense of authority that it otherwise may never have attained. Written histories of taarab, particularly those authored in the 1950s and 1960s, often memorialize her as literally, `giving voice to the voiceless,´ allowing the voice of East Afiica to be heard internationally.

In old Swahili tendi and homiletic poems about 50% of vocabulary is of Arabic origin (Bertoncini 1973), and besides single words, they include noun phrases or even whole Arabic sentences. In order to prove my point, I will discuss some verses taken from the Utendi wa Shujaka by one Hasan bin Ali from Lamu. The only extant manuscript of this epic poem in 295 stanzas was brought to Germany in 1854 by Ludwig Krapf and is kept in the Library of the Orientalistic Society in Halle. The poem is written in the Lamu dialect with many archaic features, like the incomplete palatalization of KI, the demonstratives in S- and others. But what is striking is the great amount of Arabic phrases and whole sentences, to the extent that we may perhaps speak of a case of code-switching. In fact, several verses of the poem cannot be understood properly without some knowledge of the main features of Arabic grammar, such as verb conjugation (both perfective and imperfective), verb forms (or classes), active and passive participles, noun inflection (masculine and feminine, broken plurals, construct state), personal, relative and possessive pronouns, prepositions and their combination with enclitic pronouns, numerals, conjunctions and particles, as well as word order.

What are the visions of gender identity that emerge in contemporary Swahili women`s writing? How are gender relations negotiated? How are the attendant notions of `femininity´ and `masculinity´ defined? How does gender identity implicate issues of power, agency and authority? These and other questions I intend to discuss for three plays by Tanzanian and Kenyan women authors: Heshima Yangu (1974) and Nguzo Mama (1982) by Penina Muhando and Mama Ee (1987) by Ari Katini Mwachofi. The theoretical focus of my analyses is stimulated by the interdisciplinary dialogue between feminist theory, cultural studies, and narrative poetics on narrative identity, in particular literary configurations of gender identities and relations. This collaboration proceeds from the premise that any verbal or performative expression of identity already intertwines narrative and identity by representing an individual subjectivity, a `life story´ (see for example Lieblich & Josselson 1984). Narratives are a way `of making sense´ out of seemingly incoherent experiences, and even the lived life is a `storied life´(Ochberg 1984), a telling or performance of a story.

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.

Watumishi wa Taasisi ya Mambo ya Kiafrika ya Chuo Kikuu cha Humboldt walipotayarisha kuhama kwa taasisi yao kutoka Reinhardtstrasse mwaka 1995, boksi la jivu ilipatikana ndani ya kabati la chuma. Ndani yake zilihifadhiwa nyaraka za Kiswahili na Kiarabu zilizoandikwa kwa hati za Kiarabu. Kufuatana na lugha na maelezo yalioyoongezwa nyaraka hizo zilitoka Afrika Mashariki na kukusanywa na Gustav Neuhaus mwishoni mwa karne iliyopita. Lengo la makala hii ni yafuatayo: kutoa maelezo machache juu ya maisha ya Gustav Neuhaus, kuzungumzia matoleo yake ili kufafanua mchango wake katika masomo ya Kiswahili mjini Berlin na katika kupanua ujuzi juu ya lugha na utamaduni wa Waswahili, kutumia mada ya utumwa kama ilivyoelezwa katika nyaraka mbalimbali za mkusanyo wa Neuhaus ili kuonyesha umuhimu wa nyaraka hizo kwa historia ya Afrika Mashariki.

This article is based upon the following concept: Poetry is a chain of representation of the sub-conscience that is the creative source. We can read the poetic text in many ways, but if we imagine the text as the stage of images, we can understand the fundamental abstraction of the conscience. In this sense, oneiric images in some of Euphrase Kezilahabi’s poems will be analysed by using insights from psychoanalytic theory.