This paper examines issues that emerge in the attempts that have been made to develop the national language terminology in kenya by committees, Kiswahili enthusiasts and Kiswahili scholars. Attention is drawn to the fact that the problematic national language policy that emerges from the national language`s social history is an important backround to the issues that are discussed. The issues emerging in these attempts are examined in the prism of an encompassing terminology development framework that is synthesised from terminology development literature from different areas of the world. This framework views terminology development as a process that entails: formation of a language institute, setting up of goals, the actual engineering of the terms, the mode of dissemination and evaluation. The case of Kenya demonstrates that the attempts have so far consisted of isolated steps of terminology development rather than the whole set of required action.

The aim of this article is to analyse allegories in the first four novels of the Swahili-writing author Euphrase Kezilahabi who is one of the most renowned authors in contemporary Tanzania. This analysis will be based on allegory as it is defined in literary studies. What is aimed at with this study is a hermeneutical interpretative approach to the allegories found in Kezilahabi`s early novels which shall be based on as much contexts as available: text-context, intertextual context, cultural context, historical context, only to mention the most important (cf. Mohlig 1994: 257). The text-context or co-text, however, is considered as the most reliable basis of such a study.

Historically the culture of the Comoro Islands shows a strong relationship to the Swahili culture of the East African coast. Archeology, written and oral history have impressively documented these bonds dating back not less than a thousand years. The appearance of so called twarab in the first decades of the 20th Century once more demonstrated the closeness of this cultural imaginary that links the Comoros to the Swahili world, and beyond to include the predominantly Islamic cultures of the Western Indian Ocean. The paper is a first approach to the history of twarab on one island, Ngazidja, until the mid-1960s. It also addresses the question of language use, especially the relationship between East Coast and Comorian varieties of Swahili, and the influence of the Swahili poetic canon on the practice of Ngazidjan poets and singers. The orthography of names and place names follows Comorian conventions. A distinction is made between `twarab` and `taarab`, the former is the Comorian rendering and refers to the Comorian style, while the latter designates the East African Coast or Swahili variant.

To this day research in pre-colonial Swahili history has only taken casual notice of the role of Swahili crafts. This applies in particular to blacksmithing and iron smelting. Probably iron smelting were among the driving factors of cultural contact and of the development of economical structures on the Swahili Coast. Kusimba postulates that metallurgy played an important role for cultural change within Swahili polities. Foreign trade in iron products to other parts of the Indian Ocean fostered local exchange systems that linked the East African settlements on the Coast to each other and the interior (1996:387). In this article the potential of linguistic research on iron crafts for Swahili historiography will be demonstrated, though it has to be emphasised that linguistic evidence is as of yet too scarce to allow more than preliminary results. Two steps are deemed necessary to achieve this aim. In a first step the scientific contributions by historical linguistics, history, and archaeology in regard to Swahili iron working will be reviewed. In a second step it will be demonstrated that historical semantics, together with language geography can make a significant contribution to this discussion. More than anything else, it is the semantic aspect of language that is capable of revealing pre-colonial cultural change in Africa. With comparative phonological and morphological methods historical genetic relationships within a given language family can be discovered.

A mention of name in literature is almost always likely to recall the question Juliet posed to Romeo about his family name Montague in William Shakespeare´s Romeo and Juliet. In reading creative works we tend to identify characters basically by the names given to them. It is on this basic premise that some character analysis methods tend to define characters by taking recourse to their names and sometimes identifying them in metaphorical terms or as speaking names. Names play a very central and important role in any reading exercise and so would certainly the names given to characters be of importance to us. These are linguistic or semiotic signs that play a very crucial role in the overall linguistic structure of a literary text or its signification. Decoding of the names therefore becomes an important critical engagement in as far as it helps the reader in his deciphering of the text in which the names are. Characters´ names, as this article will show, can be used artistically to achieve a number of goals like encoding a central trait in a particular character´s signification, embracing crucial thematic motifs, ideological toning as well as even showing the particular writer´s point of view. Some of these qualities are easily lost in translation.

Mass communication through the print and the electronic media has not been spared by the post-Cold-War wind of change that is sweeping across Africa and the rest of the world. According to Wilcox (1974: 37), in 1974 over 70 percent of all the newspapers that were printed in Africa were government-owned; in the same year, almost all radio and T.V. stations were owned by government. In the changing socio-eonomic climate, however, a state monopoly of the mass media in many Sub- Saharan African countries is now a thing of the past (see for instance, Bourgault 1995). Where, for example, there used to be only one or two newspapers owned by the government or the ruling party, there now exists a plethora of privately owned competing newspapers and other publications; and where there used to be only one sycophantic radio and T. V. station owned by the government, there now exist several radio and T. V. stations, many of them privately-owned commercial broadcasters. The general philosophy behind the liberalization of the mass media is what has come to be called `the freedom of speech`. Citing the liberalization of the electronic media in Kenya, this paper argues that the liberalization of the media in many Sub-Saharan countries has not been matched by policies that encourage the entrenchment, spread and full utilization of African indigenous languages. It is further argued that the lack of media policy that favours African indigenous languages is likely to lead to negative consequences for the languages of Africa.

It is a fact that modern science and technology from the west has reached Africa through European languages. Historically, these languages have also served as the vehicles of formal education in Africa to the exclusion of Swahili and other local languages. The deficiency of African languages such as Swahili in scientific and technical registers is both artificial and historically understandable. Secondly, it is easily remediable given that the basic core of the said vocabulary is shared and international in nature (Alexandrie, 1961 ). Therefore such a deficiency should present no barrier to Swahili serving as a medium of instruction in higher education. Whereas English, German and French can boast of self-sufficiency in literature in all fields of study, Swahili is a relatively much younger language of education and lacks literature even in the most basic aspects of the language itself. This situation often forces lecturers in the universities teaching Swahili to undertake `translation´ of concepts or even loan words in order to communicate with their students. Therefore, quite often, lecturing in the Swahili medium entails being able to translate from English into Swahili because most of the material to be taught is sourced from English original publications. As far as the use of Swahili in teaching natural sciences and other technical subjects at the tertiary level is concerned, Chimera (1998) suggests that this should be done gradually as the language grows and develops in its technical domains. If Swahili is to develop and modernise, it has to be more liberal in expanding its technical and scientific domains. The two registers should more or less be of comparable size as is the case with English (Chimera 1998: 37). However, the question that naturally arises here is, how is this ideal to be achieved? Perhaps, by deciding to teach linguistics and literature in Swahili, East African universities want to face the terminological challenge and solve the problems as they occurred. After decades of experimenting, the time has come for all stakeholders to come to terms with the problem.

This study aims at studying one of the most important contemporary Kiswahili writers: Euphrase Kezilahabi. In a way this paper can be seen as a continuation of my earlier articles on the same writer. It is definitely different from the other ones though a certain thread links them: the interest in Kezilahabi`s philosophy. In this paper my interest is with two main motifs namely contemptus mundi and carpe diem. Contemptus mundi is a Latin expression for contemptible world, world as a bad place and one that is perceived contemptuously. I intend to explore the said motifs in Kezilahabi\'s prose works: Rosa Mistika, Kichwamaji, Gamba la Nyoka, Dunia Uwanja wa Fujo, Nagana and Mzingile. The latter two works are slightly short, lacking the novel length of the other four works. I do not, however, want to entangle myself in the polemics of genre as to what a novel or novella is. I will, however, regard the two as novellas at least by the virtue of their length.

Reading Mohamed´s novels Kiu (`Thirst´; 1972) and Nyota ya Rehema (`The Star ofRehema´or `The Destiny of Rehema´; 1976), one is struck by abundant use of `implication´ technique. Implication is regarded as a feature that is statistically more frequent in poetry than in prose, hence the presence of this technique in abundance in Mohamed´s idiom, renders it a quality of poetic prose. The purpose of this paper is therefore to show how various linguistic features are used as vehicle for the realisation of the implication technique used to create exponents for the semantic structure in his novels. Exponents as literary devices need not be implicit as in Mohamed`s idiom, however if used implicitly, they form an artistically engineered correlation with literary substance of the novel and gives it a certain quality that affects our `attitude´ and `judgement` towards it. Hence in this paper we hold it that the reader`s involvement in the interpretation of the novel eventually entails the decoding of the corpus for the externalisation of the literary substance. A reader who is fully involved in the interpretation and processing of implied meaning(s) in the novel, digs into its semantic structure by condation and deduction and comes out with more lasting impressions than he would if he were to deal with a less subtle or totally explicit idiom that may be regarded as plain and spoon-feeding.

The present article attempts to analyse the effects of Kiswahili curricula changes in Kenya on Kiswahili authorship and publishing since 1963. The bottomline of the argument is that any changes on the educational curriculum affecting Kiswahili has a corresponding effect on the way Kiswahili authors and publishers behave. The analysis is divided into several periods marked with the various commissions appointed by the government to investigate and make recommendations on education. Based on the foregoing, the paper shows how the authors and ublishers are compelled to adjust their attitude towards Kiswahili in order to keep abreast with the ever-changing millieu – at one time they cherish Kiswahili while discounting it at another. Finally, it is argued that at present there is a lot of good will towards Kiswahili. This can be enhanced if special incentives such as awarding higher entry salaries to applicants for jobs in the civil service who can fluently express themselves in Kiswahili.