Obituary in memory of John Francis Marchmant Middleton

‘Taarab’ is a popular music entertainment in East Africa whose origin is ‘contentiously’ given as Middle East. It is an art form imported to East Africa perhaps in the early years of the 1900s. Taraab has been ariedly looked at, but has generally been seen as a uniform body. This essay sets out to show that from its inception in East Africa, taarab has never been uniform as it started to develop its own characteristics and peculiarities as a performing art. It has been undergoing a number of changes in its musical and lyrical structures. It moved outward to become a popular music instead of being court music, and from being coastal music to being a music that has spread out to inland Tanzania, Kenya, Uganda and Burundi, thus approximating musical structures of these regions as it is assuming new roles and functions. Although in our description we do in passing refer to the whole body of the art complex ‘taarab’, it is on the lyric that we focus on. This article is written on the basis of findings from field work and library research that have been conducted from 2000 to date in a project entitled Local and Global Aspects of Taarab: A Popular Music Entertainment in East Africa, under the umbrella topic “Lokales Handeln in Afrika im Kontext globaler Einflüsse”, funded by Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG).

This paper discusses Standard Kiswahili honorifics in Nairobi. It used observation as a means of obtaining data in Nairobi where Standard Kiswahili is also spoken. It points out that honorifics are a chief politeness strategy across many discourse domains; Kiswahili honorifics are conspicuously used and seem easy to learn; honorifics complement other politeness strategies; they are used in both formal and informal encounters. This paper also argues that honorifics in expressing face sav-ing ideals in Kiswahili language have both a social and individual appeal. There is, therefore, a strong suggestion for social face and communal based politeness as opposed to individual polite-ness in Kiswahili. This paper observes that politeness and especially by means of honorifics makes a Kiswahili conversational encounter fruitful. The honorifics also help to define, redefine and sus-tain social strata that are used as a basis of expressing face-saving ideals and politeness in Kiswa-hili and hence contributing to less conflict in interaction and strengthening cohesion in society in question.

The 6th National Book Fair in Nairobi, Kenya, in September 2003 saw a new publication in the field of Swahili literary studies that should draw the attention of Swahili scholars in and outside of East Africa: the first comprehensive literary dictionary in Swahili language. Kyallo Wadi Wamitila, who is currently Senior Lecturer for Swahili Literature and Literary Theory at the University of Nairobi, has committed more than a decade of meticulous research to compile this major work. It comprises roughly 1.300 entries, arranged alphabetically, ranging from adhidadi (antonym) to muhakati (mimesis), tashtiti (satire) and zila (tragic flaw).

Book review of `Kenya Coast Handbook. Culture, resources and development in the East African littoral`by Jan Hoorweg, Dick Foeken & R. A. Obudho.

The osmotic relationship between oral and written literature has been neglected for a long time by literary criticism in post-independence Tanzania: the development of new genres and the related debates about literary values have until the end of the Eighties mostly attracted the attention of the scholars, making thus marginal the study of oral literature until the recent awakening of critical studies. Residual were especially those oral forms, like contemporary oral poetry, not wholly ´traditional` - coming from a pre-colonial past or alluding to unchanging features -, nor enough `modern` and `progressive` to be assigned much interest in scholarship. This paper is a tentative to approach the question from a different perspective, presenting the case of one kind of oral poetry - taarab songs - , which has been dealt within creative writing, from the pre-independence era until our days - creative literature, being not bound to categorising and coherence as criticism is, sometimes succeeding better than a too `scientifically- oriented` criticism in containing the subtle relations between opponents, like orality and writing, tradition and modernity, elite and popular arts. In the following pages I will discuss three Swahili prose works, namely Wasifu wa Siti Binti Saad by Shaaban Robert (1958), Utengano by S.A Mohamed (1980) and Siku njema by K. Walibora (1996), in which taarab appears in the narration- both thematically and stylistically -, evidencing the continuities but also stressing the different ways in which symbolism and literary techniques are employed by the authors.

The aim of this article is to deal with reduplication in Swahili. In phase I, we pay attention to the process of reduplication as such, i.e., we try to define this phenomenon and we determine the scope of our study. The core of phase II is constituted by the examination of formal properties of reduplication in Swahili. Phase III contains the investigation of the phenomenon in question from the functional perspective. In the next phase, we concentrate on the so-called `pseudoreduplication` since we are convinced that this feature of Swahili morphology is quite important in relation to reduplication. The last phase is devouted to the analysis of a set of concrete examples from a work of fiction which illustrates the issues discussed in previous phases. Although this study is intended to be an intralanguage one, we do not restrain omselves from occassional interlanguage comparisons since it is our belief that any contrastive comparison can contribute to a better understanding of the phenomenon concerned. The synchronic point of view is applied throughout the whole study.

In the traditional Swahili literature description has a secondary role. Characters` portrayals are limited to a few stereotyped attributes, because they represent types, not individualized characters The model of women`s beauty is taken from Arabic literature: round face, black, flowing hair, big eyes, teeth like pealls with beautiful gaps in between, slender neck... This model is valid to a large extent also in modern novels.. Thus, the complexion of an ideal woman is as clear as possible; even up-rountry heroines are often light-roloured `as a half-cast` or at least bronzed. They are preferably of medium height, lump, but with a slender waist and well-shaped legs.

This lively poem, one of several hundred collected in Mombasa at the end of the nineteenth century by W.E T AYLOR thanks to Mwalimu SIKUJUWA bin ABDALLAH ai-BAIAWI (Frankl, 1993), is preserved in Volume Ill of the Taylor Papers, now in the library of the School of Oriental & African Studies (SOAS) in London.. lt consists of two versions - both in Arabic script (SOAS MS 47754); the first (Section X, page 4) is probably in the hand of ABDALLAH bin RASHID and has fifteen stanzas, while the second (Section Z, page 161) is in the hand of Mwalimu SIKUJUWA (one of T AYLOR\''s two Swahili teachers) and has twenty-one stanzas .. The entire text of version X is to be found in Z, although not in the same order. Version Z has thus six additional stanzas, and we have had no hesitation in selecting it as the text for this article (the manuscript having been most probably commissioned by TAYLOR).

Between 1977 and 1980 I collected a nuber of texts on the northern Kenya coast Most were tape recorded by myself fiom oral performances, a few were written down or recorded by others Most of the current collection consists of texts gathered so, plus: the Mwiini material, provided by Chuck Kisseberth, originally provided or recorded in Barawa by M I. Abasheikh, and the Bajuni \"contemporary\" verse, taken form a publicly available cassette-recording by AM. Msallarn in the 1970.