Examines Swahili narrative poetry which, despite being available in published editions for many years, has not been studied from a historical perspective. The poetry contained narrates the episodes in the wars of conquest during the First World War. Most of these poems belong to a literary genre called Utenzi, the oldest preserved samples of which date back to the 18th century. Includes a study of the historical context in which the poems were produced and the social origins of the poets who composed these works.
Africa is a marriage of cultures: African and Asian, Islamic and Euro-Christian. Nowhere is this fusion more evident than in the formation of Swahili, Eastern Africa's lingua franca, and its cultures. Swahili Beyond the Boundaries: Literature, Language, and Identity addresses the moving frontiers of Swahili literature under the impetus of new waves of globalization in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. These momentous changes have generated much theoretical debate on several literary fronts, as Swahili literature continues to undergo transformation in the mill of human creativity. Swahili literature is a hybrid that is being reconfigured by a conjuncture of global and local forces. As the interweaving of elements of the colonizer and the colonized, this hybrid formation provides a representation of cultural difference that is said to constitute a "third space," blurring existing boundaries and calling into question established identitarian categorizations. This cultural dialectic is clearly evident in the Swahili literary experience as it has evolved in the crucible of the politics of African cultural production. However, Swahili Beyond the Boundaries demonstrates that, from the point of view of Swahili literature, while hybridity evokes endless openness on questions of home and identity, it can simultaneously put closure on specific forms of subjectivity. In the process of this contestation, a new synthesis may be emerging that is poised to subject Swahili literature to new kinds of challenges in the politics of identity, compounded by the dynamics and counterdynamics of post-Cold War globalization.
In this rich and multi-layered deconstruction of German colonial engagement with Islam, Jörg Haustein shows how imperial agents in Germany’s largest colony wielded the knowledge category of Islam in a broad set of debates, ranging from race, language, and education to slavery, law, conflict, and war. These representations of ‘Mohammedanism’, often invoked for particular political ends, amounted to a serious misreading of Muslims in East Africa, with significant long-term effects. As the first in-depth account of the politics of Islam in German East Africa, the book makes an essential contribution to the history of religion in Tanzania before British rule. It also offers a template for re-reading the colonial archive in a manner that recovers Muslim agency beyond a European paradigm of religion.
German colonial history in today Tanzania Mainlad is extensively documented, but it has not been studied from its memory perspective despite it being widely remembered among the Tanzanians. This book documents German colonial memories as shared cultural legacy that exists in forms of monuments, archives and historical sites. It also presents them as trans-generational memory narratives that live in people's memories that are also commemorated in different ways like erection of war monuments. The book analyzes memories of colonialism from the historical perspective, showing how the collective memories like monuments and commemorations have undergone structural and institutional changes over time. The study uses Michael Rothberg's multi-directional theory, together with other theoretical approaches to analyze various forms of German colonial memories in Tanzanian context. The findings, which are analyzed historically, indicate that the collective memories of the Germans are cultural, communicative, commemorative, functional and topographical. They are also traumatic as well as nostalgic.
This monograph examines the roles and functions of Swahili in war/conflict situations, and the impact of wars on the destiny of the language. Covering a period of over a century, the monograph explores this sociolinguistic theme in the context of six wars/conflicts: the Maji Maji resistance against German rule, the two World Wars, the anti-colonial resistance to British colonialism, the wars of the Great Lakes region, the cold wars, and the ongoing war against terrorism. In geographical focus, some of the war situations explored here are “local,” others are “transnational,” and others still rather “global” in scope and ramifications. In the final analysis, the monograph provides important snapshots of the conflict-based history of the Swahili language, demonstrating once again that language is a malleable tool that can be appropriated and galvanized to serve the interests of either party in a conflict and sometimes as a means of creating hegemonic and anti-hegemonic meanings.
This volume reexamines the Maji Maji war of 1905-07 in Tanzania, the largest African rebellion against European colonialism. Contributors provide histories of previously neglected localities and groups, and new insight into the use of protective medicines believed to provide invulnerability.
The askari, African soldiers recruited in the 1890s to fill the ranks of the German East African colonial army, occupy a unique space at the intersection of East African history, German colonial history, and military history. Lauded by Germans for their loyalty during the East Africa campaign of World War I, but reviled by Tanzanians for the violence they committed during the making of the colonial state between 1890 and 1918, the askari have been poorly understood as historical agents. Violent Intermediaries situates them in their everyday household, community, military, and constabulary roles, as men who helped make colonialism in German East Africa. By linking microhistories with wider nineteenth-century African historical processes, Michelle Moyd shows how as soldiers and colonial intermediaries, the askari built the colonial state while simultaneously carving out paths to respectability, becoming men of influence within their local contexts. Through its focus on the making of empire from the ground up, Violent Intermediaries offers a fresh perspective on African colonial troops as state-making agents and critiques the mythologies surrounding the askari by focusing on the nature of colonial violence.
These volumes offer a one-stop resource for researching the lives, customs, and cultures of Africa's nations and peoples. Unparalleled in its coverage of contemporary customs in all of Africa, this multivolume set is perfect for both high school and public library shelves. The three-volume encyclopedia will provide readers with an overview of contemporary customs and life in North Africa and sub-Saharan Africa through discussions of key concepts and topics that touch everyday life among the nations' peoples. While this encyclopedia places emphasis on the customs and cultural practices of each state, history, politics, and economics are also addressed. Because entries average 14,000 to 15,000 words each, contributors are able to expound more extensively on each country than in similar encyclopedic works with shorter entries. As a result, readers will gain a more complete understanding of what life is like in Africa's 54 nations and territories, and will be better able to draw cross-cultural comparisons based on their reading.
