Methali ni kipera muhimu cha fasihi simulizi katika kutoa mafunzo kutokana na maudhui yapatikanayo humo. Zimekuwa zikichukuliwa kuwa zina ukweli, hekima na busara kwa jamii husika. Lengo la makala hii ni kuzihakiki methali za Kiswahili ambazo zinahusu ulemavu ili kuelewa mitazamo iliyomo katika methali hizo na athari zake katika jamii. Maswali tunayojibu ni: Je, methali hizo zinabeba mitazamo gani ya jamii? Nini nafasi na athari ya mitazamo hiyo kwa maendeleo endelevu ya watu wenye ulemavu na jamii husika? Data za makala hii zimekusanywa kupitia usomaji wa maandiko mbalimbali maktabani na kufanya mahojiano na wanajamii. Matokeo ya utafiti huu yanaonesha kuwa, methali zimebeba mitazamo hasi na chanya kuhusu ulemavu na watu wenye ulemavu katika jamii. Aidha, methali hizo zinazungumzia mambo yanayohusu si tu ulemavu bali pia zinabeba mitazamo anuwai na falsafa ya Kiafrika kuhusu mambo mbalimbali katika jamii. Vilevile, imebainika kuwa methali hizo zinajenga na kuendeleza unyanyapaa na usaguzi kwa watu wenye ulemavu na hata makundi mengine katika jamii. Makala pia imebaini kuwa pamoja na ukweli kwamba methali zimekuwa chombo muhimu cha kupitishia falsafa na mafunzo mbalimbali kwa maendeleo ya jamii, baadhi ya methali hizo zinapaswa kufanyiwa marekebisho ili kuakisi mabadiliko ya kimtazamo na maendeleo mbalimbali katika wakati wa sasa.

Swahili

The aim of this study is to illustrate the state of-the art of technical tools which allow the user to build the lexicon of a Swahili text. Different kinds of statistical information can also be extracted from the text with the aid of tailor made software. The basic operation in building the lexicon of a text is lemmatization, i. e extracting the lemma from the forms contained in the text. Once the lemma list is ready it can be converted into a list of entties, to be filled according to selected criteria.

This paper presents an edited version of a hand written text in Shaba Swahili and French, accompanied by an English translation. The original text was written in ballpoint by a Shaba Zairean ex-houseboy, and sent to his former employer in Belgium It provides an account of his life, with special focus on the period after his Belgian employers left Zaire in 1973. It documents the conditions of hardship in the life of a semi-educated Zairean and provides a detailed account of the migrations he has to undertake in order to find means to support himself and his family. The author Wiote the `recit` at the request of the former employer`s wife, as a symbolic way to repay the debt he had incurred over the years in which he had received money and other goods from the Belgian lady. The text was sent to me by the former employer, who asked me to translate it into Dutch. The former employer granted me the permission to edit and publish the text in its totality. For reasons of privacy, we decided to alter the names of the people mentioned in the text. Thus, for instance, the employer is named Andni Deprins, his wife (who is the central addressee of the text) Helena Arens, and the author of the text is identified as Julien.

This overview paper aims to present general approaches to variation in Swahili, both from a structural/typological and from a sociolinguistic angle. Recently, building upon earlier dialectological studies of Swahili, varieties in the periphery have been the focus of scholarly attention, as well as urban dialects from East Africa and Swahili in the diaspora. This introductory paper intends to summarize some of the approaches and directions that address the geographical and sociolinguistic diversity of Swahili, studied from different angles. These include both traditional approaches (descriptive sketches, dialectological and dialectometrical analyses, lexicostatistics etc.) and more recent directions in Bantu studies, such as micro-parametric analysis in the field of microvariation. Moreover, current (socio)linguistic trends are discussed, which mostly deal with language contact, diversity and change in touristic settings, in relation to new media, and in regard to youth language practices, or with new approaches to urban fluidity such as metrolingualism and translanguaging. In this contribution, we aim to give an overview of current trends in the study of Swahili by analyzing processes of linguistic and scholarly diversification and variation in the Swahili-speaking world.

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.

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