Recently we have seen the appearance of an interesting and provocative book on the Swahili. This book, by Ali Amin Mazrui and Ibrahim Noor Shariff (1994), takes a serious look at the question of Swahili identity and origins. This paper has at least two goals. One is to help define the nature of the debate about origins, and in so doing I will explicate and critique the Mazrui and Shariff hypothesis. The second is to reiterate the theme of the study of Swahili by Derek Nurse and the present author (1993), entitled Swahili and Sabaki · A Linguistic History (hereafter N&H). The linking of Swahili and Sabaki in the title was deliberate: the history of Swahili is inextricably intertwined with that of Sabaki and we cannot speak of the former without direct reference to the latter. The paper is divided into several sections. The first reviews the position taken by Mazrui and Shariff, the second discusses the view of N&H, implicit in their work on Sabaki, that Swahili is an integrated development from its Afiican heritage, the Sabaki languages. Finally, a critique of the Mazrui and Shariff hypothesis will conclude the paper.

This book records the knowledge and experience Swahili-speaking people have acquired in dealing with then plant world (p. 12). With its folk botanic approach it aims at discovering the principles of taxonomy they apply in classifying and labelling their plants as well as the different kinds of uses they make of them. This is what distinguishes the book from other dictionaries of Swahili plant names, e.g. P. J. Greenway (A Swahili-Botanical-English Dictionary of Plant Names Second edition. Dares Salaam 1940) where short descriptions of morphological plant characteristics are given. Greenway only makes some remarks about the use of important plants. The dictionary of J. Schroebler and J. Berchem (Mimea ya Afrika Mashariki. Sehemu ya pili. Kamusi ya majina ya mimea. Cologne: Omimee Publishers 1992) consists of a list of Swahili plant names with then botanical equivalents and some additional remarks on plant ecology.

This paper addresses the history and current status of the Swahili 0 tense marker.

Kenyan Swahili creative writing has been in the shadow of Tanzanian creative works for a long time. Infact some critics even end up claiming that one cannot really talk of Kenyan Swahili prose creative writing. This is notwithstanding a number of commendable works some of which belong to the very first generation of Swahili literature.

One of the most striking charactetistics of contemporary drama is its denial of illusion. Modern playwrights do their best to convince the audience that what is presented on the stage is not a tranche de vie (as was the aspiration of naturalist writers), but a performance.

There are two matters for us to consider.The first is that of the association of Alhamisi with religious connotations and if that is only specific to Kiswahili language (community); and the second is if the borrowing of Alhamisi is linguistically well motivated even for that purpose. For both these matters, we shall be comparing the Kiswahili calendar with that of its neighbours to determine what we think is a discrepancy, especially, with the Kiswahili borrowing of Alhamisi. We shall discuss the issues above and others in this paper as follows. In the following section we shall, briefly, consider the basis of the formulation of some week calendars.This will be followed by the consideration of the week calendars of a number of languages in East Afiica. Lastly, we shall focus specifically on the Kiswahili week calendar; comparing it with the others and drawing our conclusion.

Few East African groups have attracted the attention of academics as much as the Swahili of coastal Kenya and Tanzania. The Swahili town of Lamu has even been described as having more professional researchers than doctors per inhabitant (Mazmi and Shariff 1994:2). Researchers commonly describe the Swahili as having a maritime culture (Middleton 1992:8; Nurse and Spear 1985:97; Prins 1965:263-275) and looking to the sea for their livelihood and identity (Mazmi and Shariff 1994:19; Ylvisaker 1975:74-83). They stress the contact of the `sea-prowling` Swahili with the ocean through seafaring, trading, fishing, and boat building to acquire wealth and social standing (Mazmi and Sharif 1994: 19; Middleton 1992: 8). Futhermore, the origin of the word Swahili is said to stress the proximity of the sea, coming from the Arabic sawahil (coast) or being of local origin, swahili (literally this island), making the Swahili variously the people of the coast (Middleton 1992:1) or the people of this island (Mazmi and Shariff 1994:56).

Kiswahili has many ways to express different relations that may hold between two events occurring at the same time. In this paper I examine and contrast the meanings of two types of verbal forms: those with the class 16 relative concord marker -po- and those with the tense marker -ki-. All examples are taken from a single small novel. I conclude that forms with PO tell us where or, more frequently, when something else occurred, whereas events presented in the KI-tense describe the situation existing at the time of some other event (`situative´). When that other event is non-factual the situation presented in the KI-tense expresses a condition. Elsewhere, the situation presented in the KI-tense may be backgrounded (in the discourse analysis sense of the term), but it may also be the main event that is hidden behind a more superficial situation (pace Contini-Morava 1989).

Chachage Seithy L. Chachage amepata kuandika riwaya nyingine tatu: Sudi ya Yohana (1980), Kivuli (1984) na Almasi za Bandia (1990). Riwaya yake ya nne Makuadi wa Soko Huria (2002) ni ya kihistoria na yenye upekee wa maudhui, muundo na mtindo. Vipengele hivi vinadhihirisha ukomavu na upeo wa juu wa mwandishi ilimradi kwenda sambamba na changamoto ya utandawazi ya karne ya ishirini na moja ya milenia ya tatu. Mwandishi amekitabaruku kitabu hiki kwa kumbukumbu ya Mwalimu Julius Kambarage Nyerere (1922-1999).

Kiswahili language has undergone a lot of changes in the last decades especially at the lexical level. Many lexical items have been coined, adapted, borrowed or modified to express concepts that were hitherto unknown or non existent in the Swahili world view cosmology. One area that has witnessed a lot of these changes has been the area of sciences, or better put science has been a prime causer of many neologisms in this language. This eventuality has gone a long way to disprove the naive assumptions that the language has not come of age to express scientific concepts.