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Home > Library > Miscellaneous > Oxford Articles
Noteworthy English translations of literatures from East Africa commenced in the second half of the 19th c., mainly
by missionaries, and primarily from Swahili, the lingua franca of the region and now the national language of
Tanzania and Kenya. Significant contributions in this field came from two missionaries resident on the Swahili coast:
Bishop Edward Steere (d.1882), of the Universities Mission to Central Africa based in Zanzibar, and the Revd W. E.
Taylor (d.1927), of the Church Missionary Society based in Mombasa.
i. Tales and Other Prose
Steere published in 1870 a collection of tales, as told by natives of Zanzibar, containing original oral texts with a
page-by-page English translation. It was a pioneering effort, though he himself acknowledges the compilation of
the late M. Jablonsky for a long time acting French consul in Zanzibar which, unfortunately, was written down in
Polish and not published. Steere's Swahili Tales is also notable for its introduction, which discusses the sources,
style, and songs contained in the tales.
Some tales are said to have had their provenance in the stories of the Arabian Nights [II.b.5], and in Swahili
legends; Steere sees similarities also with some well-known English tales, though there is no suggestion that the
latter were imported into East Africa. The last part of one tale (Sultan Darai), for example, closely resembles Puss
in Boots, while in another (Sultan Majnun) the hero has a name (sit-in-the-kitchen) as nearly like Cinderella as
may be. In terms of style, Steere distinguishes three types, basing his criteria, it seems, on the number and use of
Arabic words in the tales. There is, first, the best and purest language of Zanzibar; followed by a dialect spoken by
a class less refined and educated, less exact in its style and with more Arabic words; and, finally, a court dialect
whose style is more Arabic in its forms and vocabulary than the rest, and is characteristically represented by a strict
translation of an Arab story. While the translation does not reflect this division, it is noticeable that a number of
both Arabic and Swahili words are retained in the English translation. Examples include greeting phrases,
sabalkheri/masalkheri (good morning/ evening); names of currencies, dirham and deenar; and words whose cultural
content is not easily translatable: kanzu (a gown worn by Muslim men), hodi (a formulaic request for permission to
enter a house or place), kitoweo (a relish, usually fish or meat, served with the main dish), joho (a ceremonial robe).
Steere remarks on the inclusion of songs in the tales which the audience is required to sing along with the narrator,
and he comments on the presence of non-Swahili, but Bantu, words in the songs, a fact indicative of the influence of
the mainland on Zanzibar in this genre. Swahili Tales also contains a poem of the legendary Swahili hero Fumo
Liongo, and the beginning of the story of the prophet Job.
Equally significant is the Revd Taylor's African Aphorisms, subtitled or Saws from Swahililand, published in 1891. Like
Steere, Taylor acquired deep knowledge of the people, their language and customs through his friendship with
them. His relationship with two Swahili scholarsMwalimu Sikujua, an accomplished poet, and Hemedi Muhammad,
a man with a quick ear for distinguishing soundswas particularly fruitful. This enabled Taylor to collect what he
himself refers to as a large collection of the best of Swahili poetry, ancient and modern, among which were the
poems of the celebrated Mombasa poet Muyaka bin Mwinyi Haji (d.1840). Another outcome of this relationship was
the volume of proverbs containing over 600 Swahili proverbs, with an appendix of grammatical notes. Each proverb
is translated, contextualized, and, where appropriate, compared to others, either Swahili or English. Footnotes
elaborate on the meaning of significant words or historical allusions. It is thus not surprising that a scholar of
Swahili earlier this century, Alice Werner, remarked in an obituary on Taylor that the volume should never have been
allowed to go out of print, both for the sake of the proverbs themselves and the notes, which besides elucidating
many obsure points in Bantu grammar are full of interest from other points of view (see Frankl and Omar 1993: 40).
While the Aphorisms were being published, another volume was in the making which also came to acquire an
interesting place in Swahili scholarship, especially in the understanding of the Swahili world and identity. In the
1890s Carl Velten, a German linguist and administrator in the then Tanganyika (now Tanzania), asked a group of
Africans to write down the customs and traditions of their people. They did so in Swahili, using the Arabic script. The
overall coordinator was Mtoro bin Mwinyi Bakari, a scholar who is said to have been a master of Swahili prose
(King, in Bakari 1981: p. viii). Velten compiled the material, transliterated it into the roman script, translated it into
German, and published it in Gttingen in 1903. A selection was translated into English by Lyndon Harries (1965),
and a full translation from the Swahili original was published in 1981 as The Customs of the Swahili People. It was a
posthumous publication in the name of J. W. T. Allen as editor and translator; a number of his colleagues contributed
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a preface, notes, and appendices in his memory. One of them, Noel King, places in perspective the content and
contribution of the book, stating that the volume revealed to the European rulers a human dimension of the people
they were governing, their culture, and viable ways of life other than their own. King elaborates: the Desturi was
one of the lone voices to tell them that African and other civilizations had to be taken into account if historians
were to capture something of the greatness and tragedy of the human race. In a way, it [the book] did for the
academic world what Africa through Picasso and others did for the world of art or what jazz did for the world of
music. (Bakari 1981: p. xi)A bold claim, perhaps, but it is one which is indicative of the significance of Bakari's work.
Other works of this period which could be considered as precursors to Swahili prose were the chronicles of the
various city-states of the East African coast. These are accounts of local rulers and dynasties, narrated from the
perspectives of the writers. Some parts have been rendered into English (Freeman-Grenville 1962; Werner 1915);
their literary aspects have been discussed by Rollins (1983), who points out that the narration also, at times,
carries verses of poetry appropriate to the events.
ii. Poetry
Swahili poetry has received considerable attention from Western scholars, making it by far the most accessible
genre in English. Some volumes contain extensive texts and translations of both classical and modern poems:
Knappert on religious as well as secular poetry (1971; 1972; 1979); a survey of some major classical poems and
their forms by Harries (1962); Allen (1971) on the form -utendiutilized mainly (though not exclusively) for epic
narratives; Abdulaziz (1979) on the poems of Muyaka Haji mentioned earlier; and, with a more specialized focus,
Shariff (1983) on dialogic poems; Topan (1974) on the emergence of the free verse in Swahili poetry; and Biersteker
and Shariff (1995) on war poems.
As an illustration of the genre one can take a religious classical poem composed in the early 19th c. by Sayyid
Abdalla Nassir (d.1820) on the glory and then decline of Pate, a city on an island off the coast of northern Kenya.
Nassir called the poem al-Inkishafi, a title with the basic meaning of the uncovering but which has been translated
by W. Hichens (1939) as The Soul's Awakening and by James de Vere Allen (1977) as Catechism of a Soul. The
ruins of Pate evoke in the poet deep reflections on the transitoriness of life, thus connecting the impoverishment of
the city to issues of morality. Although this was, and still is, a common theme in Swahili Islamic poetry, its treatment
by Nassir has resulted in a work of art which W. E. Taylor commended as a great, if not the greatest religious classic
of the race (in his introduction to Stigand 1915: 11).
Three major translations exist of the text: the two by Allen and Hichens just mentioned, and, the earliest, by Taylor
(given in Stigand 1915). Each represents an interpretation of the poem by its generation: a classicist one by Taylor;
a formal scholastic one by Hichens; and a culturally insightful one by Allen, with an introduction by a Swahili
academic, Ali Mazrui.
iii. Drama
Drama, in its Western sense, is of relatively recent importation to East Africa. Although Swahili playwrights have
written many plays over these three decades on a wide variety of themes and issues, only a handful have actually
been translated into English (though the traffic in the other direction is quite common, particularly in relation to
Ngg's works). Of these, the most renowned is Kinjeketile (1969) by Ebrahim Hussein of Tanzania, which also has
the distinction of having been the first full-length play written in Swahili. It depicts the rebellion of the tribes in
southern Tanganyika against German oppression. A prophet named Kinjeketile is possessed by a spirit, Hongo, who
gives him medicine to make the people impervious to German guns and bullets. The medicine is watermaji in
Swahili; hence the name of the rising: the Maji rebellion (19057). Although the existence of Kinjeketile is
historically documented, Hussein makes it clear in his introduction to the play that the hero is not an historical
evocation of the real man but a creature of the imagination. All the same, the main events of the play follow closely
the oral narratives documented by historians. In this lies also the novelty of Hussein's approach, that of writing a
play based on documents of oral history. When the Swahili version of the play was first performed in Dar es Salaam
in 1970, it was perceived as an artistic enactment of the first nationalistic fight for freedom.
Several features emerge from a comparison of the original version of the play with its translation. As the play has
been rendered into English by the playwright himself (then a university student at Dar es Salaam), the translation
reflects what he himself deems essential (or indeed possible) to convey to an English-speaking audience. The
introduction to the English version, for example, is briefer: an elaborate explanation in Swahili on the production of
the play (inclusive of a diagram) is shortened to a note of two sentences in English; does Hussein assume that an
English-speaking producer has no need of detailed direction in this regard? An explanation on the use of standard
Swahili and dialect variations is omitted as the issue is not relevant in the translated version. Although the impact of
such code-switching is lost in English, Hussein feels obliged to replace it by other means to indicate Kinjeketile's
state of being possessed by Hongo. In the Swahili original, Kinjeketile spoke dialectical Swahili in his normal state
and standard Swahili when possessed; in the English translation, his normal (prose) speech is replaced by verse
when possessed.
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