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The Swahili: Idiom and Identity of an African People
An in-depth look at the culture, language and people of this unique East African community.
192 pages, Hardcover
First published April 1, 1993
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May 16, 2018
I enjoyed The Swahili: Idiom And Identity Of An African People by Alamin M. Mazrui and Ibrahim Noor Shariff. It is a social, linguistic, cultural, and religious history of the Swahili people who are East Africans with some Arab admixture from the Middle East. The two groups mixed as far back as at least 1500 years ago as result mainly of ancient mercantilism.
The original Swahili live mainly along what is now the coasts of Kenya and Tanzania on the island of Zanzibar. They have a diaspora too because often they have been marginalized in the societies where they live because during European colonial times Eurocentric scholars put them more under the Arab umbrella than under the African because of their architecture, language, and poetic traditions. Because of this some non-Swahili African ethnic groups in the region also adopted the attitude of the Swahili as being "the other" especially in the case of the political elites. Since this book was published in 1994 I don't know if the situation has changed. The authors write that the Swahili are most definitely Africans and that they do not go by any European interpretations of race or ethnicity.
The authors present a lot of interesting (to me) information. Even though the Swahili community is small, their language ( also Kiswahili) has made a huge impact in the area. In Tanzania, the official de facto language is Swahili. Just last week there was news in several outlets that Twitter's translation feature now recognized Swahili.
The authors who are Swahili give attention mainly to the coastal Swahili of Kenya and a tiny amount to the Zanzibaris of the coast in Tanzania (Island of Zanzibar), but Swahili is spoken in a number of East African countries and over west into the Democratic Republic of the Congo and even east in the islands of Comoros and Madagascar.
The only complaint I have about the book is the section on poetry. The author got a little too bogged down in the topic and repetitious. Despite that irritation, I enjoyed this book. I learned a lot, and some things I had suspected were confirmed.
The original Swahili live mainly along what is now the coasts of Kenya and Tanzania on the island of Zanzibar. They have a diaspora too because often they have been marginalized in the societies where they live because during European colonial times Eurocentric scholars put them more under the Arab umbrella than under the African because of their architecture, language, and poetic traditions. Because of this some non-Swahili African ethnic groups in the region also adopted the attitude of the Swahili as being "the other" especially in the case of the political elites. Since this book was published in 1994 I don't know if the situation has changed. The authors write that the Swahili are most definitely Africans and that they do not go by any European interpretations of race or ethnicity.
The authors present a lot of interesting (to me) information. Even though the Swahili community is small, their language ( also Kiswahili) has made a huge impact in the area. In Tanzania, the official de facto language is Swahili. Just last week there was news in several outlets that Twitter's translation feature now recognized Swahili.
The authors who are Swahili give attention mainly to the coastal Swahili of Kenya and a tiny amount to the Zanzibaris of the coast in Tanzania (Island of Zanzibar), but Swahili is spoken in a number of East African countries and over west into the Democratic Republic of the Congo and even east in the islands of Comoros and Madagascar.
The only complaint I have about the book is the section on poetry. The author got a little too bogged down in the topic and repetitious. Despite that irritation, I enjoyed this book. I learned a lot, and some things I had suspected were confirmed.
Displaying 1 of 1 review