In the last two decades, Swahili chronicles have been thoroughly re-evaluated by historians of the East African coast, and their usefulness as historical sources subject to serious doubt and criticism. Typical of this new attitude were the words of Gill Shepherd: `Such chronicles are less objective histories than annotated pedigrees of a single ruling lineage`. Given such a perspective, the question may be asked whether the chronicles are a suitable guide to the search for historical identities of coastal societies.

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.

An important editorial achievement has been the recent translation into Swahili of the first volume of the monumental work on the life of Jesus Christ in ten volumes, L`Evangelo come mi Stato rivelato (the title of the English version is The Poem of the Man-God) by the Italian mystic Maria Valtorta (1897-1961).

Manqala games are played in large parts of Africa, Asia, the Caribbean, South-America and some parts of Europe. Bao is the variation which is found on the East African coast, and only in the Swahili speaking areas. Ways of playing Bao though differ along the coast, and de Voogt focused his research on the sophisticated variant of Zanzibar. The author deals with this Zanzibar variation of Bao in analogy to chess. The first aim of his research project was to find out what distinguishes a master of Bao from an ordinary player. Psychological methods, derived from the study of chess playing are his main methodological instruments, which make the book a remarkable study in the psychology of players, and the role of memory and calculation. His second aim is to introduce Bao to the field of computer games, comparable to computer-based chess.

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

In Swahili Forum III Elena Bertoncini-Zubkova (1996) discussed some of the political criticisms, expressed in the form of literary motifs and imagery, that emerged in the works of the Tanzanian Swahili writer Euphrase Kezilahabi since 1978 onwards. She situates this emergent critique in the new political discoursive context where critical reviews of the Ujamaa policy could now be publicly voiced since President Nyerere himself admitted the failure of Ujamaa in his delivery Azimio la Arusha baada ya Miaka Kumi (The Arusha Declaration Ten Years Later, 1977). According to Bertoncini this admission `clear[ed] the way for critical literary works` of which Kezilahabi satirical play Kaputula la Marx (Marx`s Shorts, 1978) and his short story Mayai- Waziri wa maradhi (Eggs- Minister of Sickness, 1978) were among the first.

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.

This paper speculates about the origin of the overall use of the form iko in Inland Swahili. Its functional scope comprises predication, identification, location, existence, and association. In Standard Swahili, the primary function of iko is to express the locative relation of nouns belonging to noun class 4 or 9. For the expression of identification various other means are used. As Inland Swahili is mostly acquired as a second language it will be argued here that the functional expansion of iko might be due to the crosslinguistic influence of the first language. However, first languages, such as Maasai, exhibit a formal distinction between location and predication. A conceptual merger of both functions in the second language is more likely to occur when the first language contains only one obligatory copula expressing both concepts. This obligatory copula can be found in many Indo-European languages, e.g. English or Hindi. Until today Indians speaking Swahili are characterised by the frequent usage of iko, a fact which points to the view that the overall use of iko could be due to substrate influence of Hindi.

A book review of `Zanzibar: Kinyang`anyiro na utumwa´by Issa Nasser Issa AI-Ismaily (1999).

Bwana Tela (1856-1927) alikuja Afrika ya mashriki kutoka Ulaya katika mwaka 1297 wa hijti (mwaka 1880 wa miladi), akakaa kwa muda wa myaka khamustaashara takriban. Ingawa alikuja kutangaza dini ya kiNasara, kazi aliyofanya zaidi Mambasa ilikuwa ni ya mambo ya utaalamu wa lugha ya kiSawahili, na mashairi yake, na utamaduni wa waSawahili. Alipata bahati ya kuwa na marafiki wataalamu wa kiMvita, khaswa Mwalimu Sikujuwa al-Batawi, na Bwana Hemedi al-Mambasi. Nyimbo zake za kiMisheni alizotunga kwa kiSawahili hazikutiwa maanani, lakini mahadhi aliokuwa akiimbiya yalibakiya kwa myaka mingi kwa jina la `mahildhi ya Tela´. Bwana Tela alisaidiana na Mwalimu Sikujuwa kuhifadhi t´ungo za washairi wengi wa kale zisipotee, khaswa t´ungo za Bwana Muyaka. Kadhalika alikusanya mithali ya kiSawahili, zaidi ya sita-mia. Karatasi zake alizoandika mambo ya kiSawahili, nyingi sasa ziko maktaba ya SOAS, London, na ni muhimu katika kutusaidiya kufahamu kiSawahili cha kiSawahili. Si makosa kusema kuwa Bwana Tela ndiye mtaalamu mkubwa wa kiSawahili katika wataalamu wote wa kiNgereza.