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.

To refer to the origin of taarab as a direct importation of Egyptian music by the Arab upper class (Topp 1994:153) is a plausibility without solid evidence. To define it as a style of music played for entertainment at weddings and other festive occasions all along the Swahili Coast (153) is to exclude other styles of music, indeed played for entertainment at weddings and other festive occasions all along the Swahili Coast. To say that taarab contains all the features of a typical `Indian Ocean music`, combining influences from Egypt, the Arabian peninsula, India and the West with local musical practices (153) is apparently true but does not adequately capture the ambiguities and complexities of its protean nature. Refening to taarab as the Swahili popular `salon` music whose song may be recorded or, as often is the case, orally transmitted (King`ei 1992:29) is misleading, for taarab is not always `salon` music and the method and process of creating and transmitting a song in taarab is not the same as that of other forms of African music. To state that taarab has transcended its local Swahili boundaries to be consumed in other communities including other cities in East and Central Africa (Ntarangwi 1998: 150) is a valid statement from a point of view of media, change and spread, but still leaves out a lot to be said. Taarab, like so many complex living things, refuses to be thrust into neat bags or squeezed into terse all-embracing definitions. It is an ongoing process whose form(s) are amorphous, assuming different structures, roles, functions and epithets triggered by a number of factors. That notwithstanding - whatever forms, role and function taarab exhibits at different stages, its making consists of five major components or processes: the composition of the lyric, the composition of musical patterns, the extemporized performance of its song, instrumentation and audience.

This article deals with the communicative uses of the printed wrap cloth kanga. Specifically I will show how the kanga is constituted as a communicative sign and is at the core of ambiguation processes that are pervasive to this communicative genre. Because of its high degree of ambiguity the question arises whether we can, for communication by way of kanga, still speak of communication in any sense. In my opinion, we can only do so if it is possible to analyze the communication process within existing models of communication. Starting from the hypothesis that the kanga indeed has communicative potential communication is understood as social interaction, whereby the focus is not solely on meanings in a pragmatic or semantic sense, but rather on social meaning, i.e. the negotiation of relationships between the interactants in an area of tension between individual, social and cultural interests (within which meaning in a linguistic sense does play a role, too) (Anderson & Meyer 1988, Burgoon et aL 1996). This will be shown in the fust part of the analysis. In the second part of this article I will describe and explain the role of the medium kanga within this process of ambiguation. This article is based on material collected during two field periods in 1994/ 1995 and 1996 in Mombasa and, from 1995 onwards, in various archives in the Netherlands and Switzerland.

As is well-known, there are presently several archives of old Swahili manuscripts: in Dar es Salaam, Halle and Hamburg, London etc. These collections and separate manuscripts are being studied from various points of view by both European and African scholars. Beside the vast collection of old Swahili manuscripts kept in SOAS, there is another collection of Swahili works at the British Library in London, which has been considerably expanded recently by acquisitions from Jan Knappert. There, one of the most interesting manuscripts which I have ever seen is kept. I am talking about the manuscripts (OR 4534) received in 1884 by a well-known expert of the Swahili language and literature: W.E. Taylor, who was a missionary in East Africa. In 1891 they have been acquired by the British Museum. It is a roll that is 200 cm long and 16-17 cm wide. Seven sheets, glued together, of a thick paper of special quality (2-3 sheets put together) which even resembles a kind of skin, it is skillfully written on in stable ink.

Below are listed publications on the Comoro Islands which have appeared since the publication of the extensive Comoros bibliography in Ottenheimer & Ottenheimer 1994 (& online at: http:/ /www.ksu.edu/sasw/comoros/combibl.cornoro).

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.

The aim of this paper is to show that Swahili has several strategies to resolve verbal agreement with conjoined noun phrases. In section 2, I give a brief summary of the situation as depicted in grammatical descriptions of Swahili. I then present a number of examples - mainly taken from Muhammed Said Abdulla`s (1976) novel Mwana wa Yungi hulewa - illustrating different strategies of agreement with conjoined NPs. In section 4, I present an analysis of one of the strategies discussed and argue that the choice of different strategies is not only based on dialect or speaker variation, but rather can be related to information structure and the dynamics of interpretation.

`The Rosetta Stone Language Library` is a language learning software developed by the American company Fairfield Language Technologies which allows users to learn a foreign language with their computer without the aid of an instructor. The program promises its users they can learn a language faster and with more ease than ever before, without having to learn vocabulary or grammatical rules. Once having completed Levels I and II, learners should be able to make themselves understood in the new language using a basic vocabulary of roughly 3000 words. Both these levels are to be completed within a time frame of one to two years, and the results should be the equivalent of five years of conventional school instruction. Since 1993, a Swahili language course has been featured in The Rosetta Stone for which only Level I is currently available. With regard to the Swahili course, it must be asked if this design can work with a class language just as it does with an Indo-European gender language. The second question addresses the cultural adequacy of the contexts, or more specifically, of cultural knowledge, which must not be excluded from modern language instruction.

Until the Eighties the regional character of Kenyan prose writing was far less marked than that of Zanzibari novels. Different was the situation in poetry; in fact, Kimvita and Kiamu have been used even in modern times (see, e.g., Ahmad Nassir Juma Bhalo, Abdilatif Abdalla and Ahmed Sheikh Nabhany; the last one is well-known for his endeavour in enriching and modernizing Swahili terminology, and a few of his proposed terms, e. g. runinga for `television`, have been accepted). Kenyan prose fiction, on the other hand, used to be much alike to the up-country Tanzanian literary production, written as it was in standard Swahili, sometimes with many colloquial features.

As a subject of scientific interest `Western` comics (i.e. the European, American, Japanese comics) have after all achieved some recognition. From its beginnings in the 1890s the comic has been an economic success, and gradually gained importance in the contemporary cultural production of `Western´ societies. However, only with a development that finally met the tastes of a `Western´ intellectual readership, scientific treatment of comics became academically acceptable. Compared to the Western market, the production of comics in Africa is negligeable, and therefore its scientific reception almost nonexistent. This article, however preliminary, for the first time takes interest in an African comic, specifically the comics in Swahili, as a subject of its own right. Under the guise of discussing the question given in the title on two levels, I intend to present as much material as possible (without stretching copyrights too far), to give a short introduction to the theory of the comic, and to raise the reader´s interest for the Swahili comic. The first level of discussion focuses on a global perspective. Here I take a more theoretical stance, concentrating on the comic as a narrative medium, reflecting its inventory of representation and questions of reading. My main question is: What does the Swahili comic do that other comics do as well? The second level focuses on the local perspective. I look at the setting in which the comic occurs, i.e. Swahili- speaking, urban East Africa, and take into consideration the cultural embedding of the medium: What can the comic do in East Africa that other media or gemes of cultural expression (music, tv, literature, painting, theatre, etc.) do not or can not do? What is new about the comic in East Africa?