Focused on Pemba Island in Zanzibar, this paper examines how talk about food – in abundance and plenty as well as drought, and hardship – can yield important insights into people’s experiences of the past and present. While food, in a very basic way, is central to human survival, people’s experiences of acquiring, preparing, sharing, and consuming food are central aspects of human social and cultural life. When talking about food, human beings deploy culturally specific knowledge that locates them in history and in society. Food discourse deploys culturally inflected visions of wellness and social harmony, as well as of hardship and fragmentation. This paper explores food discourse in Pemba as oral history that sheds light on how people experienced the 1920s and 1930s, World War II and rationing, the Zanzibar Revolution and the famine of 1972, as well as how changes in food preparation figure in people’s assessments of their own well-being, and experiences of contemporary times. The paper also argues that the Pemban concept of shibe, or ‘satiety’, may provide a culturally viable framework for thinking about as well as implementing social and environmental wellbeing on a larger scale.

This paper attempts an analysis of Ebrahim Hussein’s drama Mashetani through a critical approach based on the dimension of horror. Despite the pervasive strength of this element in Mashetani, it has rarely been considered as anything more than a mere stylistic element in a vision of this drama which approaches its contents only, using allegory. In this study, Mashetani will be read from a different point of view, which sees the horrific element as bearer of new contents and new subjects not always reachable through an allegorical interpretation, in order not only to make a contribution to literary criticism of this drama, but also to emphasize how horror can acquire an analytic function besides its stylistic role.

This paper examines the perceptions of Kenyans towards the way other Kenyans speak Swahili from a Folklinguistic perspective. The study involved two main tasks. In the first task, informants were provided with blank maps of the country and asked to identify areas where they thought there was a distinct way of speaking Swahili. In the second task, they were provided with the same map showing Kenyan’s eight provinces and asked to rank them in terms of correctness, attractiveness and closeness to the way they speak Swahili. The results show little or no difference between the rankings of correctness versus pleasantness of Swahili varieties. The study also shows that Kenyans do not identify with the normative variety modeled on the standardized or Kenyan coastal Swahili which is used in the schools or mass media. Similar to other studies in perceptual dialectology, the informants’ judgments were influenced by their background knowledge and stereotypes about different regions that have little or no relationship with linguistics factors per se. Unlike other studies in perceptual dialectology however, languages that are not the object of study have a strong influence on respondents’ perceptions. Beside the ethnic stereotypes that characterize Kenya’s multilingual discourse, Kenyans’ attitudes towards varieties of Swahili seem to be filtered through the lens of a competitive hegemonic language that has enjoyed historical advantage. As a result, the promotion of an idealized variety of Swahili in light of the dominance of English and the continued use of local languages is not likely to increase its acceptability as a national and official language.

Although a textual relationship between Arabic Muslim texts and their rendition through Swahili epic poems (tendi) is acknowledged in Swahili poetry studies, “translation” is not a straightforward explanation of this relationship. Furthermore, Swahili narrative poems on the prophets (manabii), mostly created at the end of the 19th century, have seldom been considered in textual relation to the Qiṣaṣ al-Anbiyā’ literature or to the Qur’ān. Thus, important questions have not been asked: How did the Arabic stories of the prophets arrive on the Swahili coast? How did poets appropriate these stories and forge them into a new narrative discourse? In this paper, I focus on tafsiri as a form of appropriation and adaptation, applying Gérard Genette’s concept of “palimpsest” to analyse the textual relationship between Arabic Muslim and Swahili literary texts. This will allow me, through a close reading of these texts and consideration of both language and genre, to identify the palimpsestuous presence or rather copresence of Arabic source texts within Swahili works. Ultimately, this method offers a model for future philologies of world literature.

No description available.

Translating a Swahili literary work into French poses specific problems due to the small number of translations existing so far and the imaginary representations associated with these two languages in the translator’s mind. In the case of Euphrase Kezilahabi’s novels Nagona (1990) and Mzingile (1991), the task is complicated by the very peculiar nature of these narratives, whose apocalyptic substratum does not refer to an identifiable cultural universe but to the interstitial space between a world condemned to die and a world yet to be born. In this article I will provide some insights from my experience of translation of these two Swahili novels.

The mediation of foreign films for Swahili audiences is an established cultural and linguistic practice in Tanzania that combines translation with commentary and story-telling. It helps audiences make sense of films whose original language and cultural background are unfamiliar to them. Today, an industry has grown around translated foreign films of all genres and from all regions. The practice also makes genres accessible that are still under-represented in Tanzanian film production, such as science fiction. The genre’s depiction of a futuristic, technically advanced and strange world presents a challenge to commentators. Through the analysis of a particular episode of the Star Wars saga, I show how the commentator acts as an ethnodramaturg, who through translation, re-narration and intertextual reference explains and re-enacts the strange cultural universe of the source film and brings it closer to the audience.

No description available.

In this paper, I propose translation as a main tool for a sensualistic and hermeneutical approach to texts. In agreement with the writer and thinker Euphrase Kezilahabi, who claims that the text has to be considered as a living event, I propose to look at a text not as an object but as a living body. I ague that this approach reduces the distance between the body of the text and that of the reader. Perception can thus be used as a means to know and critique a literary text. I present a multifocal sensualistic analysis based on an analogical idea of knowledge, taking translation as a tool to push the critic to focus on the text word for word (not excluding the paratext or the context). The translations discussed here are poems by Kezilahabi and a proposal for a Swahili translation of the poem L’infinito by the Italian poet Giacomo Leopardi.

Obituary in memory of Irmi Maral-Hanak and her scientific work