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.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:DRESDEN/oai:qucosa.de:bsz:15-qucosa-91625 |
| Date | 09 August 2012 |
| Creators | Gräbner, Werner |
| Contributors | Universität Bayreuth, Institut für Afrikastudien, Universität zu Köln, Institut für Afrikanistik |
| Publisher | Universitätsbibliothek Leipzig |
| Source Sets | Hochschulschriftenserver (HSSS) der SLUB Dresden |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | doc-type:article |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Source | Swahili Forum 8 (2001), S. 129-143 |
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