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Traditional History and African Literature: The Swahili Case

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 January 2009

J. De V. Allen
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Type
Review Article
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The Journal of African History , Volume 23 , Issue 2 , April 1982 , pp. 227 - 236
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1982

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References

1 White, Landeg, ‘Literature and History in Africa’, J. Afr. Hist. xxi (1980), 539.Google Scholar

2 Steere, Edward, Stvahili Tales (London, 1871)Google Scholar; Taylor, W. E., African Aphorisms or Saw sfrom Swahililand (London, 1891)Google Scholar; Stigand, C. H., The Land of Zinj (London, 1913)Google Scholar; Werner, A., ‘A Swahili history of Pate’, Journal of the African Society, xiv (1915), 148–61, 278–97, 392–413Google Scholar; Werner, A. and Hichens, W. E., The Advice of Mwana Kupona upon the Wifely Duty (Medstead, 1934)Google Scholar; Hichens, W. E., ‘Khabar al-Lamu (Chronicle of Lamu)’, Bantu Studies, xii (1938). 1–34Google Scholar; idem, Al-Inkishafi (London, 1939).

3 Coupland, R., East Africa and its Invaders from Earliest Times to the Death of Seyyid Said in 1856 (London, 1938)Google Scholar; Kirkman, J. S., Men and Monuments on the East African Coast (London, 1964), 37Google Scholar; Chittick, H. N., ‘A new look at the history of Pate’, J. Afr. Hist., x, 3 (1969), 391.Google Scholar

4 Freeman-Grenville, G. S. P., ‘Swahili literature and the history and archaeology of the East African Coast’, J. East African Swahili Committee, xxviii, 2 (1958), 7–25Google Scholar; idem, ‘Medieval evidence for Swahili’, J. East African Swahili Committee, xxix, 1 (1959), 4–8; Harries, Lyndon, Swahili Poetry (Oxford, 1962), 128–9.Google Scholar

5 Pearce, F. B., Zanzibar, thelsland Metropolisof Eastern Africa (London, 1920), 235–52Google Scholar; Ingrams, W. H., Zanzibar, its History and its People (London, 1931), 220–26Google Scholar; Hobley, C. W., Kenya, from Chartered Company to Crown Colony (London, 1929), 168Google Scholar; Hollingsworth, L. W., A Short History of the East Coast of Africa (London, 1974: first edition, 1929), 7Google Scholar; Kirkman in Strandes, J. (tr. Wallwork, J.), The Portuguese Period in East Africa (Nairobi, 1962), 313.Google Scholar

6 Men and Monuments, 22.

7 Kirkman, J. S., The Arab City of Gedi (Oxford, 1954)Google Scholar and ‘Kinuni. An Arab Manor on the coast of East Africa’, J. Royal Asiatic Soc. (1957), 147–50.Google Scholar

8 Lewis, B., The Arabs in History (London, 1966), 9–10.Google Scholar

9 Garlake, P. S., Early Islamic Architecture on the East African Coast (London and Nairobi, 1966), 17, 57Google Scholar; Chittick, H. N., Kihva, an Islamic Trading-City on the East African Coast (London and Nairobi, 1974, 2 vols.), 1, 245Google Scholar, and ‘The East Coast, Madagascar and the Indian Ocean’ in Oliver, R., ed., Cambridge History of Africa, iii (Cambridge, 1977), 207.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

10 Whiteley, W. H., Swahili: the Rise of a National Language (London, 1969), 8, 39.Google Scholar

11 See, for example, his ‘Quelques remarques à propos de l'histoire des Swahili’, Études Congolaises xii, 1 (1969), 111–26.Google Scholar

12 I use the phrase ‘Liongo Saga’ throughout to describe the group of anonymous poetic and prose texts concerning and/or relating to Liongo Fumo, generally excluding the poems, some of them written in the first person, which we know to be the work of later authors (though there is often some question as to how much of these comes from an earlier source). The main materials relevant to it so far published are listed in note 21.

13 Knappert, , Four Centuries, 68.Google Scholar

14 Ibid. 20.

15 Ibid. 8; Kirkman, J. S., Ungwana on the Tana (The Hague, 1966), 8.Google Scholar

16 Knappert, , Four Centuries, 67.Google Scholar

17 Ibid, vii, xiii.

18 Stigand, , Land of Zinj, 44.Google Scholar

19 Kirkman, , Ungwana, 8–10.Google Scholar

20 Islamic names are relatively scarce in the Saga, and some if not all of them could be later additions; but this is not conclusive, for non-Muslim titles and nicknames were used by Swahili rulers who undoubtedly were Muslims well into the nineteenth century.

21 Gervase Mathew was one of the few modern scholars to consider seriously the possibility of using the Liongo Saga as a historical source, though he himself suggested that it was based on resistance to the Galla in the seventeenth century, which in my view is too late (‘The Coast, c. a.d. 100–1498’, in Oliver, R. and Mathew, G., eds., History of East Africa, i (Oxford, 1963), 105 n.Google Scholar). It is hoped that the full case for dating the historical Liongo to the fourteenth or fifteenth century will be published shortly. Meanwhile, the most important materials so far published for the Liongo Saga are to be found in Steere, Swahili Tales, vi-vii, 438–82; Meinhof, C., ‘Das Lied des Liongo’, Zeitschrift für Eingeborenen Sprachen, xv (1924–1925), 241–65Google Scholar; Werner, A., Myths and Legends of the Bantu (London, 1933), 145–54Google Scholar; and Knappert, , Four Centuries, 66–101.Google Scholar See also Harries, , Swahili Poetry, 49–50, n. 4.Google Scholar

22 Chittick, H. N., ‘The coast before the arrival of the Portuguese’, in Ogot, B. A., ed., Zamani (2nd edition; Nairobi, 1974), 112Google Scholar, and ‘The East Coast, Madagascar and the Indian Ocean’, in Oliver, , ed., Cambridge History of Africa, iii, 218.Google Scholar

23 Allen, J. de V., ‘Settlement patterns on the East African coast, c. a.d. 800–1900’, in Leakey, R. E. and Ogot, B. A., eds., Proceedings of the Eighth Panafrican Congress of Prehistory and Quaternary Studies (Nairobi, 1980), 361–3Google Scholar, and ‘Swahili culture and the nature of the east coast settlement’, Int. J. African Historical Studies, xiv, 2 (1981).Google Scholar

24 The oldest Swahili documents so far known are fourteen letters written between 1711 and 1728 now in the Goa Archives (Whiteley, Swahili, 38); but manuscript works in Arabic have been recovered on the Kenya coast dating from much earlier – one from the fourteenth century – and it seems to me extremely unlikely that Swahili was not being written down by, at the latest, the sixteenth.

25 Abdulaziz, , Muyaka, 57Google Scholar, quotes a Liongo praise-song known to have been written by Seyyid Abdalla bin Ali bin Nasir (and not, as he there writes, his father, Seyyid Ali) of Pate, who died c. 1820; and Harries (Swahili Poetry, 52–71) gives an ‘Utendi wa Fumo Liongo’ said to have been composed by Mohamed Kijumwa of Lamu c. 1914; though Taylor reports depositing a manuscript ‘Utendi wa Fumo Liongo’, which could not have been written by Kijumwa, in the British Museum about 1885: Stigand, C. H., A Grammar of Dialectic Changes in the Kiswahili Language (Cambridge, 1915), 94.Google Scholar

26 Harries and Knappert both date the beginning of Swahili literature to c. 1700. Knappert believes the Hamziya may have been composed c. 1690, although the oldest surviving dated manuscript of a Swahili poem, the Herekali or Utendi wa Tambuka, was written in 1728 (Four Centuries, 103–4, 109–11).

27 As Allen, J. W. T. noted, ‘All Swahili verse form was, and almost all is, composed to be sung’ (‘Swahili Prosody’, Swahili, xxxvii, 2, 1979, 171–9Google Scholar). The Liongo Saga includes a description of a band with trumpets, side-blown horns, cymbals, gongs and a complete set of drums (Werner, Myths and Legends, 150); and Vasco da Gama was met at Malindi by a band including ‘many players on anafils [brass trumpets] and two trumpets of ivory… the size of a man, which were blown from a hole in the side, and made sweet harmony with the anafils’: Freeman-Grenville, G. S. P., The East African Coast: Select Documents (Oxford, 1962), 54.Google Scholar Nothing so elaborate is known from the nineteenth or twentieth centuries.

28 Abdalla, Seyyid and Allen, J. de V., Al-Inkishafi – Catechism of a soul (Nairobi, 1977), 14–22.Google Scholar

29 Krapf, J. L., Dictionary of the Suahili Language (London, 1882), 150Google Scholar; Sacleux, Ch., Dictionnaire Swahili-Français (Paris, 1939), 386–87Google Scholar; Knappert, , Four Centuries, 107–8Google ScholarHarries, , swahili poetry, 14.Google Scholar

30 Abdulaziz, , Muyaka, 68.Google Scholar

31 For the views of Muallim Yahya and Ahmed Sheikh Nabhany, see Knappert, , Four Centuries, 104Google Scholar (and, in the case of Nabhany, personal communication); Taylor in Stigand, C. H., Grammar, 95Google Scholar; Hichens, , Inkishafi, 17n.Google Scholar

32 I am grateful to Dr D. Nurse who first noticed references to Ngozi-ni on Pate Island. I have since recorded some myself.

33 Hichens, , Inkishafi, 17n.Google Scholar

34 Harries, , Swahili Poetry, 208–9.Google Scholar

35 Whiteley, , Swahili, 24–5.Google Scholar

36 Whiteley, , Swahili, 19Google Scholar; Abdulaziz, , Muyaka, 114–55.Google Scholar

37 Op. cit., 51, 54–5; Knappert, J., ‘A gungu song in the Gunya dialect’, Afrika und Übersee lvi, 3 (1973), 185–200.Google Scholar

38 Vave is almost unpublished, but is mentioned briefly in Ylvisaker, M., Lamu in the Nineteenth Century (Boston, 1979), 49–50Google Scholar, and is described more fully in Bujra, J. M., ‘An anthropological study of political action in a Bajuni village’ (Ph.D. thesis, University of London, 1968).Google Scholar See also Nurse, D., ‘Bajuni historical linguistics’, Kenya Past and Present XII (1980), 37–8.Google Scholar

39 Knappert, J., ‘The discovery of a lost Swahili manuscript from the eighteenth century’, African Language Studies x (1969), 1–30Google Scholar, concerns a religious poem in Mombasa dialect but collected in the Comoros. Given the extraordinary series of chances to which we owe the publication of this work, it is perhaps unwise to assume that there were not many more early works in dialects other than northern ones.

40 Lambert, H. E., ‘The taking of Tumbe Town’, Bull. East African Swahili Committee, xxiii (1953). 36–46.Google Scholar

41 Stigand, , Landof Zinj, 33–4, 43, 45–6, 81Google Scholar; Hichens, , ‘Lamu Chronicle’, 14–15, 16–17, 22–3.Google Scholar

42 Shepherd, G., ‘The making of the Swahili: a view from the south end of the East African coast’, forthcoming in Allen, J. de V. and Wilson, T. H., eds., From Zinj to Zanzibar: Studies in History, Trade and Society on the Eastern Coast of Africa, to be published as Paideuma xxviii (1982).Google Scholar

43 The Pate Chronicle is considered from a different angle by Prins, A. H. J. in ‘On Swahili historiography’, J. East African Swahili Committee, xxviii, 2 (1958), 26–40.Google Scholar

44 Cf. Stanley, H. M., Through the Dark Continent (London, 1880), 386–7.Google Scholar

45 Whiteley, W. H., ed., Maishaya Hamed bin Muhammed el Murjebi Yaani Tippu Tip (Nairobi, 1959), 17.Google Scholar Having thus explained it, he leaves it untranslated.

46 Velten, C., ed., Desturi za Wasuaheli (Göttingen, 1905).Google Scholar A new translation by Allen, J. W. T. is shortly to be published as Customs of the Swahili People, ed. King, N. Q. (University of California Press).Google Scholar

47 Velten, , Desturi, 2.Google Scholar

48 Velten sponsored Mtoro; Brode sponsored Tippu Tip. See also the remarks of Baumann and Werner in Prins, A. H. J., The Swahili-speaking Peoples of Zanzibar and the East African Coast (London, 1967), ii n. 1 and 12 n. 4.Google Scholar