Paper long abstract:

The Tanzanian language policy of promoting Kiswahili as a nation building language has been quite succesful. Does this leave room for ethnic identity and how can that be shaped in the national context? The current socio-political climate in Tanzania shows mixed signals in this respect. The Iraqw are numerous enough to maintain their culture. They are expanding in Northern Tanzania. Their language is not under threat and in fact growing even faster than the population. An important element is that Iraqw is markedly different from the dominant Bantu linguistic and cultural landscape, yet, unlike other non-Bantu peoples such as Maasai, Datooga, Sandawe, Hadza, the Iraqw conform now and in the past the dominant model of sedentary agriculturalists. The paper investigates how the Iraqw negotiate their identity and their values in their verbal art, how this is adjusted in the development of a Tanzanian culture and which challenges threathen Iraqw distinctiveness. Specific attention is addressed to the so-called slufay a ritual praise-prayer that prtrays the ideal of Iraqw society.

References

Mous, Maarten & Daniela Merolla The Iraqw of Tanzania as an "Expanding" Minority: Verbal Art and Conflicting Identities. To appear in Proceedings of the Ninth Annual Symposium of the Consortium for Asian and African Studies (CAAS): Minorities Between Globalization and Areal Approaches [Self]Definitions, Constructions, Realities, Identities and Memories, INALCO (Paris), October 19th and 20th, 2018

Rose-Marie Beck and Maarten Mous 2014 Iraqw slufay and the power of voice. In From the Tana River to Lake Chad, Research in African Oratures and Literatures. In memoriam Thomas Geider, ed. by Hannelore Vogele, Uta Reuster-Jahn, Raimund Kastenholz and Lutz Diegner, pp 357-371. Cologne: Ruediger Koeppe

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Paper long abstract:

The present paper aims to analyse the relationship between the language of oral speech (Ekoti) on that of the written text (Kiswahili) in the Swahili manuscript culture of Angoche. Angoche is currently the name of a coastal district in the province of Nampula in northern Mozambique. Its toponym is derived from the name of an ancient Swahili sultanate, Ngoji, which was founded by Swahili migrants from Kilwa, during the fifteenth century. Since then, a Swahili ruling elite was established in Ngoji (nowadays, the Islands of Angoche), which was surrounded by Makhuwa people with whom they interacted and intermarried creating a mixed society that became the Wangoji, now the Angocheans or Akoti (as by their current language, Ekoti).

Until the end of the pre-colonial period (1910) the Angocheans remained heavily influenced by the Swahili culture, religiously oriented towards Islamic belief. Through Islam the region benefited with the spread of Arabic script. As part of the Swahili cultural networks it also borrowed the Swahili Ajami literary culture which was later adapted to local patterns. With the advent of the de facto colonial administration in northern Mozambique (1910-12), Kiswahili as a spoken language was gradually abandoned in Angoche, however, it remains until today as the language of literary production. Thus, the Angocheans who are currently bilingual in orality (speaking Emakhuwa and Ekoti) they use a third language (Kiswahili) to produce their Ajami literature. An investigation on part of this literary production (Ajami correspondence and tenzi poetry) shows that there's a cyclic influence between oral and written language with impact on orthography, grammar and vocabulary. Based on historical and sociolinguistic approach this paper attempts to give answer on the why and how of the selected evidences of the above-mentioned relationship.

Keywords: orality; literacy; Ajami literature; Angoche.

Paper long abstract:

The most famous and ancient legend on the Swahili coast is that of the hero and master singer Fumo Liyongo. The episodes and songs of the hero who had to fight for the throne of Pate have been explored and re-explored at various points in time in Kenya as well as the diaspora. Stories of the invincible warrior-poet Fumo Liyongo have been part of oral traditions for centuries and have more recently made their way into school and children’s books, performances and youtube clips. Increasingly, the Fumo Liyongo narrative has been used as template to narrate coastal resistance against oppression or African empowerment.

My first aim in this presentation is to consider the dynamic history of adaptation in the 19th, 20th and 21st century, when more coherent narratives were forged out of episodes and song cycles. Secondly, I will also take a look back at the more ancient poems, which are difficult to date: They were first committed to writing in the 19th century, but have been dated back to the 12th, 14th or 16th century. I would like to focus on those poems, which have rather been neglected in more recent adaptations, since they did not seem to add to the Liyongo narrative. Differently from both later Liyongo narratives and the Islamic poetry of later centuries, they are not plot- or argument-driven, but evoke still lives of the material culture of the coast, including fruits, plants, scents and attire. Their powerful language creates sensory links to the mainland and the Indian Ocean, open up another view on the complex history of encounter at the coast and suggest a different notion of poetics (typically neglected in the context of later narratives).