The Swahili: Reconstructing the History and Language of an African Society, 800-1500
... One significant distinction is found in the fact that the Akan people are historically matrilineal while the Swahili people are patrilineal. However, Nurse et al. (1985) argue that the Swahili society were originally matrilineal but shifted subtly to patrilineal as ideologies and symbols were gradually transformed (Nurse, Spear, and Spear 1985). ...
... One significant distinction is found in the fact that the Akan people are historically matrilineal while the Swahili people are patrilineal. However, Nurse et al. (1985) argue that the Swahili society were originally matrilineal but shifted subtly to patrilineal as ideologies and symbols were gradually transformed (Nurse, Spear, and Spear 1985). ...
The Ghana Journal of Linguistics is a double-blind peer-reviewed scholarly journal appearing twice a year, published by the Linguistics Association of Ghana.
This special issue of GJL contains seven papers coming out of the eighth annual conference of the Linguistics Association of Ghana, hosted by the Departments of Modern Languages and English Language at the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology on 27th–29th July 2015. The conference theme was ‘Language in the Midst: Theories and Practice’, and under this umbrella a wide range of papers were presented, ranging from topics in theoretical and descriptive linguistics to discourse analysis, language and gender, language and social issues, language and religion, language and politics, language in education, language and literature and corpus linguistics. Some 25 languages were discussed, including Arabic, French and local varieties of English. Paul Kerswill (University of York) gave a keynote dealing with demographic change and dialect change in the UK, drawing parallels with language change in Africa.
The papers we present here reflect the diversity of the conference, dealing not only with the indigenous languages of Ghana, but also those spoken elsewhere in Africa, including Nigeria and Kenya, as well as English in Africa and internationally. Topics, too, are diverse, covering phonology (Kuubezelle & Akanlig-Pare), morphology/syntax (Imoh, Areo, Moles & Gambo, and Lamidi), discourse (Kpogo & Abrefa, Kambon & Duah, Kambon & Dzahene Quarshie) and language and literature (Kodah). We hope you find this collection stimulating and informative.
Nana Aba Appiah Amfo
Jemima Asabea Anderson
Paul Kerswill
Accra & York
... One significant distinction is found in the fact that the Akan people are historically matrilineal while the Swahili people are patrilineal. However, Nurse et al. (1985) argue that the Swahili society were originally matrilineal but shifted subtly to patrilineal as ideologies and symbols were gradually transformed (Nurse, Spear, and Spear 1985). ...
... One significant distinction is found in the fact that the Akan people are historically matrilineal while the Swahili people are patrilineal. However, Nurse et al. (1985) argue that the Swahili society were originally matrilineal but shifted subtly to patrilineal as ideologies and symbols were gradually transformed (Nurse, Spear, and Spear 1985). ...
In Akan and Kiswahili, there are several proverbs that express the same underlying idea, oftentimes in the exact same or similar ways. There are several possible reasons why these parallel proverbs exist. In one line of thinking, the similarities may be due to contact phenomena facilitating shared cultural and/or historical experiences. Another perspective is that the similarities may be due to the demonstrably genetic relationship between Akan and Kiswahili as languages of the Niger-Congo phylum. In this study, however, we will examine these proverbs in parallel or near-parallel and demonstrate that regardless of the facts of the two aforementioned lines of inquiry, they attest to a shared African worldview and can be analyzed in terms of measured proximity and similarity.
The UNESCO World Heritage Site of Kilwa Kisiwani and Songo Mnara in SE Tanzania contains ruins of mosques and palaces dating from the 11th to 19th century AD. Historical trade of Indian Ocean resources such as mangroves, ivory, and slaves supported by seasonally reversing monsoon winds along the Swahili coast is referred to 2000 years ago. Climate change involves increasing temperature, wind speed, rainfall, humidity, sea temperature and sea level rise. Investigations methods using Uncrewed Aerial Vehicle, geophysics, hydrology and sub aqua diving are discussed. Community engagement involved intangible heritage, guide training, production of maritime-themed modern music, sustainable living, entrepreneurship, engagement with site issues. Increase in awareness has led to less desire to reuse ruins for modern building materials and motivation to value and preserve heritage. A national Digital Heritage Database will provide data on the impact of environmental change in the historic environment and the local communities.
Recent widely received claims about postcolonial Africa do not reflect any clear-cut connection between contemporary society and indigenous black African cultures as they prevailed before the colonial era, nor do they capture accurately the ways that European culture influenced – or failed to impact altogether – Africans during colonialism. Nor do proclamations about postcolonial reality present very well the hybrid linguistic cultures emerging after colonialism in contemporary settings where Africans interact with foreigners at high levels of intensity. Representation of the historical contribution of indigenous black African cultures to the hybridity of postcolonial settings is woefully incomplete. Further, there is a total absence of proper signage appropriate for those individuals whose heritage is the focus of foreigners gazing in situ at black African historical cultures. The evidence provided here is gathered from three linguistic landscapes along the East African coastline: Bagamoyo and Zanzibar in Tanzania, Mombasa in Kenya, and from West Africa’s Gulf of Guinea coast at Ouidah in Benin.
Societal Impact Statement
Highland forests of Mozambique have been strongly modified by human activities for millennia. Some highlands have sheer rock cliffs and are highly inaccessible to people and appear relatively undisturbed. Evidence from the forest and soils of inaccessible Mount Lico show that the fire regime has changed over the recent millennia. As climate and fire regimes continue to change, management of highland ecosystems will be crucial to sustain the high biodiversity and mountain‐water resources that provide key ecosystem services to people living close to these forests.
Summary
The sheer rock cliffs of the Mount Lico inselberg, northern Mozambique, is relatively inaccessible to people. A 0.57 km² forest covers the top of the isolated mountain, and the tree demographics and soil offer an opportunity to investigate the long‐term fire ecology of the forests of the western, leeside of the mountain and potential for changing regional hydroclimate of the Late Holocene.
On the western side of the mountaintop, a 20 × 20 m plot was surveyed for tree taxa, heights and bole diameters. A 220 cm deep pit was dug into the forest soil and analysed to describe the soil texture and carbon content. Charcoal was quantified on sieved subsamples and classified into charcoal morphologies that were then grouped by how readily entrainable on an index score. Three radiocarbon dates were collected from pieces charcoal.
The forest is a combination of montane and woodland tree taxa that differed from the older, more mesic eastern side and reflected differential disturbance patterns. The reddish loam soils dated to the Middle Holocene. Charcoal was present in all soil subsamples and varied little until increasing consistently during the past millennium. The charcoal morphologies suggested a combination of locally derived charcoal and charcoal derived from the surrounding lowlands with the latter increasing in the past centuries.
Few Holocene paleoenvironmental records have been developed from tropical soils in Africa and are useful in locations that do not host lakes and wetlands. Both tree demographics and soil charcoal suggest that changing forest disturbance regimes began during the past millennium. An understanding of history informs future conservation and appropriate management of these special places.
We articulate the lexicalization and extension of the meaning of kinship terms in Bantu languages spoken in Tanzania. We draw linguistic conclusion from proto-forms reconstructed in comparison with the maternal kin terms and affinal address forms in matrilineal and patrilineal societies. We assume that since societies (e.g. Luguru, Mwera, Ndendeule, Swahili) changed from matrilineal to patrilineal, the kin terms and address forms were altered to fit this transformation. Findings indicated that matrilineal societies (e.g. Luguru and Zigula) maintain the prominence of mtumba ‘paternal uncle’ irrespective of the socio-economic and political transformations which undermined the protagonist mother and elevated patriarchal relations. Findings also indicate that patrilineal societies (e.g. Ruuri and Sukuma) coin labels which indicate women as cattle and/or women as sources of children. While research in social sciences show diminishing matrilineal societies (e.g. Mwera and Sambaa), we argue in this paper that linguistically, this phenomenon unravels even societies whose matrilineal features appear to have been eroded by Islam, colonization and ujamaa policies.
This Element discusses a medieval African urban society as a product of interactions among African communities who inhabited the region between 100 BCE and 500 CE. It deviates from standard approaches that credit urbanism and state in Africa to non-African agents. East Africa, then and now, was part of the broader world of the Indian Ocean. Globalism coincided with the political and economic transformations that occurred during the Tang-Sung-Yuan-Ming and Islamic Dynastic times, 600-1500 CE. Positioned as the gateway into and out of eastern Africa, the Swahili coast became a site through which people, inventions, and innovations bi-directionally migrated, were adopted, and evolved. Swahili peoples' agency and unique characteristics cannot be seen only through Islam's prism. Instead, their unique character is a consequence of social and economic interactions of actors along the coast, inland, and beyond the Indian Ocean.
Decoding meaning in communication depends on semantic properties assigned by grammar and the speaker's intended meaning. Therefore, it is necessary to infer the intended meaning from the cues the speaker provides in the utterance. In such a case, context bridges the explanatory gap between sentence meaning and the speaker's meaning. Context is fundamental for language comprehension because meaning is dependent on it. This implies that context makes clear the intended meaning of any communicative act. This study sought to demonstrate the role of co-text in adding additional meaning. The study focused on Bi. Msafwari’s topical discussions. Data was collected through content analysis. It was analyzed through the interpretive method. The findings reveal that grammatical linguistic levels can be used to communicate indirectly through a shift in the motive of the sentence. The findings highlight the use of co-text in communicating indirectly. The study will also contribute literature to the critical discourse analysis of African languages.
The urban peoples of the Swahili coast traded across eastern Africa and the Indian Ocean and were among the first practitioners of Islam among sub-Saharan people1,2. The extent to which these early interactions between Africans and non-Africans were accompanied by genetic exchange remains unknown. Here we report ancient DNA data for 80 individuals from 6 medieval and early modern (ad 1250–1800) coastal towns and an inland town after ad 1650. More than half of the DNA of many of the individuals from coastal towns originates from primarily female ancestors from Africa, with a large proportion—and occasionally more than half—of the DNA coming from Asian ancestors. The Asian ancestry includes components associated with Persia and India, with 80–90% of the Asian DNA originating from Persian men. Peoples of African and Asian origins began to mix by about ad 1000, coinciding with the large-scale adoption of Islam. Before about ad 1500, the Southwest Asian ancestry was mainly Persian-related, consistent with the narrative of the Kilwa Chronicle, the oldest history told by people of the Swahili coast³. After this time, the sources of DNA became increasingly Arabian, consistent with evidence of growing interactions with southern Arabia⁴. Subsequent interactions with Asian and African people further changed the ancestry of present-day people of the Swahili coast in relation to the medieval individuals whose DNA we sequenced.
Originating from its relatively tiny native speaking population on the narrow East African coastal strip and its adjacent islands, the Swahili language today has spread throughout East and Central Africa to become the most widely spoken African language after Arabic. This chapter explores the various forces – trade, religion, education, wars, and urbanization – that have led to this momentous linguistic expansion over the years. In the process, the language came in contact with a number of other languages – of international traders and invaders like the Arabs and the Portuguese, of settler communities of Indian and Arabic descent, and of a broad range of African ethnic groups inland – that resulted in the emergence of new varieties of the language. In conclusion, the chapter will look at how, through the different spaces and contexts of linguistic contact, Swahili came to impact on other languages of East and Central Africa.
Language contact - the linguistic and social outcomes of two or more languages coming into contact with each other - has been pervasive in human history. However, where histories of language contact are comparable, experiences of migrant populations have been only similar, not identical. Given this, how does language contact work? With contributions from an international team of scholars, this Handbook - the first in a two-volume set - delves into this question from multiple perspectives and provides state-of-the-art research on population movement and language contact and change. It begins with an overview of how language contact as a research area has evolved since the late 19th century. The chapters then cover various processes and theoretical issues associated with population movement and language contact worldwide. It is essential reading for anybody interested in the dynamics of social interactions in diverse contact settings and how the changing ecologies influence the linguistic outcomes.
Archaeological excavations at Unguja Ukuu recovered a rock crystal cabochon seal with the word lillāh (“for God”) inscribed in the Kufic script on its domed surface. The artifact is an intaglio amulet seal engraved in the negative. Microscopic examination of the seal surfaces reveals that a rotary tool was used to make the initial inscription. At some later point, a diagonal spall was removed across part of the inscription. The diagonal spall appears to be along a natural crystal plane. It is impossible to determine if this was the result of intentional defacement or an accidental process that might have resulted in the eventual deposition of the seal. Strata dated by radiometric and relative methods coupled with the style of the Kufic script date the seal to the late-8th to 9th centuries CE . This artifact is the earliest known example of an Islamic amulet seal and of writing in the Zanzibar Archipelago.
In this article, we present the results of a recent program of high-resolution radiocarbon dating on the urban sequence at Kilwa Kisiwani in southern Tanzania, including Bayesian modeling of 21 calibrated ¹⁴C dates. These data come from the 2016 excavation of a large trench directly adjacent to trench ZLL, one of the key 1960s excavations that served to establish the original chronology of the town. The new sequence reported here anchors the phases of Kilwa’s development for the first time in absolute terms. The dates, stratigraphy, and artifact assemblage offer a number of new insights into the timing and tempo of the occupation at Kilwa, notably placing the first coral buildings and coins at the end of the tenth century. Insights also include findings related to the earliest phases of settlement and periods of possible urban decline. We argue against a trend for understanding Swahili towns according to a common coastal trajectory and suggest that it is important to consider regional diversity by recognizing the particular, episodic sequence at Kilwa.
In the 1970s and 1980s, Tanzanian Publishing House, a government parastatal of the East African nation, embarked upon a project to spread practical yet specialized knowledge to its citizens through a series of twenty how–to Kiswahili manuals called Vitabu Vya Ufundi (“Books of Specialization”). The authors who participated in this project certainly helped shape a national technical language by introducing new terms in both English and Kiswahili. Yet equally important, and the subject of this essay, is that the authors drew upon pre-existing linguistic frameworks and categories for establishing the boundaries of useful knowledge. Using seven of these manuals, this essay demonstrates how a broad, flexible, and historic Kiswahili term for specialization, ufundi, provided a framework for state entities, practitioners-turned-authors, and citizens to establish and negotiate the boundaries of knowledge production during the independent period. It further shows how the vernacularized term for technology, tekinolojia, found uptake with and through established discourses of ufundi and their relationship to two other significant terms, kilimo (farming or agriculture) and maendeleo (development).
In 2016, with the support of a three-year National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) Collaborative Research Grant to research and write a precolonial African history of family, generations, and gender, we began building the Bantu Ancestral Roots Database (BARD). BARD is a digital repository of word-roots related to gender and life stage practices from over sixty Bantu languages. We developed it to assist us in our analysis of this large corpus of data that we used to write histories of people’s material and ideological inventions that cover the longue durée across multiple regions. BARD allows researchers with internet access to search for terms by entering at least three consecutive phonemes. If phonemes exist in that sequence in any of the 64 Bantu languages that BARD holds, those words and their meanings appear as results. In this article, we discuss the usefulness and complexities of Digital Humanities (DH) as research tools. We explain our methodology and research process using three reconstructed word-roots pertinent to our research on family and generations. The three word-roots we examine invite scholars to probe how to recover deep connections and linkages between people’s pasts in Africa and its Diasporas, particularly in ways that move beyond histories of the slave trade and enslavement. As we developed our open-access website African Social History and Data Across Bantu Matrilineal Communities (ASH-DABMC) and our database, BARD, we gained greater insight into the meanings encoded in our data even as we faced challenges. We hope the discussion of our experiences will provide an intellectual framework and inspire others considering digital projects.
In this article, I engage the “language as heritage” trope to critically examine a popular belief that underlies it: the idea that a shared language primordially connects an individual to a group of people, a homogenous culture and a particular territory—the notion of the ethnolinguistic group. Judith T. Irvine has long urged linguistic anthropologists to problematize the linguistic side of these classifications, to recognize the ideologies that shape both scholarly language descriptions and speakers’ own interactional practices (often in response to those official depictions). Here, I take on this challenge by considering both the contrived colonial standardization process of East Africa’s Swahili language, and contemporary Swahili speakers’ creative resistances to scholarly descriptions of “their” linguistic heritage. Orthographic and interactional practices from speakers of KiAmu, a Swahili vernacular spoken in coastal Kenya, illustrate how speakers creatively attempt to make their vernacular more “like itself.” Rejecting (post)colonial perspectives of Swahili as a distinctly “African” language, they are reimagining their linguistic heritage and its associated belongings to appeal to alternative identities and histories, that have hybridity and transoceanic interconnectivity at their core.
The Swahili are arguably the most studied society in ancient Sub-Saharan Africa. The Swahili are of African in origin but balance their character between continental Africa and influences from the Indian Ocean, including Islam. City-states and towns along the eastern coast of Africa attest that the Swahili built coral monuments and commercial networks with broad connectivity. Colonial archaeologists claimed foreign origins and cast the Swahili as transplants, false representations evident by 1990 through the contributions of African and other archaeologists and interdisciplinary scholarship. Other aspects of the Swahili continue to be debated, and gaps and shortcomings present impediments to resolution. In this article, we characterize the Swahili and note early trends in the region’s archaeology relevant to contextualize Swahili archaeology post-1990. The article then discusses aspects of Swahili archaeology from 1990 to 2015 and current practices. We note trends, substantive achievements, and lapses in substance and practice during 30 years. Finally, we make observations and suggestions to advance archaeology the region’s archaeology. Archaeology in the Global South can learn from the case of the Swahili and the affirmations, critiques, and suggestions offered here, which we intend to promote future archaeological practice in East Africa.
Laudatio en honneur du Professeur V.Y. Mudimbe. En "V. Y. Mudimbe. Appropriations, transmissions, reconsidérations", de Gilbert KISHIBA FITULA (dir.), avec Germain NGOIE TSHIBAMBE & Antoine Tshitungu Kongolo. Paris: Edítions du Cygne, 2021.
The Rising from the Depths (RftD) network aims to identify the ways in which Marine Cultural Heritage (MCH) can contribute to the sustainable development of coastal communities in Kenya, Tanzania, Mozambique and Madagascar. Although the coastal and marine heritage of eastern Africa is a valuable cultural and environmental resource, it remains largely unstudied and undervalued and is subject to significant threat from natural and anthropogenic processes of change. This paper outlines the aims of the RftD network and describes the co-creation of a challenge-led research and sustainability programme for the study of MCH in eastern Africa. Through funding 29 challenge-led research projects across these four Global South countries, the network is demonstrating how MCH can directly benefit East African communities and local economies through building identity and place-making, stimulating resource-centred alternative sources of income and livelihoods, and enhancing the value and impact of overseas aid in the marine sector. Overall, Rising from the Depths aims to illustrate that an integrated consideration of cultural heritage, rather than being a barrier to development, should be positioned as a central facet of the transformative development process if that development is to be ethical, inclusive and sustainable.
This essay presents some brief reflections about “Africa and the production of knowledges at the globalization era” (theme of the international conference for which it was originally prepared) and suggests some possible connections with the same problem in Latin America. This will be done in dialogue with the works of the Congolese academic Valentin-Yves Mudimbe, one of the more important thinkers of the global periphery. To deal with this theme, we must think about African and Black identities, and Mudimbe is essential to do that. He is one of the main critics of the essentialism present in the construction of the notions of “black” and “Africa”. He highlights that they are inventions and they are produced mainly from outside. “Black” is an invention of the “White”, the “European”, the “Western”, like “Africa” or “Orient”, built negatively for the self-assertion of a superior identity. At the same time, he produces some of the more interesting reflections about the ways for an epistemic decolonialization of Africa (Ngoie Tshibambe, 2017).
The article highlights the results of field research conducted in Tanzania from August 24 to September 14, 2018, focused on the historical memory of the Arab slave trade in East Africa and the Indian Ocean in the 19th century and its influence on the interethnic relations in the country nowadays. Structured and non-structured interviews (mostly in-depth) were done in Dar es Salaam, Bagamoyo and Zanzibar. In general, opinions divided almost equally: half of respondents are convinced that the relations are completely good, the other half believe that there are some tensions. Both opinions are well-argued and substantiated, it is possible to trace some patterns in people’s perception. The history of the Arab slave trade lies between family trauma on the one hand, and tolerance, non-discrimination, imposed by the state, on the other. Two ways of reproducing the historical memory largely oppose each other: the school system lays the blame on Europeans, promoting peaceful interethnic relations, presenting the slave trade as an essential part of colonialism, and after that emphasizing the story of overcoming the colonial past, while the oral tradition censors nothing and tells the history of the ancestors’ sufferings in its entirety. Thus, connoisseurs of the oral tradition with a low level of education turn to be the most vulnerable category, they become the least tolerant to Arab-Tanzanians part of the country’s population.
Most of what we know about pidgin and creole languages is the result of research into contact languages that developed as a consequence of European expansion into Africa and the Caribbean. The narrow focus on European lexifier and West African substrate languages has resulted in insufficient investigation of other contact varieties. Even more perniciously, lesser known and often under-described contact languages have not been taken into consideration when formulating supposedly general tendencies about the linguistic properties of contact languages. This volume aims to give a platform to research on the history, genesis, and typology of a number of non-European language-based contact languages. A more encompassing and diverse data-base will contribute to more accurate and comprehensive inventories of the typological features of contact languages.
This article argues that historians will have a new understanding of northeast and east Africa if they recall the medieval meaning of the terms Zanj and Ahabish , or Habasha . Before the fifteenth century the term Zanj included the diverse populations of northeast Africa, so should not be exclusive of the populations of coastal east Africa. Likewise, Habasha or Ahabish was not confined to the peoples of the northern Horn but included the diverse peoples of coastal east Africa. Uncovering older meanings of Zanj and Ahabish helps to identify elusive groups of ancient northeast Africans referred to as northern Zanj, Zanj-Ahabish, Ahabish , and Damadim . For identification, this article presents three types of historical data overlooked in the sources. The first consists of the interchangeable names northern Zanj , Damadim, Ahabish, Zanj-Ahabish , and Zanj ed-Damadim to recast the term Zanj and identify the Damadim or Yamyam. The second is the broadly inclusive meaning before the fifteenth century of the term Habasha . The third is the reported eloquence in their Buttaa ceremony of the northern Zanj , and the institutional setting of the Buttaa within the Oromo Gadaa system.
In recent years, several attempts to revitalize Area Studies have concentrated on oceans as the unifying force to create regions. In this respect, the Indian Ocean has become a prime example to show how economic as well as cultural flows across the sea have contributed to close connections between its shores. However, by doing so, they not only seem to create a certain, rather homogeneous, Indian Ocean space, they often also lead to a conceptual separation between “coast” and “hinterland,” similar to earlier distinctions between “African/Arab” or “East/Central Africa.” In this contribution, so-called “Arab” traders who settled along trade routes connecting the East African coast to its hinterland will serve as an empirical ground to explore and challenge these boundaries. Tracing maritime imaginaries and related materialities in the Tanzanian interior, it will reflect on the ends of the Indian Ocean and the nature of such maritime conceptualizations of space more generally. By taking the relational thinking that lies at the ground of maritimity inland, it wishes to encourage a re-conceptualization of areas that not only replaces a terrestrial spatial entity with a maritime one, but that genuinely breaks with such “container-thinking” and, instead, foregrounds the meandering, fluid character of regions and their complex and highly dynamic entanglements.
“From the Streets to the Ivory Tower” provides an overview of the role Kiswahili, an East African language, has played in African-American cultural discourse. Highlighting selected texts, the essay argues Kiswahili contests the presumed primacy of Western languages and cultures and serves a transgressive, albeit somewhat contested, role in the burgeoning manifestations of Black Power/Nationalism/Diaspora. Debates about the language’s efficacy were common in academic and popular journals in the middle and second half of the twentieth century; however, all arguments notwithstanding, Kiswahili remains a recognizable, commonly taught, and often referenced African language—from literary texts (Scott-Heron, Killens, Reed) to advertisements (Afro Sheen) to cultural celebrations (Kwanzaa) to children’s books (Feelings)—in African-American discourse.
Arab travellers and traders along the eastern African coast, more than 1000 years ago, were the first Arabic speaking people to bring Arabic language in contact with the other African languages in eastern and later southern Africa. Over the years, Arabic gained a lot of influence in the region. The impact of Arabic can be seen, especially in old scripts, loanwords, Arabic accents and sound features in some of the local languages.This article examines the nature and extent of contact situations between Arabic and two languages, namely Kiswahili, spoken in eastern Africa, and Setswana, spoken in southern Africa. The study is based on the Language Contact Theory, which states that the nature, length and intensity of language contact are the key factors determining the linguistic and sociolinguistic processes that take place. Contact between languages could be either direct or indirect. The main argument of the study is that the extent of influence of a language on another depends not only on the nature of contact, but also, and mainly, on the length and intensity of contact. The paper highlights the domains in which elements of Arabic origin have infiltrated or been adopted in these languages.
Swahili literary genres and conventions, as well as specific Swahili literary works, have intrigued and inspired a wide range of writers on African history. While early writers on East African history considered only the chronicles of Swahili city‐states, more recently scholars have begun to write about other narrative genres as well as about Swahili narrative poetry. Historians have also turned to ethnographies, local histories, the more recent genre of autobiographical writing in Swahili, and the Swahili novel. Literary works may, of course, be problematic when they are read as documents, and therefore an understanding of both literature and history is necessary for an insight into significant issues in African history as well as issues that are central to Swahili literary history. Swahili literature has provided invaluable and diverse sources to historians and other scholars, and an international intellectual community is emerging for whom Swahili is the primary language.
Missionaries collected and, in many cases, were instructed to collect not only linguistic data but also cultural artifacts and natural scientific specimens of various kinds. In doing so, they became motors of European “arm-chair” science and museum culture, supplying European universities and scientific institutions with curiosities and rarities from the colonies. What is the relationship between colonial collection practices and doing linguistic work? Does a better understanding of how missionaries approached the collection of linguistic data, on the one hand, and non-linguistic specimens, on the other hand, provide insight into how they viewed, handled, or “descriptively appropriated” indigenous languages? In this paper, I examine a particular moment in the history of linguistics where the collection of natural scientific, especially botanical, specimens and linguistic enquiry intersected in a powerful way in the extra-linguistic collecting activities of French missionaries in colonial Africa.
The eastern African coast is known for its Swahili “stonetowns.” Archaeological study of stonetowns has overshadowed that of Swahili rural life, and how it reformulated in the context of urban transformations after a.d. 1000. To help redress that imbalance, we focus here on village research carried out in a Swahili heartland—Pemba Island, Tanzania—in the context of two archaeological projects. We feature four settlements: later 1st millennium Kimimba village and its large, trading village neighbor, Tumbe; and 2nd millennium Kaliwa village, neighbor to Chwaka stonetown. Their archaeology, contextualized within a regional landscape, allows us to say new things about the changing nature of rural life on Pemba, and to make a case for the potential of village complexity elsewhere on the Swahili coast.
This chapter critiques the use of linguistic evidence in the preceding case study of feasting on the Swahili coast. Commentary focuses in particular on issues of dating historical linguistic evidence with a specific focus on debates surrounding the divergence dates for the Swahili, Sabaki, and Northeast Coastal groups. These debates have an important impact on the correlations archaeologists can make between the linguistic and material records. The chapter also introduces additional historical evidence embedded in published word reconstructions for Sabaki and Swahili as revealed by their etymologies and morphologies and their position as constituent parts of lexicons. The dialogue clarifies points raised in the commentary, particularly around dating and the issues of narrative scale, patterning, and preservation that make interdisciplinary research difficult without formal training in multiple disciplines. The revised narrative at the end of the chapter changes the argument offered in Chap. 4 by shifting the topic to focus not only on feasting but on the earlier emergence of lexicon describing performative verbal jousting that was later incorporated into the novel social settings developed around competitive feasts in the early second millennium.
This chapter introduces the volume’s second case study. Through an assessment of the lexical reconstructions from published historical linguistic analyses, this chapter reexamines earlier arguments about the emergence of feasting on the eastern African, Swahili coast after AD 1000. The finding of a collection of word innovations about discussions, disparagement, and power that predate this period, indicates a set of social practices that emerged during the last quarter of the first millennium; these include the establishment of social distinction through competition and verbal jousting. The resonance of these practices with later evidence of feasting forces a reconsideration of ceramic evidence from the first millennium AD. Based on this analysis, a longer biography of practice of feasting is posited, extending from the first to second millennium.
In this article, we respond to an article by Jeffrey Fleisher et al. (2015) in which they pose the question: When did the Swahili become maritime? We draw from our research findings in coastal and inland Eastern Africa to show that inland African societies were an essential component in the development of Swahili urbanism and maritimity. To understand change in any part of the East African coast requires understanding the entire context of economic, political, and social interaction across the diverse dimensions of this society. By excluding inland Eastern Africa from their analysis, Fleisher et al. omit the interactions between land and sea that were the basis of this society's development. We conclude that Swahili society resulted from intercommunity interaction, socioeconomic networks, and exploitation of diverse regional resources. [trade, maritime, mosaics, urbanism, Swahili] En este artículo, respondemos al escrito de Jeffrey Fleischer et al. (2015) en el cual hacen la pregunta: ¿Cuándo los swahilis se convirtieron en una sociedad marítima? Nos basamos en los hallazgos de nuestra investigación en África oriental costera e interior para mostrar que las sociedades africanas del interior fueron un componente esencial en el desarrollo del urbanismo y la maritimidad swahili. Entender los cambios en cualquier parte de la costa africana oriental requiere entender el contexto entero de las interacciones económicas, políticas y sociales a través de las diversas dimensiones de esta sociedad. Al excluir África oriental interior de su análisis, Fleisher et al. omiten las interacciones entre el mar y la tierra que fueron la base del desarrollo de esta sociedad. Concluimos que la sociedad swahili resultó de la interacción intercomunitaria, las redes socioeconómicas y la explotación de diversos recursos regionales. [comercio, marítimo, mosaicos, urbanismo, Swahili]
Résumé
Le continent africain sub-saharien, pour toute une série de raisons qui continuent d’interpeller les historiens mais qu’il n’y a pas lieu de réexaminer ici, a été jusqu’à une époque récente très peu urbanisé. Avec l’urbanisation, qui s’est accélérée à partir du milieu du XXe siècle, la population des villes est seulement aujourd’hui en passe de devenir majoritaire, même si nombre d’États, pour des raisons d’ailleurs diverses, ont fait le saut depuis une vingtaine d’années au moins: comme l’Afrique du Sud en raison de l’avance industrielle des Blancs, le Gabon, le Congo ou la Mauritanie pour des raisons en grande partie minières, ou le Sénégal malgré des statistiques trompeuses, comme elles le sont toutes d’ailleurs, sans même parler des villes sud-africaines de l’apartheid, où la majorité des citadins africains n’était guère prise en compte puisqu’ils étaient clandestins. Auparavant, si les villes anciennes d’Afrique ont pu jouer un rôle fort important et parfois déterminant sur le plan politique et économique, elles ont été en général peu nombreuses et relativement peu densément peuplées. Mais cela ne signifie pas qu’elles ont été inexistantes.
This paper examines the African experience with forced labor in colonial Mozambique, where the administration developed a labor regime that resembled a 'modern slavery.' Both contemporary observers and subsequent scholarly research have used the modifying 'modern' to describe types of forced labor and to draw distinctions from older forms of slavery. This work aims to historicize notions of free labor in the midst of a broader atmosphere of coercion and to make sense of the silence of certain actors on the question of slavery. The paper explores the ways in which African in Mozambique considered colonial labor practices, with an emphasis on questions of dignity, honor and degradation. © 2017 Centro de Estudos Internacionais do Instituto Universitário de Lisboa (ISCTE-IUL).
Swahili is a second language for the majority of its users both within East Africa and beyond, creating a great need for adequate teaching, learning, and assessment resources. Outside of Africa, it is the most widely taught African language. While Swahili has been assessed through standardized tests within East Africa for decades, only recently have those involved in teaching Swahili as a foreign language begun developing standardized tests for Swahili assessment. Different assessments used in East Africa and the USA, as well as existing challenges and needs, are considered in this chapter.
An overview article dealing with migrations within a continent over a period of a thousand years must inevitably be sketchy and can at best give some examples. Nowadays about 2,500 languages are spoken by at least as many ethnic, political, or societal groups. The picture is complicated by the fact that languages do not necessarily correspond to ethnic, political, societal, or cultural entities and there is no reason to assume that the situation was different during the period under consideration. Quite the contrary is the case. Linguistic, archaeological, and historical studies have shown that languages and cultures have disappeared in the course of time. Migrations of people(s), but also of ideas, religions, goods, and many more took place permanently somewhere on the continent, and the reconstruction of these different events and processes has only just begun and will never be complete.
Keywords:
indigenous peoples;
archaeology;
empire;
farming;
linguistics;
medieval
This chapter provides an introduction for those who may not be familiar with East African archaeology and history. It also contextualizes the social changes taking place on clove plantations. By taking a longue durée approach in relation to Swahili archaeology, it becomes clear that while the nineteenth century was a period of rapid social change, foundational aspects of what emerged as Zanzibari culture also drew upon preexisting Swahili norms. Historical background on nineteenth-century East Africa is provided not only to contextualize clove plantations but also to demonstrate how archaeology provides a broader understanding of a historical period through the integration of material and historical sources.
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