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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.

The identification of a cultural grouping termed ‘Swahili’ has long rested on the ability to discern a commonality of material and social environment across an enormous region, aspects of which have been discussed in previous chapters. Clearly, the coast and offshore islands of eastern Africa have been interconnected to a significant degree throughout the precolonial period, in a similar way to that noted in colonial histories. One of the key data sources for that ongoing interaction is the record of historical linguistics, which has traced a spread of Swahili languages from a north-eastern homeland southwards along the coast and to the Comoro archipelago. This has not only offered a crucial challenge to models of external origins, but also serves as a guide to the ongoing interactions that have made dialects of Swahili mutually intelligible more than 1,000 years since their original divergence. This mobility and entanglement are also invoked as causation for the ‘community of material culture that remained relatively constant over 3,000 kilometres of archipelagic civilization’ (Prestholdt 1998: 8). Certainly for the historical period, sources suggest that cultural cohesiveness was maintained through regular coasting travel along the littoral (Sheriff 2010). This seems likely also to have been the case in the deeper past, which resulted in similarities along the coastline over the longer term. Horton and Middleton (2000: 5) discuss this in enduring terms: ‘[the Swahili] have comprised a single social and cultural entity, Swahili society, with its own unique civilization of which they are deeply proud and possessive.’ These patterns of commonality have to some extent been the subject of this entire volume, but this chapter specifically explores the route by which communities of material culture were produced and maintained. Clearly this is more than simply a case of proximity or contact. Through attention to the shifting geography of coastal connections over time, it also becomes clear that the situation encountered by the Portuguese and later Europeans on the coast, while indicative, was not necessarily representative of the coast through time.

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.

Africa’s eastern littoral borders the Indian Ocean, providing the setting for the settlements, people, and language known collectively as Swahili, which have been a key part of that ocean’s trading networks for at least two millennia. Graeco-Roman sailors visited the now-forgotten metropolis of Rhapta, and their voyages were recorded in the narratives that later became the first-century Periplus of the Erythraean Sea (Casson 1989). Traces of that early contact survive in the form of beads and coins, yet are limited in number and diffuse in nature (Chami and Msemwa 1997a; Horton 1990). From the seventh century onwards, a series of more permanent settlements began to monopolize this trade; by the eleventh century some of these had grown into towns that were able to control and provide a focus for the mercantile opportunities of the Indian Ocean. The trading economy of Swahili towns was based on the wealth of the African continent—gold and ivory were particularly valuable exports—and underlain by a mixed economy and diverse population of fishers and farmers, traders and craft-workers (Horton and Middleton 2000; Kusimba 2008). By the ‘golden age’ of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, the Swahili were an African society of considerable cosmopolitanism and fame, with towns like Kilwa Kisiwani known throughout the medieval world (Sutton 1993, 1997). Swahili archaeology is focused, conceptually and methodologically, on the series of stone towns that grew up along Africa’s eastern coast from the end of the first millennium AD. These towns developed as key nodes in both local and international networks of interaction, and became the conduits through which the African continent traded and communicated with the wider Indian Ocean world. The material settings of the towns, and particularly the distinctive tradition of coral architecture they contain, embody their cosmopolitanism, with this locally derived building tradition creating unique urban spaces that nevertheless reference the Islamic architecture of the Arabian Peninsula and Persian Gulf (Garlake 1966). Archaeology on this coast is still relatively new, dating back only to the 1950s and 1960s, and to the pioneering work of researchers convinced they had discovered evidence for Arab trading stations on the coast of eastern Africa (Kirkman 1964).

The stone towns of the Swahili coast define and embody both contemporary Swahili society and the ways that the archaeology of that region is known. The series of large-scale projects that have explored their architecture and changing material culture provide the means through which the past is conceived, even though these stone towns were themselves a particular material expression of a broader eastern African society, linked through networks of trade and interaction from earliest times. Urban centres provided the setting for the practices and lifestyles that came to be construed as Swahili, and twenty-first-century stone towns such as Lamu, Mombasa, and Zanzibar are still the quintessential expression of coastal culture. Stone-town excavations therefore structure our understandings of ancient Swahili materiality, and explorations of the wider society use these urban trajectories and developmental sequences as their reference point for exploration of the broader context. The objects of the Swahili world, reviewed in this chapter, are therefore presented through the archaeology of some of the more prominent stone-town excavations that together have defined our understandings. Rather than offering a comprehensive review of the archaeology of the coast (for which see Horton and Middleton 2000; Kusimba 1999b), this chapter discusses the material settings of the town. After a brief consideration of these key excavations, discussion focuses on themes in the study of Swahili materiality, and the ways that this has been conceptualized. Objects are implicated in understandings of identity from two angles, first as a reflection of some kind of ethnic identity, and second as part of the practices of daily life and the ways that people have constructed the urban social world. These discussions introduce more sites into consideration, and attempt to position them with relation to material understandings. The Swahili world presents itself as a ‘material culture’, in which objects are and were crucial to the performance of social roles and the construction of the urban environment. The evidence suggests that the Swahili themselves have long manipulated the material world to create a certain form of urban life, which defines and also creates certain types of person and activity.