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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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