Search Results

This chapter explores how a language-acquiring child might ‘not know’ agreement. Ways in which such a child could be non-adultlike include inoperability of universal principles, incorrect parameter settings, incomplete/incorrect knowledge of inflectional forms, imperfect execution of grammatical computations, and production difficulties. Distinguishing these is illustrated with English and Swahili transcripts.

The future of relations between Tanzanian Muslims and the state is in the balance as recriminations between reformists and Bakwata continue, and the outline of potential compromises between Ansar and Lailah Muslims is as yet hard to see. Beyond the acceptance of basic religious practices, being Muslim meant very different things to different people at different times: a privileged connection to coastal sites of exchange for pre-colonial big men; social ascendancy for pre-colonial patricians, but social equality to inter-war immigrants; full participation in the social and ritual life of the village for rural converts in the mid-twentieth century; an increasingly problematic separate allegiance for post-colonial Tanzanians. The permutations of public ritual are covered. The concern about ignorance is not in itself a product of post-colonial political rhetoric. The chapter then discusses the political topography and the distribution of religious affiliations. The history of town and countryside helps in the understanding of the context that has shaped academic representations of Swahili culture as an urban culture. The Ansar and the debate on Islam and modernity are explained. The Islamist movements in the Southeast and East Africa at large draw on allegiances and grievances rooted in both recent and long-term history.

Historically, poetry and its performance were applied to a wide range of incidents in Swahili social life. Swahili poetry has long been used for Islamic and social education, as well as for ideological attacks between political or religious opponents. Reformist poets, for instance, railed against the supposed enemies of ‘pure’ Islam, such as the traditional healers practising divination or spirit-possession. This chapter presents an epigraph characterising Nabhany's literary and cultural project that can serve as a guideline through these passages which attempt to give a portrait of this important intellectual. Nabhany is a self-trained scholar who has assisted many academics in their research and, over decades, himself worked through various fields of Swahili cultural knowledge.

This chapter applies the results of the study to a new set of original data — namely, applied (or applicative) verbs in Swahili. These verb forms have as standard been argued to result from a process of valency changing, which adds an indirect object to the base verb's subcategorization frame. Since a purely syntactic valency changing operation is surprising from the perspective adopted here, given that subcategorization is underspecified anyway, applied verbs provide apparent counter-evidence to the analysis. In this chapter, a range of new data is presented which support the underspecification analysis. They show that applied verbs do not universally introduce a new argument, but that in many contexts they do not have more arguments than their base verb. From the novel evidence it appears that the more abstract common characteristic of applied verbs is that they instruct the hearer to derive more inferential effects from the utterance than from a corresponding non-applied verb. The analysis consequently takes this as the primary function of applied verbs, i.e., they are an instruction for concept formation, and shows that the syntactic facts follow from this more fundamental characterization. Swahili applied verbs thus provide more evidence for the relation between the dynamics of argument structure, and occasion specific concept formation.

The map of the Indian Ocean in the Book of Curiosities shows the Gulf of Aden as a gateway to the ports and islands of the East Africa, known today as the Swahili coast. Fatimid commercial relations with East Africa are rarely documented, and recent scholarship has doubted any Fatimid impact on the region during its formative period of Islamization. But the detailed depiction of East Africa in the Book of Curiosities points to an unexpected level of familiarity, based on information gathered from navigation along the coasts of the Horn of Africa. We have here what may be the first recorded references in Arabic to the islands of Zanzibar (al-Unguja), Mafia, and several localities and capes along the coasts of modern Somalia. The treatise allows us to visualize the Indian Ocean from a Fatimid viewpoint, with the Isma'ili anchors of Sind and the Yemen as the two crucial nodes for further political, religious and economic penetration. This Indian Ocean, unlike the Mediterranean, was not a militarised space, and Fatimid ambitions there relate to the propagation of the Isma'ili missionary network. Visually, the Indian Ocean also lacks the perfect symmetry of the Mediterranean and is shown here in disparate segments.

What travel meant when scientific explorers began producing knowledge about vast regions such as central Africa merits close attention, especially in view of the imminent danger of disembodied postcolonial theorizing. This chapter gives an account of the course this project has taken. It took years before the author realized to place his work in the context of colonial history. Knowledge of the colonial past was essential to understand, among other things, a problem that intrigued him: How did it come about that Swahili, a language which had its origins on the east coast of Africa, would emerge, in different variants, as both a tool of Belgian colonization and a “weapon of resistance”, as the common medium through which displaced labor recruits and other immigrants created spaces of freedom for the vital and complex popular culture first encountered in the sixties?

An anthropological investigation into philosophy provides insights and information about traditions of knowledge and intellectual practice elsewhere in the world, in social contexts very different from our own. This chapter carves out one particular approach about how this could work in relation to the Swahili context and against the background of discussions in African philosophy. Philosophy, as socialised discourse and practice, overlaps with other areas of anthropological interest, such as literature and religion. These overlaps, of genre and of discipline, can be investigated and made useful as points of orientation. However, one difficulty of introducing the project of an ‘anthropology of philosophy’ to an interdisciplinary audience with widely disparate expertise and background is dealing with all the subject-specific matters and questions in appropriate depth. The discussion tries to find a balance, presenting several sub-disciplinary turns that lead to an anthropology of philosophy.

This chapter presents a brief sketch of the history of Mombasa and of the current socio-economic situation of the City and its Old Town. First, it discusses two central features of the Swahili context in relation to each other, the potential of social integration, and the status-centred self-conception. Strictly speaking, they seem to contradict each other while claiming to represent the key feature of social dynamics in the Swahili context. Both the ideology of hierarchy and the process of social integration have been mentioned in the abundant literature on ‘Swahili identity’. The chapter argues argue that both crucial features of the Swahili context are somehow epitomised in the social history of Mombasa. Second, it helps to clarify why the ‘Swahili’ category is elusive and yet seemingly inevitable. Third, the chapter describes the living conditions in the Old Town of Mombasa during the time of the fieldwork.

This chapter sketches the intellectual climate of Mombasa today and also the recent intellectual history of the region, including some of its most significant scholars. They are constant reference points for discussions taking place among common people in the streets, or among scholars in their speeches or religious booklets. In describing local discourses and intellectual debates, the discussion provides evidence for the internal recognition of features that are associated with philosophy. It notes that in Swahili intellectual discourse, the label ‘philosopher’ is sometimes directly and spontaneously applied to prominent thinkers.

This chapter deals with the classic philosophical questions of what is humanity (signifying the field of philosophical anthropology) and what is goodness (characterising moral theory). It provides illustrations from Swahili social discourse, using sayings and the expressed convictions of ordinary people. There is a shared common body of knowledge about what it means to be ‘human’ or ‘good’ within the wider Swahili-speaking community. The chapter sketches this out by documenting how a selected handful of young men in Kibokoni would elaborate on these issues. It presents a discussion of their overlapping and contrasting statements leading on to the portrayal and discussion of Ahmad Nassir's theory of utu, as he presents it in an extended utenzi poem.

Looking back at the contextual portrayals of Ahmed Sheikh Nabhany, Ahmad Nassir Juma Bhalo, and Sheikh Abdilahi Nassir, it is evident that these diverse Swahili intellectuals have produced a corresponding range of texts, some of which are explicitly critical in character. In different ways, all three thinkers are concerned with social knowledge and its descriptive and normative aspects. Turning to their experience of social life in Mombasa and their reflection on this experience, there are counterpoints and continuities in comparison to the older generation. This chapter explores how philosophical discourse and intellectual practice in the Swahili context will continue in the future, in relation to local discourses of knowledge, Islamic debates, and the challenges of everyday life.

The spirit of Africa was imbibed by von Sicard, who grew up there and studied in South Africa before moving on to Uppsala, Hartford, and Cairo. The journey is marked by figures like Tor Andrae, F.A. Klein, the shaykhs of al-Azhar and Sayyid Akhtar Rizvi of the Bilal Mission and immersion in Swahili language and culture. It is argued that the days of polemic and apologetic are past, to be replaced by diapraxis–growing through shared social action for the common good – and an open, sincere experience of intellectual, spiritual and humanist dimensions. The shared languages should be used to promote Christian-Muslim understanding. Human growth is directed towards God-consciousness. This is the African approach to which we are called: a sincere respect for the views and ways of others.

This chapter tells the story of the changing use of the term maendeleo in colonial Tanganyika between the turn of the century and independence in 1961. Hunter argues that it is only by appreciating the broad way in which maendeleo was understood in local contexts and the way that it served in part as a space in which to reflect on the meaning of modernity that we can make sense of its power then and now, and that the history of this keyword provides a crucial context for understanding development discourse in late colonial Tanganyika. To make this argument, she draws on a close reading of the editorial comment and letters pages of three Swahili-language newspapers – Mambo Leo, Mwafrika and the Kilimanjaro newspaper Komkya, as well as a set of district newspapers published in 1952 by district offices around Tanganyika.

This chapter focuses on the historical chronicles of three Swahili towns on the coast of southern Tanzania, drawing on archaeological data from survey and excavation in the region. More specifically, it examines how the three chronicles challenge the dichotomy between history and prehistory on two levels. First, as transcribed oral traditions, Swahili chronicles break down the dichotomy between oral and written sources, and thus implicitly between prehistory and history. Second, as they break down the prehistory/history divide within a given coastal community, the chronicles also highlight the contributions of interior groups to coastal society. The chapter questions essentialised meta-narratives that have been used to dichotomise groups in East Africa since the colonial era, which is evident in the separation between the urban Swahili deemed to belong to history and their non-Swahili neighbours who were relegated to prehistory. It shows that non-Swahili African groups, whose pasts have been dismissed as prehistory, played critical roles in shaping historical outcomes on the coast.