 conference, Swahili study confidence, but also confidence. And I want to start, of course, by thanking our main organizers of this event, Ijha Ajivarionis and Angelica Masheeda. Thank you, Ijha and Angelica, for organizing this event. I believe we are in year six of our annual event. And I shall simply hand it over to you, Angelica, to welcome our panelists or Ida to welcome our panelists and to say, I hope you have a very good confidence today. Hello, hi, yes, yeah. So that was Wayne Dooley, Dr. Wayne Dooley, who is the chair of the Center of African Studies here at SOAS. So I will speak in Swahili and Angelica will speak in English after, because I'm sure our audience are Swahili members. Thank you very much for joining us today. Hello, everybody. Welcome to our sixth Baraza. I am very pleased to be here today again to celebrate Swahili studies at SOAS. And a big thank you to Ida for bringing the program together. And we are very pleased to see so many of you here from across the world, from East Africa, Germany and UK, to spend a day to talk about different aspects of Swahili studies. And as you have seen from the program is very varied in terms of different topics would be looked at. And yes, we have a very busy program, which is great and we want you to accommodate as many people as possible. And therefore, we will be quite strict with the timing for the speakers, and so that there will be space for question and answer. And the question and answer session will be live. Therefore, you will be able to speak and then we will see you. You will have to raise your hand in order to do so once once we get to that point anyway, we will remind you that the procedure. And I don't want to take too long as well because yes, we have a program we want to start with our first speaker. And in the chat, you will see that the speakers bio and the speakers abstracts have been posted, because we don't have time now to go over that so you can still refer to those documents about each presentation. And yes, so I will now pass it on to either if you have any questions, you can always put it in the chat for us. And now I'll pass back to either to start with panel one. And again, welcome everybody and thank you so much for joining us. Thank you very much for that angelica. So just to recap, I will put, I will raise a hand when it's 15 minutes. And then you'll have five minutes until the end of your presentation. Karibuni sana you're very very welcome we have. Okay, Jalul, am I saying that all right. Okay Jalul Amari. Ahmed Kipacha. Francisca Faye, who was it so us for many many years it's good to have you back. We also have Rachel Maena from Kenya. Thank you very much. And we'll also have Omar Kibolanga from Lamu Kenya. So the first speaker is Jalul Amari, who will be talking about Yahya Ali Omar's matembezia peponi translation translocality and the conceptual history of the Sahi coast. You're welcome. Thank you very much. Can everyone hear me. Okay, good morning to everyone. Please excuse me if my speech is a little slurred. It's a little bit early on the east coast of the United States right now. It's so beautiful to be able to be in conference with you all and I wish that we could be all in person. So looking forward to a day when that can happen but I would like to thank the organizers for making this possible. The project that I'm working on is in a very early stage. So I would like to be able to bounce these ideas off. So I thank you guys again for putting this together so that there's room to kind of tease these ideas out. All right, I'm going to try to share my screen and I'm going to have a little slide up there. Please let me know if there is a technical problem. Oh, it's not possible. Okay, so we will keep this purely verbal. Um, maybe maybe I am. Yeah, we able to. You can share this right now. Yeah, please share now. Okay, now it's possible. Thank you very much. Can everybody see what I am looking at. Is there a slide that says, yeah, yeah, I don't know as much and busy up a pony. Yes. Beautiful. Okay. And since I'm teasing these ideas out my email is also on the bottom of this slide. If anybody wants to follow up and send me some notes to help me grow. As a scholar, I would much appreciate that. All right, I'm going to begin by by reading a couple of little quotes, and then tying them back to a Swahili context. And I'm trying to do with this project, although the title of it is very specific, like I'm focusing only on this one work of translation on the part of Yahya Ali Omar, a very creative work of translation. What I'm really doing is a much, much bigger reach and perhaps it's too big of a reach and this is kind of what I want to bounce off of you. But it seems to me like there's something deeply important about this project and projects like it in this period. For those of us that are thinking about something else in the world. So I'm going to bounce it off you and see what happens. Alright, so here are the first three things I want to say that are from outside of a Swahili context. Number one, writing is the outlining and shaping of letters to indicate audible words, which in turn indicate what is in the soul. This is from Ibn Khaldun, a long time ago. Second, je te fais savoir que je n'écris jamais quelque chose ni ne le parle sans qu'il soit venu du fond du mon coeur. Je porte à ta connaissance que mes paroles sont conformes à mes actes. This to do a loose translation, I want you to know that I never write anything. And I never speak anything, unless it comes from the depths of my heart. Number three, and I want you to know that my words conform with my acts. And this is from Amadou Bamba in West Africa. And then third, what puts a thing into condition. That is arranges it disposes it favorably speech, what damages a thing speech, what keeps a thing as it is speech. And this is that's Amadou Bamba from writing in the UNESCO general history of Africa. Those three things I dwelt upon them because I'm now going to say three things from a Swahili context specifically around three scholars that I'm focusing on for this bigger project, one of whom is Yahya Adi Omar. The first thing is from Alamin Mazrui. Since the Europeans arrived, they have transformed Swahili and spoiled it in whatever way they like. They have reduced some of the letters that must be included in some of the words. And sometimes the meaning changes for lack of those letters. The books of grammar. And sometimes those who have composed these books are foreign Europeans that do not know this language well. And those that put mistakes in them are Europeans from inland that do not know Kiswahili. And when they are told by someone from the coast that they are mistakes, they do not accept as authoritative anything other than that which is theirs. Now I'm moving to the history of Kiswahili from Shihabuddin Chiragdeen. I know this is a long introduction, but I promise you it's important to have all of these things in the in the background in the palette. And he says, So with these things in mind, I'm moving on to the description of the bigger project. It's down 15 to go in its broadest sense. This project seeks to trace an epistemic and ethical reorientation brought about by the colonial moment in Islamic Africa writ large. It is concerned with how wholly new or radically changing institutions were animated and adapted in attempts at creative continuity, and with how the very form of those institutions may have impinged on such attempts. Its overarching focus, however, is on language as a kind of meta institution, an organizing matrix in which these processes unfolded, beginning from a specific set of circumstances on the Swahili coast. It traces the movement of key concepts across several genre of multilingual discourse and explores their relationship to changing subjectivities. In 1930, a British committee began standardizing Swahili as a lingua franca for colonial East Africa. They were charged to regulate the standard as an institution bridging speakers of hundreds of other languages, and thus made responsible for the production of translocal knowledge in its most literal sense. They settled on a dialect that had developed currency through trade, mission work and colonial government and then used it as a platform for engineering an official grammar and lexicon. Standard dictionaries, manuals and lists of new meanings became blueprints, and with them the committee aimed to build the library that would define the colony's future. They were as concerned with governing language use in schools as they were with presses, and their explicit commitment was to develop this new standard as a vessel for the modern world. There were no mother tongue speakers of Swahili at committee meetings for the first 16 years of its existence. Colonial officials use the language it produced to administrate and rule, and anti-colonial nationalists used it to organize, resist and build a government of their own following independence. Yet narratives of both types played down this critical point. There were in fact people who belonged to a language world against which this standard was engineered. Such narratives likewise underestimated the fuller implications of this standard and what it might mean that it was the framing denominator for both political valences. Among mother tongue speakers in Mombasa, a pattern of discourse centered on language itself emerges in this period. It raises provocative questions about this increasingly language the pressure towards the modern and the stripping of pre-modern or non-modern and Islamic form and content that this entailed. Colonial and anti-colonial reformations provoked lines of tension in concept logic and lived cosmology that overflowed strictly political or ethnic categories of analysis. Along these lines various efforts were made to oppose co-opt or sidestep the standardization moment through the creation and adaptation of alternatively language space in which older webs of meaning were tended to and negotiated against it the increasing flux in social, political and economic forces. These webs were important because they formed the dynamic matrices in which all thought and action were constituted. Matrices that we often neglect or granularly reduce for the way that our own historically derivative of that same modernizing pressure shape academic analysis. From within this adaptive frame in aggregate no less than a total cosmology mother tongue speakers use the same organs of press and pedagogy that the committee itself originally sought to influence, but via life ways that ran laterally through these institutional formations to unite discursive genre, commonly treated as separate in modern scholarship. The project locates nodal points for this languaging discursive turn in the work of three scholars in Mombasa between 1930 and 1977. Alameen Mazrui, Yahya Ali Omar, and Shihabuddin Chirahdin. They were all mother tongue speakers of the original language and bilingually proficient in classical Arabic, and all of them developed their life efforts in a specifically language sense. The project draws principally upon their work in teaching and translation, thus the mountain busy a peponi, but with special attention to lateral life ways that bridge a variety of discursive spaces from the faculty student parent networks that animated the colonial secondary to informal circles of debate and learning in mosque had a cause from the colonial party court to bilingual periodicals called Islam from language textbooks to children's tales to dances weddings soccer teams and poems, all of which were brought together in the work of Mazrui, Omar, and Shihabuddin. These invocations were not just local, but also trans local and mediated by Swahili Arabic and English. They included fields of both composition and comprehension terms I prefer to production and consumption for evaluations of this kind of discourse. As to say they included both what these three scholars spoke, taught, wrote and translated, and what they heard, learned, read and understood. The overarching premise is that these spaces must be read in concert intertextually in any attempt to produce a conceptual history of the moment, and it's aftermath. I demonstrate that this kind of reading shows clear connections between them and sheds light on the way conceptual webs and their attendant logics were shifting under the pressure of the modern. Now, moving into Yahya Omar, Martin busy a peponi I want to read you something that he wrote there's a really, really lovely tribute to him that PJ at Franco. And in that he mentions he makes reference to to the written evidence that Omar submitted to the Commission on coastal coastal independence. So when that British Commission was collecting written evidence, there's a letter in the archives at Q, the National Archives, that's handwritten, it's really powerful when you encounter it by Omar. It's handwritten in English. And this is what he says I'm going to read this to you really quickly and then I'm going to transition to a specific discussion of this translation. First thing I want to tell you is that my English is very weak. I speak Swahili, and I know Arabic very well. I believe that you shall understand my views through my bad English. Now remember he's submitting this to an explicitly political commissioner trying to figure out something that they have categorized as political and this is what he says. When I read what anti autonomists had said to you, or wrote in the papers, I came to understand that all the opposition of autonomy resulted from printed misnames, which are in use in the press. All the misnames, which I mean, coastal strip, coast of Kenya, Sultan of Zanzibar, Sultan dominions, one bow autonomy. Here's the key. It means that the British rule had not connected this part of Swahili land with Kenya in practice, administration only, but also by wording. And only this last part, the wording, creating misnames which conflict with reality. Only this last part is the force, which caused all this opposition of our right. We the Swahili nation to re independence and reunite all the points which they use in supporting their case are coming from these misnames, being these false names also the points which anti autonomy draws from these words are false. And the message in this space, his English as he said, was weak, but what he's saying about language here is very strong. So, my question is, when we look to this work of translation Martin busy a peponi, which we see come out again I believe in 1998 published by Franco in a revised edition. And on the slide right now is the original edition that was published. Omar dates it as the 31st of January, 1959. And it's translated based on a work called, see how to fill the Jenna, which was written by an Egyptian schoolmaster now Franco says this in the introduction to the reprint, but he unfortunately misnames that author, so it can be difficult to find where this actual one is. Fortunately, I was able to access it in the daughter of kutub in Cairo. And so you see a photograph of its first page on the left now, having both of these texts next to each other, and being able to read them line by line against each other reveals that Omar in fact was doing a work of great creativity in translating this. This was not simply just reproducing the thing line for line word for word. It was not just trying to create an equivalence of meaning. It actually domesticated to a local space, which is fascinating, because it's an appeal to the trans local networks that overflow colonial categories, colonial regional categories. In order to reinforce something that's distinctly local, which is a keen beta speaking socialist sociolinguistic communities identity. So I want to take a look at some of some of what the, what those. See if we can switch it here. What those look like. All right, does everybody see what's happening here it says, this is line two. I can actually hear any of you so I'm going to assume that that's yes. All right. So we're looking at the two, the two passages this is line two of the story. What we have on the top is what Omar has rendered into Kim vita. And on the bottom, this is, this is the Arabic. I apologize for the font it was better on on the other system I was using. So the first thing that he does is he changes the name of the character. Immediately and he adorns him with the title shape. So he becomes someone that is in the way of either an elder and authority. And he becomes somewhat of a teacher as he relates this tale. This is important because Omar is translating this out of the context of also being a teacher. So in my bigger project, these acts of teaching and translation, which are shared both by Masrui and Shirah Dean are woven together. So he changes the name from Sarah to do to. I won't translate any of the Swahili, because of my esteemed company. And then he changes Hyal, which, which means like the imagination or like, you know, the realm of imagining to coily. This is clearly not a not an attempted translation for equivalence. Then he says I'm in Nipah, but he could want no. Whereas in the in the other one in the Arabic, it just says color, he said. All right. So the idea of him giving news. He's integrated the character immediately into a kind of communal exchange of knowledge. He gave me a body. Instead of just, he said, then it's the Arabic says semi too. I heard. But in the quin vita, it says sick was out a killer. He's so much. So it becomes a different kind of a medium, like the rhythm of what's happening is no longer purely oral. As it as it seems to be coming across in the Arabic, but now it has this connotation of persona. And then he leaves out a huge section of the of the of the Arabic, and, and he returns to the quote, the quote he does in equivalence. And this quote is a hadith in my bigger project that I trace all of the different origins and context of these of these references that are that are contained inside it. So you can see more of this happening. And I'm not going to dwell on this because I see that I only have like three minutes. Okay. There are a couple things that I definitely want to take a look at. One of them is there's a section by the way Omar leaves out an entire section he he removes an entire chapter from the thing and it happens to be a chapter in which in paradise, the narrator is finding a wife. And there's like this passage about all these beautiful birds and the angel is talking to the narrator and says, you know which bird is the most beautiful to you. And there's this whole sequence of, you know, choosing a companion in in peponi or peponi and Omar totally excises this from the thing and there's just no mention of it. So being able to in future research, follow the chat of to build some something of an oral history by the way this originally was translated for broadcast on Saudi. And so this was an oral presentation first and then it was so popular with the listening audience in Mombasa that it was printed and this is the printed version that I'm using here. Okay. When it's talking about, let me zoom to something that's a real distinct difference. There are there are questions in terms of subjectivity. The way the things are translated sometimes the Arabic seems to be talking about almost like a personal possession that says things like when my feet, my feet trod those grounds, but in the quim vita Omar has it when we stepped into that place. He repeatedly refers the angel as Yule Malika. He does not say Malaki, my angel, like the Arabic does. So there are all these kind of sensitive subtleties and if you trace the differences, you start to ask questions about what is it that that is informing these choices and what is it informed that informs the very warm reception on the part of the Mombasa community of this version of the tail. So on this slide, you can see that what was you barqa. This is the Jesus, and he said I am saying, it says that he bless them and and the verbiance because Baraka the same one that we used if God were blessing someone. But in the quim vita, Omar says, ye ye ayah papasa, akiya umbeya baraka, wakiondoka huwa na furaha kabisa. This is clearly a distinction because it's not saying he's akiya bariki, akiya umbeya baraka. So there are these subtle kind of theological points that are in it, even though Omar is not making any kind of claims to being a religious authority. You see these other vectors of conversation around what it means to be Muslim in Mombasa, in that local space through this translation. There's so much more to talk about and I had some things that were convergences that were really cool, but I'm going to leave you now because I'm at 20 minutes, I believe. Is this true? Yes, but oh my God, that was fascinating. Thank you so much. I did my PhD on translation. I looked at the norms of Sahili translation. In listening, it's okay to you now how so much has been domesticated. I think there's definitely a trend, I can see that we can talk about later in the QA. But thank you so much, Yalul, this is excellent. I'm sure people like Adlatif Abdullah in the audience will have questions for you later. So be ready. Our next speaker is Ahmad Kipacha. And he will be talking about sniffing Oriental scents. So we are still on the coast of East Africa, the eroticized Swahili Odes. Ahmad Kipacha has been to Baraza previously and it's good to have you back, Ahmad. Karim Boussana. Is he there? Hello. Hi, Ahmad. Okay. Are you sharing a document? No, I'll just speak. Okay. Yeah. If you'd like to put your video on, it might be better if we see you. Okay. Well, shall I put that video here? Yeah. Okay. Is it possible? I don't want to... I don't know. Oh, you'll be able to see me here. Ah, Mullah. Perfect. Boussana. Okay. Okay. We have 20 minutes. Karim. Okay. Thank you. I started at 11.42. All right. Simply, my topic is divided into two parts. First is Oriental sense. And then we have issues of classical Swahili poetry as evidence of Oriental sense. So why now? Why now should we start speaking of Oriental sense? Perfume, issues of perfume in Swahili culture or Swahili civilization. Why? It is because, first, if you go through a book of perfumes by You Can Remell, it's a very famous book, huge book of 1880 something, you'll see no mention of Swahili coast, the use of perfume in the Swahili coast. What he says about us is that there is very few or limited use of perfume in this part of the world. And I want to argue against that. That's number one. And number two is when you go through tip-tip travelogy or in his biography, you'll see a mention of perfume. And that's fascinating. And he was given perfume by one of the finisher of slaves, of the slave trade, who was also given a perfume. So that is very, very interesting. And when you go through page 110 in his book, you will see a parcel of clothes, scarves, sashes, two heads and four in clothes, but also two bottles of essence of roses and other alloys. So this is part of the package that was given by Taria Topan, a very famous in East Africa, very famous finisher of the Ivorian slave trade in the Caravan safaris. So it's a very interesting issue. And then when you go through proverbs, Swahili proverbs, Swahili proverbs is a reserve of facts, of knowledge that we have, indigenous knowledge of Swahili. You will see a very interesting, a very, very interesting proverb which says, mufuatana namanga unukato. Mufuatana namanga unukato. I have a literary translation that one who follows an Arabian manga come close to smell like them. This is my own translation, you'll forgive me for if I don't get it right. So it reminds public that once you rub off with Arabian manga, you'll be influenced by their exotic fragrance. This is something really, really interesting. And when you go through recent scholars, literary scholars, such as Vek Clarissa Vek, Clarissa Vek had something interesting in one of his articles in 2016. And then she says in his article that pre-colonial Swahili texts, most of which are poetry, have hardly been taken into consideration in recent debates on Indian ocean connection. So this is something of interest. And if you go through a number of anthropological works by Abdullah Zizlawi, Oriental influence in Swahili, you see a lot of mentions of perfumes, numerous perfumes like Kaffur, Ambergris, Jasmine, Mask, Daffodil, Sanderuz, Patchouli, as being of Arabic Indian origin. That's page 1, 1987. So that's very interesting. But also Rosabel Boswell, in her book, Sense of Identity, fragrance as heritage in Zanzibar, she portrays in that book that there is a spraying of the housing, clothing, and also concoction of Oriental Atari or Italy, such as Rosewater, Meski, Zandalwood, Zafarani, among people of Zanzibar, and of course, East Africa. So it makes Boswell makes it very clear that fragrance and other seemingly then heritage attract little attention in the preservation process. And yet this indicates important cultural continuity in the Indian ocean region, and from a vital part of heritage and the harmonization of culture in the island. So this is something of interest. So when you go through a number of poems, especially poems by, I've taken here two poems, two famous poems. The first one is poem by Moana Kupona, is a very famous one. And the second one by Fumo Leongo, which is also a very famous, but apart from that, if you read also Abdullah Shiragudin and others, and also Saeed Abdullah Nasser, also, you'll see mention of Zandalwood, mentions of Rosewater, et cetera, et cetera, Yasmin, Odeon as very, very common in their web. So I would like to point on two major issues. First of all, cross-cultural adornment, and second is scented bodies. These two poets, one is male, the other one is a female, have spoken a lot about body, body sense, or sensing our bodies. And then you will notice that, for instance, Solomon, King Solomon. King Solomon also mentioned, in the song of Solomon, a poem very close to Fumo Leongo. And I wonder why? Why now one has seen this? For instance, Fumo Leongo, Fumo Leongo speaks about a woman, body, centered in every part of it. And also Solomon described the same. Solomon starts with the breast and called them as strings of gazelle, while Leongo compared them with fruit of pomegranate. In this time of song of Solomon, the erotic intimacy is described as more intoxicating than wine, when Leongo tells readers that after his love-making ended, he found himself as if possessed by spirits. So this is very, very interesting. But the most remarkable similarity between song of Solomon and Fumo Leongo's of Tendu and Manacopona, of Tendu and Manacopona is they have protected women just to see. Leongo revealed that his woman body was not leaking. Therefore, the theory of leaky vessels, for those who knows about it, is a stereotype against women. But for these two males, they both protected or they both defended their women. They defended their wives and they threw the scent, but their body actually fused with oriental scents and so on and so forth. So they also mentioned a number of perfume, like alloy, balsam, francazine, Mary, roses, saffron, and fruits of pomegranate and apples. So it's a very interesting issue that Manacopona as well also mentioned perfumes and the agent of her daughter to beautify herself and also her husband. And this is through the use of wood or use of perfumes, a different type of what is called atta or utiri, utiri, manukato in Swahili. Or in Swahili we also use karabizuna, karabizuna means all kinds of perfumes. So in Manacopona we read in verse 138 that the moon leaves you at the mwingo, for manashe daliya, leave no odor on your body by smearing rosewater and fragrance powder. So this is interesting also. Na'udi umfukize bukuratawa ashe and perfume your husband with the wood incense morning and evening. So something interesting is produced by Lyongu and which has escaped the attention of critics it's the collection between fragrance, pleasant fragrance and maka. There is a mention of manga and maka in Lyongu's. Why so? Why in utumuizu manama, manashe? There is also mentions of Pilawia Hindi, Sinia Hirazi, all this collection and also lady from maka or lady from manga and so on or even an adult of hijas. What's the connection between the two? Why mentioning hijas, manga and so forth in connection to women and also in connection to perfumes? Here is my argument. My argument is that the body has to be scented by perfume. That those perfumes are heavenly scent so they connect you to spirit world. This is my argument. And that's why the mention of maka, manga and comes every time in their works, in their Swahili works. Scented bodies, there's a clear relationship between the oriental female body parts, cultural factories, sensuality and eroticism in some of the work of various writers or anthropologists, especially. Orderizing body parts, their presentation, removal of socially discredible orders is taking as part of the high civilization in the Western world. So too in Swahili world. Therefore, I would argue that when we consider civilization, when we consider a perfumery civilization, part of Swahili cost. Zanzibar, Mombasa, as seen in the points of the, of the great points of the 20th and 19th century is part of it. So we cannot exclude them in their discussion. I don't want to go deeper into the erotic part of it because this is still under construction but eroticism is seen in those two points. And if you go, if you seriously or deeply read or deeply read through some of the metaphors like Noah's Ark, Safina, some of the metaphors like Namaani, Bilge, these give you a picture or this is give you a sense of eroticism and also love making, love making in Swahili and it's something which has been camouflaged by metaphors. I like also to mention the use of pomegranate. Pomegranate has been mentioned and I want to connect that with also as a smell, a sense of smell and also the sense of testing. In the Quran, if you read the Quran verse 55, verse 66, 66 to 69 at the surah 55, you will notice in both of them, gardens are to spring, sprouting, in both of them are fruits and palm trees and pomegranates. You also notice that Leongu just opposes the mention of pomegranate between God swearing, God swearing and the fruits of paradise. On standards 12, he says, I swear by God, the incomparable, I shall speak the truth about the pomegranates, I swear, I have not seen nor have I witnessed the fruits of paradise, such as those of Muna Manga. This indicate that the choice of pomegranate is deliberately linked to heavenly sense. Once one applies the pleasant fragrance from Maka or Manga, he or she is purifying the male or female body in order to attain heavenly or heavenly sense or paradise. More signs of heavenly connection are expressed by the recurrence of Toponim Maka. Toponim Maka appears in an also Toponim Safima and also these also connect the two sense. And when we look at one of the Leongu's description of her wise armpit, he says it is better than wild jasmine or pleasant fragrance of oil from Manga Arab. So there are three connections here. There is jasmine, there is a fragrance, pleasant fragrance in Manga, Manga Arab. So all these connected. So this connection should not be taken for granted. It's the connection that shows that there is a body, there is a spirit, also there is an issue of purifications of body and spirit. And talking of using sense or heavenly sense is also a duty, a duty of a human being who aspire to go to heaven. Let me end up by showing one of the intricate stanza by Mona Kupona at standard 35. A thing that goes in and out. She told her daughter, this is a point which has missed a number of critics. And I would like to call upon other critics to look again at this particular standard. So far I have my interpretation of this, but I would like to pause. I mean, I would like to pause it for now. And finally conclude my topic by saying that both points, Mona Kupona and Fumuli Omo, invite readers to imagine. And in some instances, gaze at sexual encounters between the young and his lover in order to monomanga and also Mona Kupona and his and her husband. But, Lyonbo surrendered to the wings of a woman seductive sense in their bodily encounter. Mona Kupona has instructed her daughter to purify and send her husband and send her husband and herself in order not only to fulfill marital obligation, but also to go to heaven. Thank you very much. Wow, thank you very, very much, Dr. Ahmed. That was amazing. That was excellent. So we now have to reread these poems and I'm really looking forward to the discussion later. There's a lot to think about that you've given us here today. I'm really intrigued by the idea of perfumes purifying us for the spiritual world. That's just fascinating. But let's just go on to the third speaker and this is Franziska Fei who will be talking about Ufeminiya, translating feminist politics in Tanzania. Karebu, Franzi. Thank you so much, Ida. Thank you, Angelica, for having me. I'm trying to share my screen as well. You see, can't currently see the presentation? Let's see if this works. It works to clear it now, not yet. I think you have to be allowed to, Angelica, I like it. Yes, we just have to make your co-host in order to screen, so just one second. Okay, thanks so much. That's great. Yes, Arki, if you could just make Franziska co-host, that'd be great. Thank you. You should be able to share it with Abin and co-host. Just click on your share screen button. I've enabled it for panellists. So, Franziska, you should try to do share screen. I'm trying, it's not currently showing it. Hang on. It's strange because you are co-host. Can you give me one moment, please? Okay, so it's like, while we're trying to figure this out, just for the audience, you are not visible now. We're only seeing the presenters. But if you have a question and you raise your hand later during Q&A, then you can put on your video and speak and we'll hear and see you. So those who have questions, you have the ability to do that. But Franziska is ready now. You're welcome. Thank you very much. Thanks so much for bearing with me here. All right. I hope you can all hear me well and similarly point out if there's any technical glitches. Thanks again for having me. Thank you so much for being here. And as you said, it is really lovely to come back to us even if it's virtually. And I'll point out first, I'm not a linguist. I'm an anthropologist who came to anthropology by way of a brief stint in Swahili linguistics. So please bear that in mind. So when I speak about translation today, I want to understand it beyond a literal sense and also metaphorically in terms of the often political practice of translation. And I'll just say a bit more about that in a moment. I'm joining Jaloul's call for your comments and feedback and for contacting me because this is a set of very new ideas that I've been dwelling on only recently. So these are very much in the embryonic stages of being developed and thought about from lots of different perspectives. And I'll appreciate all kinds of feedback on this. So please do get in touch. And I also apologize for my voice. I hope you can hear me all right. So central to the question that I do the set of questions that I'm currently thinking about is the question of how to translate feminist politics and Tanzania and its global relations and how to think closely with language and translation, such as with ideas of feminism and ufeminia and what they can add to that. I'm interested in questions of the role of language and translation as anthropological tools within politics and for liberation and in the context of global flows of political discourses on analytical lenses, such as feminism in Swahili speaking context such as Tanzania and across its mainland and its aisles. And some of the questions I'm interested in are what are people talking about when they speak about ufeminia? How as anthropologists can we speak about feminism or feminist politics in a manner that grasps the many different varieties in which it is discussed in present day Tanzania? How can we make this endeavor decidedly decolonial and anti-racist? What can thinking with the practice of translation and here I draw specifically on feminist linguistic anthropology and close attention to the Swahili language bring to a deeper understanding of feminist politics around the world? So what I'll do over the next 20 minutes is to give you some background and context to my current interest in these questions. I'll think about how and where we can observe feminist politics being discussed and negotiated in contemporary Tanzania. I'll say something about why I think it's important to think about and how we translate questions of feminism in different contexts and about how we can possibly speak to negotiations of feminist politics by centering language and translation and more specifically their relations. So this April I started a new position in political anthropology at the University of Mainz in Germany and in the process of that have begun to develop this new research project. And this was just about two weeks after President Samir Soluho was sworn in as the new and first female Muslim Zanzibar president of Tanzania and currently the only female political head of state in Africa. And it became the news surrounding this change in power that shaped my orientation in thinking toward a new project. Now while President Samir Soluho soon started assuring those in doubt that as she said, niliasi mamahapa nirai siwenua yamhuriva munganua tanzania, when yumbili lamoanamke, I remember well walking past the Baraza in Jaws Corner in Zanzibar a few years earlier and listening into a conversation about the then ongoing U.S. elections and a man saying to his conversation partner that Trump would still be better than Clinton because the very worst case scenario would mean to be ruled by a woman. So now there she was and I hope those guys have come to terms with that, but what caught my attention throughout these months of political change were in simple sexist oppositions toward women in leadership positions, but rather the discussions that were happening among Tanzanians themselves. In March shortly after being sworn in, for example, people across Tanzania started debating President Samir's title. While some people were convinced that calling her president instead of president or rice was derogatory to her presidential powers and reduced her as a woman to the role of motherhood, others like Deutsche Welles, Wahili journalist Grace Cavogo, for example, defended that in the title of mama, there was nothing anti-feminist, but instead a lot of honor and respect. A few weeks later in April, Dar es Salaam based journalist Khalifa Said asked whether Tanzania despite now having a female president also had a feminist president. And if president Salaam would indeed advance gender equality and break with the former president Magufuli's open contempt for women, which included among many other matters, his announcement of a ban on pregnant girls attending schools, which as I'm sure you're all aware are currently discussed across social media on an everyday basis. And by the end of August, the debate continued with President Samir, with President, with President Samir being criticized by Tanzanian politicians and citizens alike who questioned the whereabouts of women's rights in the country in response to her commenting on the flat chestedness of the Tanzanian women's football team, which according to her made marriage nothing but a dream to the players. Now it's not President Samir Suluho that I'm interested in, but it is instead the debates that have come to be discussed more loudly recently by means of her example. It's the nuances and the contradictions in these examples of publicly debated questions of feminist matters, sexism and women's rights, as they are currently on the table and as they of course have already been discussed in Tanzania for decades. So thinking with these initial observations from newspapers and social media, this August I had the chance to spend a few weeks in Dar Salaam, Baga Moyo, Zanzibar town Edid Pemba, where I could follow this trail and explore more perspectives on the ground. I spent those weeks connecting with people who other long standing contacts, friends and former research collaborators pointed out to me and who sometimes also referred to themselves as feminists, women's rights activists or gender advocates. Often these women were in roles that were anchored in the domain of public speech, which as Mary Bied puts it nicely, used to be quote the defining attribute of maleness. They were journalists or lawyers who worked with long established organizations like TAMWA, the Tanzania Media Women's Association or TAOLA, the Tanzanian Women Lawyers Association or with organizations who are embedded in international development, like for example the Coalition for Women's Human Rights Defenders. Plenty of others worked in the art industry and positioned themselves very consciously outside of the aforementioned spaces in which the pressures or expectations to work within the confines of certain translations of feminism were often perceived as difficult to escape. And as a side note here, the historical figures that reoccur throughout these conversations that were commemorated in speech and institutionalized cultural heritage formed a red line of the women associated with power and transgression, including people such as Princess Salma of Zanzibarke, Emily Rütte, Siti Bintissade, Bikidude, Lucy Lameck, Bibi Titi Mohamed as a conversation partner asserted mo'amke wa kwanza kupinga wa ingereza was tawalenshi a misaidi anawuguru wa tanganika female chiefs or kings like mo'amitare Zantare all much lesser known and discussed figures like Maria Ernestina and famous business women in kunguis like mo'amakuka or buguza. They were strong leaders, lakini suriaia o hayandikua is another person I spoke to stressed. Now taking as a starting point that questions of feminism and gender equality are presently anew on the table and I'll now turn to some ethnographic examples from the conversations I had in the field which show the importance of attending to the discourses and from where I hope to think about concepts and theories that they may speak to helpfully for the context of Tanzania. In her book from 2017 living a feminist life feminist theorist Sarah Ahmed writes what do you hear when you hear the word feminism? It is a word that fills me with hope with energy. It means to me how we pick each other up. Now this positive association of hearing the word feminist was not what I commonly encountered in the conversations I had across Tanzania. Here often upon hearing the word feminism and especially asking about it as a white non-African woman the reaction was usually hesitant sometimes negative at first. So in the reverse of Ahmed's definition of feminism as picking each other up feminism or what the concept was understood to mean was often rather connotated with the sense of putting each other down and specifically in regard to the relational situation between Western and African feminism and what they were understood to represent. One self identified feminist community member as she called herself explained and as she continued to explain because she considered it important work to raise awareness about women's roles in history. She confirmed . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .