 Okay, good morning everyone. I think we are ready to start the proceeding of our annual SWED study conference, the BARASA, as you many of you familiar faces you've been here before. This is our fifth, no, sixth BARASA actually organized by the SOA Center for African Studies. My name is Angelica Basier. I'm the manager of the SOA Center for African Studies. And with my colleague, Ida, Dr. Ida Ajavayanis, she is the, as you all know, lecturer in Swahili language at SOA, as well as head of the Africa section of the Faculty of Languages and Cultures. And we are very pleased to be back on campus because due to the pandemic, as you know, we had to put on hold the BARASA. And we are very pleased to have all of you here today. And also, this is the first time that we actually going to have a hybrid BARASA. So we have quite a big audience online. I hope you can all see us. Hello, online audience, online speakers as well. We have quite a few speakers that will be presenting online. So we hope the technology will work. It is the first time for all of us, but hopefully Zoom will hold on to it. We are also obviously very pleased to have today with us Nobel laureate Professor Abdul Raza Gourna is welcome back to SOA because he's been at SOA many, many times before. A lot more will be said about him by Ida and by our chair of our first panel, Dr. Lutz Martin. Without further ado, I'll now pass on to Ida who is going to say welcome in Swahili because yesterday the proceedings are going to be a mix of English and Swahili. So we hope that those of you who are like maybe not so fluent like me, will learn quite a lot today. And I'll pass on to Ida who is going to take over and then to our chair of our first panel, Professor Lutz Martin, also our SOA colleague. Okay, so thank you very much for anything. You know, we are here and we hope you enjoy the day. Thank you. Thank you. Lutz Karibu. Karibuni Wote. Welcome. Good morning, everyone. I'm Lutz Martin. I'm teaching here at SOA in the School of Languages, Cultures, and Linguistics. And I'm very pleased to be opening our proceedings. We have a packed program. And actually I'm very pleased. This is like Ida said, the first Barraza after we come from the pandemic. And we've learned our lesson because we are hybrid now. And this is the biggest Barraza I think I've seen. We're usually in the Paul Webly wing, which is also a big room. But this is bigger. It's really nice to see the Barraza growing this way. Our first panel is on translation. You have seen that for the program. And there's a number of reasons for that. One is at SOA. We have a long and strong tradition working on translation. We have a center of translation study, which is very, very active. We run a master's program in translation studies. We have a BA program in linguistics with the translation pathway. And of course, also we have a very strong center for African studies, which Angelica is strongly involved in. And we run a master's program in African studies. And just this year, a new undergraduate program, BA in African studies and Black Diaspora, which has been started very, very well. So I'm very pleased about that. So it sits very much in the remit of our school. In terms of translation practitioners, we have a long distinguished history there as well. A former colleague of ours, William Raditsche, was a translator of Bengali poetry. He translated the work of Grubrinda Tagore and was very, very acclaimed. We have Mohammed Abdul-Halim, who translated the Quran into English. So there is that tradition. We have our former colleague and still very warm and close colleague Chege Geithiora, who is translated, I think a few years ago, Kaburi Bilam Salabah, the unmarked grave, as he called it, the Maumau Kenyan novel. And of course, Ida Hajj Abayyanis, who we just saw, she's translated Alice in Wonderland, which if you know Alice in Wonderland, it's not a mean feat. And she has talked a lot about the intricacies in there. And of course, Ruma has it. And actually, we've just seen proof. I wasn't quite sure, but now I believe it. She also has translated Paradise, Abdul-Halim Gurnas novel. And that we are launching that later to SP Pony. So we are very pleased to have also Abdul-Halim with us today. Thank you. Thank you for coming. And of course, Ida to talk about her experience. And that sort of motivates the panel. And then we have Adam Habib, our director coming later to welcome us. And then the official launch of the Paboni. And then in the afternoon, there's a number of talks on different aspects of Swahili. But the focus may be also on diaspora, Indian Ocean, connecting cultures, and going back to translation. And so I'm very pleased to welcome you all here. Let us move to the first panel. We have again, a hybrid panel we have with us today. And Ida, please, if you could join us in the front and share your expertise. And we also have Salah Hamdani, if you please also. We have Clarissa Fierke, who is joining us online. I'm sure we can see her in a moment. And also online, joining us from Tanzania, Walter Mgoja. Now, let me say a little bit about that. Ida, I've already mentioned she is, and she met her as she is here. So as you know, I think probably the up and coming rising star of the next generation translators, if that's a good way to describe her. And also a very, I mean, a very valued and warm colleagues, her students can testify to her deep engagement with her subject. And as a colleague working with Ida for a number of years now, it's really a pleasure to be in the same unit. Salah Hamdani is a former fellow of the World Food Program of the United Nations, and has worked extensively as a consultant into different projects and programs, mainly on food, but also wider issues of development. And she will, you know, her career spans different places and continents. So she will contribute here today also a little bit on the cultural interpretation, cultural translation of issues in paradise and issues of Swahili translation more widely. Then Clarissa Fierke joining us from Bayreuth online is a professor of African language literature at the University of Bayreuth. And she has worked extensively, I'm sure many of you have come across her work, in particular on Swahili poetry. So she works on old Swahili on this huge legacy of Swahili poetry. Lots of manuscripts are housed here in Source Library, which are now being digitized. And she has worked on manuscript traditions, on interpretations. She has translated and edited a number of old Swahili works herself. So we're very pleased to have her here with us today. Then we have Walter Broyer, who is the general manager of the famous Tanzanian publishing house. So that was really instrumental bringing African literatures into the world, if you like. And then even more famously, maybe, he founded in the 1990s, and he is still the management director of the publishing house in Pukinanyota, which has established itself very much over the last 30 years, I think, as a major player in publishing African texts. And also he then can speak specifically on questions of translation with relation to publishing, and what that means in terms of a wider literature market. And I'm pleased to say we have Juan Gui Vagoro, he's on time, on you as a designer, perfect, perfect, who is, of course, from Source as well. She is a professor of practice here at Source. And we are very pleased that that came to pass. Juan Gui has been working in the area of translation for a very long time. She has been involved in different associations. She has been involved with the African Literature Association, specifically there, having a working group on translation and promoting that. She has a project called Africa in Translation, which champions translation as a means of cultural engagement and a cultural communication. So with that, I'm very pleased to introduce our panelists, three here in the room, two online. And I think I'll hand on to Ida as the first speaker. I should say maybe, let me check the time, if you have maybe five minutes to just maybe introduce your contribution, then we open the floor and the virtual floor for questions. And then we continue, I think, at 10.45 when our director Adam Habib joins us. Is that okay? Very good, Ida, please. Yeah. Hi, so I'm Ida Hajib Yanis and I'll be talking about Tafsiri translation. I have five minutes, but I think I've kind of myself, I think I'm going to speak for six minutes. I hope that will be okay. So just to start off, the Hamzia is just the oldest surviving piece of written work that we have in Swahili. And this is a Utensi. It is a prose poem. It's written in the Arabic tradition. And this was translated in the 17th century by a man called Idarus Usaima. This piece was written in Egypt in the 13th century. So it had arrived to the East African coast for the 17th century, written, which means the oral version of it might have been circulating centuries before that. And then I have, we also know that we have a very strong and established tradition of translating the Bible dating from 1847 and also later the Quran, although this has always been seen with a lot of suspicion. The first Quran translation into Swahili was Pastor, no, that's not Dale. This is this is Krapf, was by Pastor Godfrey Dale and he translated this from English into Swahili. And he did not include any Arabic script, which means that of course it was questioned from the outset. He did not have the original to carry it along. Now I start by mentioning this. So this was the translation that he did of the Quran. I start by mentioning this because these historic moments are also captured very, very well in Paradise, in Paradise society that is cosmopolitan, established. And it is witnessing the onset of colonialism in East Africa. We have a character called Kala Singa, one of my favorite, who proposed that he wants to translate the Quran into Swahili, but he would use the English as his source and so a copy. And so, but he does not know Arabic, just like Pastor Dale. And also similar to Pastor Dale, he's not a Muslim, which also puts everything sort of under suspicion. You also have the Mtapta or Interpreter, Mtapta, the one I have here. His name is Salim bin Abakari. He was born in the Komoro Islands and he lived in Zanzibar and then later he traveled to Germany and Russia and all the way to the board of China. And he wrote this travel log, a Swahili travel log, that is also mentioned in Paradise. And this is then another intriguing moment in history where you have the Mtapta, the first Interpreter, who translates in Prop 2. And they're seen as the go between, they go between, between the imperial powers and the people. And so there's, they're always, they're referred to as well as chief informants. And so you have these people who are seen as part of the people, but also traitors. There's this idea of like, they're under suspicion, like you cannot really trust them. And then we have a lot of these Mtaptas in East Africa. I believe Stanley had one called Darlington Maftar. And there was also an Mtapta at the court of Kabaka of Buganda. So these people are there. So I say all this because in Peponi, you have a lot of these people that I see as Mtaptas. My favorite is Nundu. And without his voice, there would not be a caravan going into the interior. Nundu speaks a number of Bantu languages. And I think they are Kisohili, Kinyamuezi, Kiha, and Kimanyema. I think, I mean, this is not in paradise, but I think from, this is something we could all debate. He's happy to make the target language sound wiser. So when you speak, he's very happy to, to make you sound cleverer than you are. So for example, at one time he tells Yusuf, I changed the words to make you sound wiser than you are, but there's no need to thank me. So in Suahili and Kusimakweli, I'm the one who speaks the language, I'm the one who speaks the language of Bolivia. So you have this, this, this suspicion, this person who is, who is changing whatever he said in the, in the, in the source. Nundu then later meets a fellow Mtapta. And in this case, it is, it is the Ascari who, who was for the German officer, the Chief Ascari. And, and so here you, I mean, this is one of the, of the best linguistic performances I think you have in the book where you have the German, speaking German to his Chief Ascari, the Chief, and the Nundu translating the Chief Ascari saying to what I call Ami Aziz. And so you have these languages sort of like performing and working together in the same space. And that's it. There are also lots of translators in the novel. So you have Khalil, we're now in the Khalil lecture theater that's possibly named after him, I don't know. So he translates the, the mistresses longing and, and flirtations with Yusuf. Although he's also far from being a faithful translator. There's Amina who is seen as more faithful, although she is also, she also has that longing in terms of, of Yusuf, etc. So now the, the thing I was going to say as well is that some scholars argue that paradise can be read as a translation and reference is often made to Abdulazak's use of Sahili diction at times. A number of Sahili words, Arabic, etc. that showcase the complex society that you have in East Africa. I'm not very sure of that, but what I believe, what I, what I found was a highly sophisticated English. I found that I did a dictionary a lot. I had to cross check meanings and sub meanings all the time. So I'm not sure how, I mean, maybe that is the post-it translation. I don't know, but I just found the, the turn of phrases, the vocabulary extremely refined, just beautiful. And, and then so the last thing I would say is paradise has also embedded the history of Sahili translation at various moments. So we have them tapped as there. We also have the originals being translated into copies or not, etc. Now before I finish very quickly, just wanted to show you some of the things. So this is the translation that we have published with Mkuki Nanyota, with Mkuki and Walter Goya. And I just absolutely love it. I think, I mean, that's the garden, you know, like you've put the pomegranates there, you've got them had to lay, you've got everything's there. So now there was a lot. So in terms of the language now, so for example, you have this sentence such as his father and uncle Aziz came home together at one in the afternoon. He could see their bodies shimmering in the liquid light as they approach slowly on the stony path which led to the house. Liquid light. I took a long time to, and in the end I tried to paraphrase and explain and I said, yes. And this is the most loved quote from Paradise. Respect yourself and others will come to respect you. That is true about all of us, but especially true about women. That's the meaning of honor. And I think these are the kind of, this is the last thing I would say, translating Abdul Razak into Swahili has been a journey, okay, translating sort of like bringing the text home because such phrases might be regarded with quite a different eye in the west, but with the Swahili milieu makes absolute sense. The woman, because you carry the household and it makes absolute sense right away. And so I think that's it. Thank you very much. Okay. For this round table, I've been invited to speak about Swahili women, specifically as portrayed in Paradise. So it's Swahili women. And there are women that I immediately thought of. These are Bisoulecha and then the rich wife of Uncle Aziz. Also you have the wife of the shopkeeper in the mountains. This is Maimuna. And then you have also her daughter, Asha. Also you have Yusuf's mother in Kawa. And then we have of course Amina and Bhatti. And for me, I have two main points here that I wish to touch upon. And hopefully, you will bring in your thoughts. These two points that I want to raise are invisibility and representation. So this is basically what I'm going to talk about. Actually, I have always known that news spread very quickly amongst women. And even women they stay indoors, still news spread very quickly behind their walls. And they tend to be more updated actually, although they are behind their walls, but they're quite updated. And I experienced this all the time when I'm in Zanzibar. But this summer, more than ever, after reading Gurnal's Paradise, actually rereading I should say, because I read it for the first time, then I read it again. And then I thought this really makes sense. Almost daily, while I'm sitting in my room, I would hear my husband conversing on the Barraza outside. And the conversation topics in the Barraza actually, the different topics from travel, food, sometimes even input like banter, you know, etc. And really this conversation would get animated. And at times, very controversial. And I found myself laughing in disbelief. But here is my husband and other men, you know, talking. I was really sometimes amazed. And in hindsight, in hindsight, I thought this is not far-faked, that now I understand how many of Gurnal's characters felt exactly as I felt. These are some of the women that found themselves behind the walls. And they were invisible. Oh, sorry. I hope you heard me. Oh, thank you very much. Okay. I hope you won't stop me. Yeah, a bit slow. Yeah. So I imagine Maimuna and her daughter must have had bits of conversations from the travelers who stopped their place. They, you know, they conversed about Russia, about all those things in faraway countries. But always because of this good behavior or what Gurnal said, the story, they didn't, they couldn't join that Barraza. So we always have, you know, Amina talking of watching Yusuf in the garden, as did Zulecha, Mr. Yes, again, they couldn't cross the walls. And even when Zulecha wanted to cry wolf, when saying that Yusuf had tried to seduce her, she couldn't do it herself. She remained behind those walls. And she needed a man to, you know, to intervene on her behalf and call the townspeople. So when I think of this invisibility of these women, it occurs to me that in my perspective, generally, it is not negative. It's not a negative experience. It is simply accepted as the civilized way of being. And I remember clearly in the 50s, with my mother, my mother would not step outside without her veil, black veil, you know, the wee-wee. She stayed inside. And even when her visitors came, the other women came, they would all, you know, sit there in the room and then they would talk. And these were women whose hands, just like the talk in Paradise, they had henna on their hands, they had the perfume allowed, you know, all of them. And then if you were a child, you had to go and kiss the hand and say, so these are the women. So actually, when I read about women visiting Missou Lecha in Paradise, I knew their faces. I knew them. I could see them clearly. And even though they were not described, but I knew them, I had the exact representation who they were. And whenever my mother spoke of her childhood, for example, she would always be behind the curtain, because when she was reaching, you know, when she was an adult, she wasn't allowed to see the man. This was the culture in that time. So she would always hear from men who were talking to her grandfather. And then what I wanted to say, I have observed in this book that there is actually a class of women who could be taken care of. And these were women, such as, you know, who were rich, but they are also very poor women, like a user. She actually had to fend for herself. And in fact, there is a very interesting class representation in this book, really. That's what I think. There were very rich husbands, you know, those women were rich husbands, like for example, Aunt Glasi's. Missou Lecha, that was Missou Lecha's husband, very rich. And she was herself also quite rich. And there was the young Amina. Amina was the junior wife. And of course, she was serving the mistress of the household. But there are also other women, you know, the middle class women, whose husbands were middle class, like shopkeepers. For example, Bibi Muna. Bibi Muna and her children, including her daughter Aisha, they are not, you know, they are not rich, just middle class. And then you had other women, other women, like, you know, Biajusa, as I talked about, she didn't have a husband. She was, you know, one of those poor women. And they were without husbands. I mean, she not they were. She was without husband, Biajusa was without husband. She covered herself in veil, but not her face. So what she did, she came to the shop very freely. And she would talk about each and every topic and all sorts of, you know, provocative jokes without any fear in front of men. And these men are sitting on the barraza. And she would just talk. She was just happy. She didn't have any property. She didn't have a husband. She had nothing to lose. So actually, and then I found also, there are other women in the hinterland. Yeah. Yeah, that's why I'm reading, you know, very fast. I don't want to be, he might stop me. Okay. Let me continue. Okay. So there are women also in the hinterland, you know, the chattos land. The likes of Batty. Very interesting. Yeah. They had no veils. No veils at all. Because culturally, this was not considered to portray any respect, you know, a veil was not considered to portray any respect for women. So in that area, but it didn't have to put on any veil. These were cultivators and hunters. And it was a different, different civilization from the cost, completely different. And strictly, they didn't remain behind walls. However, they were not part of the masculine boys. Why? They did not form, they didn't form part of the ruling assembly. There was assembly, but they are no women. I think this is true. I hope I'm not mistaken. And what I want to say is that women, they had their own, their own place. And however they move together, they move together to collect water, to collect whatever, whatever around the head as a group, but they had their own freedom. And still, of course, there are differences between all these classes of women, however, one thing that is very common is that generally women were expected to be as invisible as possible, all along, all of them. Now this position of women is actually inherited, which culturally accepted, depending on the specific context, not all contexts. Some Western scholars have portrayed this as subordination or exploitation for women, etc. But the perception along the east coast African coast actually is quite different. Remaining behind the walls and covering in veil was considered very respectful. And actually women visited each other, they participated in their own activities, they had their own freedom. They were behind the walls, but they were not behind the walls when they were together. And historically, actually women who stayed indoors and were invisible to the outside world were actually very visible in their own world. So they were very visible in their own world, in their own world of fellow women, in their own world of their family of their children. And so the supposed invisibility is actually a status in itself. This is what I think. And in terms of translating the lives of these women, I believe that the Swahili speaking audience would know and understand and accept that this is how it is. Actually Abraza Gurnah is said to have books where the masculine voice is much more present than the female one. The truth actually is that the feminine voice is portrayed in its authenticity. And I say that Gurnah says that he writes what he knows. What he knows is our believed experience, or the truth to speak in generally and the expected way of being. This is what I think. Thank you. I think this was too good to interrupt. It was very nice. Thank you. I think we are now moving online and ask Clarissa to join us. Thank you. I hope you can hear me. Yes. Well, thanks a lot, first of all, for having me in this kind of distinguished round. I don't think I can call myself really a translator. Definitely not in comparison to all the esteemed translators in the audience and in the Zoom. And let me also add Hongera Sana'ida and, of course, also Abraza for, well, first of all, a beautiful novel. And what we've seen also wonderful translation. And actually, when I was thinking about what to talk about, I started in a similar way like you, Iida, thinking about how the novel itself talks about translation. And I reflected a lot about the character Nyundo, well, the hammer, the hammer of translation, probably. And in the novel, it actually says Nyundo would also have to go as their voice. His good humor was on the mend with his new importance. But the men teased him that he was making up translations as he went along. So Nyundo has this very crucial role. He negotiates with Chatu, the very unpredictable ruler. And well, so literally the trade depends on Nyundo, but also people's lives. So he is suspicious, as you also said, Iida, but he is also malicious sometimes. And at least he's very unreliable. And you also refer to the travel loks that actually paradise draws on. It's definitely not a translation, but it draws on a lot of these very early travel loks by Felton, who was the first translator of the German governor to Germany East Africa, who was also very much concerned with the question of reliability of translation. So in his safari Zawa Swahili, where, well, one of these, well, a number of actually travels are recorded by him, he reflects in the introduction, which he later then he later translated the safari Zawa Swahili into German. And he reflects about about translation. So this is now my bad translation. So with regard to the German translation of the travel loks, I have tried to be as loyal to the world as possible in order to convey even in the translation the natural impression, which the Swahili text leaves on everyone who knows the language, so that even those who do not know Swahili can immerse themselves into the naive thought of the African. Although the German style has suffered quite a bit from it, I do still hope and that I succeeded in creating a pleasurable and enlightening read for all those interested in our colonies and the inhabitants. So we can we can clearly have a condescending tone here, the naivety, and I could talk much more about about that as well and the violence in there. But on the other hand, there's also lots of admiration actually for the narrator's talent in in felt. And so he talks about such elegance. So and the narration is such a pleasure. So referring on the one hand to Muinje Chande and to Sleiman Bakari, you saw the picture in Ida's PowerPoint earlier on. Well, and that actually he admires it so much that he wants to be as loyal to the text as possible as close as possible to the narration. And if we compare that, for instance, to the later translation, the English translation of by Lyndon Harris, he actually from 1965. So this is the context of independence where obviously it didn't fit the zeitgeist to talk about the Arabs, and then butter Africans anymore and gratitude to the Germans. So he reduced the text by one third and rearranged paragraphs. He introduced new titles. So there is a whole kind of, well, we could talk about the reliability here as well. So that even Allen, John WT Allen, he writes in a review. So the Harris version is a European way of telling a story and modeling it. And the Felton version is the Swahili way. Well, Felton, that's certainly an exaggeration. It's not a Swahili way because, after all, he was speaking to a German colonial audience, and one could have more critical comments about that as well. But still, I want to think about Felton's concern to make the German sound Swahili. So how does one make Mönchande then sound in German, as Felton actually seems to ask. In Paradise, as I said already, I mean, after Isaac definitely does not strictly translate Mönchande's prosaic account into English, but still one can still wonder. So to quote Felton, how does Abdulazak give a natural impression of Swahili in English? Or then with regard to Ida's translation, so how did Ida carry over the tone of Paradise in English Swahili or in Swahili English tone into Swahili and which Swahili exactly? So translation literally to cross over also means or to carry across also means to make the narrative enter in dialogue with other narratives. So I hear both a 19th century newspaper prose and earlier folk tales in Felton's German translation. So texts also in translation, they find new echoes. Of course, literature as such is also full of layers of texts. So in Paradise, we have the travelogues on the one hand, which turn into a coming of age story, I mean, mostly through the character of Yusuf carried over, if you want, from the Koran and popular Islamic accounts and also playing a lot with these references. And again, looking at my own kind of reading experience, I can't help but read Paradise also in relation to Thomas Mann's Joseph on Seine Brüder, so Joseph and his brothers. Joseph Mann's intention was actually to write a transcultural myth of Joseph. So he drew on Persian, Egyptian, Babylonian, Jewish and Muslim sources in his Californian exile or his Californian, Egypt. And he thought actually for a very ancient language for the myth. So Joseph is Greek and Egyptian at the same time, but there's also lots of irony. It's still also a novel. And there are find lots of parallels as well to Paradise. Guna, of course, does exactly the opposite. So there the myth is put into a very concrete, brutal and historical landscape of the late 19th century and probably denying the myth to remain one. So let me come back to the question of echoes of texts. So what will the Swahili audience stand here in the Swahili translation of Paradise? So will the popular Utensi, Yusuf, many manuscripts, I mean, you have many manuscripts at the source, but there are also lots of recitations still sold on CDs and so on in East Africa. Will they hear the Koran in it? Will the novel also enter into dialogue with Shafi Adam Shafi's Qathriya menu for art or probably the play by Farouk Topan and Falme Juhar? Are they the pharaohs as well? Or will it create also echoes with people's grandparents' narratives of slavery or great grandparents actually narratives of slavery, ivory and colonial brutality? Thank you very much. Thank you very much, Clarissa. This class, again, very inside, but you can see how the different angles of the work come together. Can we ask Wangui now, I think, as our next speaker? Yes, please. Thank you very much. Anyway, I'm really honored to be here and I'd like to congratulate you in person. Congratulations. We're very excited. I wore my East African bangle today to celebrate the joy that we feel about the Nobel Prize win, but also we're very excited about this new book, Paponi Paradise, and I'm very excited that it's been translated by Ida because of this concept of bringing the literature back home. And I will not talk about the book because I'd like to do that on another occasion, especially when I've read in Kiswahili, Ida's translation against the original text. I think that is what I think would be most exciting for me to do. But I'd like just to share a few reflections about just that I was thinking about in the context of the title of this conference, which is about the localization of what we imagine to be the networks of Kiswahili. And we all know this, but I'll just raise it theoretically. Abdullah Razak and Ida have been here in the UK. And of course, they are from Zanzibar, which is very specific locus, but they have these true and many other hundreds of locuses I'm sure that they belong to. So what does this do to meaning an expression? The text itself takes us back in time. And we need to understand what is time, like translation, it's as elastic, we're reading the book in the present in the past, somehow placing ourselves in time as readers. So what does this mean? So I'm very curious to see what has happened with time and also what is the author doing? Because, of course, the author did not witness the 19th century, we can only read it and imagine it as it's been passed down or as we imagine it. So there's so many layers of translation and the actual text itself, which is playing with translation, that I'm already dizzy, just thinking about all these layers. But some of the issues that have come up, and I'll say them very quickly, have been involved in what we call the Indian Ocean, they call it the Mozambique Channel Research, which is around that area of that water. And it's based in Mayotte, which is a little dot in the Indian Ocean, which is, for whatever reason, it's part of France. So again, what do these, and this is in the present, not in the 19th century, it is a dom tom as we sit here. So it's point of reference is French, and it's point of reference in its psyche is not the Middle East, like, you know, it's somewhere in Europe. So and the research is based there. So all these waters that are mingling and flowing, I would like that I like that shimmering expression that that you could not translate and had to paraphrase. So I see this literary practice as that wonderful phrase that the author has used of the shimmering waters. So what does then what do words then mean? And what do they mean to different people? And and who is the reader? And what do they bring to reading the text? But really what I had promised either to do, because I joined this panel very latest to talk about the globalization of Kiswahili, as you all know, Kiswahili is now on the United Nations calendar. It's celebrated now globally. Clarissa, who was speaking to us is based in German, Germany, and yourself, and your own the Kiswahili in your own ways. And so Kiswahili is a global language partly for good reasons, it has traveled on its own. But once it starts to be institutionalized in the United Nations, the African Union this year adopted Kiswahili as an official working language. Then I will I'm sure that meanings will start to harden and to be more fixed. And this is one of my concerns and the joy that literature and human engagement is way ahead of these fossilizations that are likely to happen in the language. Also, many African countries are adopting Kiswahili as a medium of instruction. And of course, as you can see from Harvard and others here, Kiswahili is being taught all over the world for a long time. But in the Cold War period, all the countries, China and Russia, the Soviet Union as it was called then had broadcasting the BBC here broadcast Kiswahili to Africa. So the flows of these networks and their meanings is something that I think can be unpacked as we do this literary translation work. So I want to ask about the location. I'm quite satisfied about this particular text and its outing and also that has been published in East Africa. But the chains may not always be that smooth is what I have found if I can say it that way. So I think I could make my minutes over. We're moving back to online, I think, where we have from Tanzania, Walter Goria. Walter, can you hear us? Yes, I can hear you. Oh, thank you. All right. Best of all, I like to say that in all the work I've been doing in publishing, translations have been part of my my my my interest in consciousness. I've done we've done quite a few actually. We've done Moliere, we've done Khalili Gibran, we've done Hemingway, we have done Yamaaba, we've done Antrandesante de Superi, we've done Victor Hugo and so many other single works. But and we'd like to do more. Of course, we've done now the point which is, you know, the icing on the cake, so to speak at the moment. And we're very, very proud to be doing this work. But and this is really what I wanted to say in respect of translations as as commodities also that have to be sold, be produced and sold. Okay. Because if the publishing, if there's no, if the resources aren't there to publish, to translate, to publish and to distribute, obviously the work of translations and exchanges in cultural literature would be seriously limited. And this where I have a particularly serious problem in Tanzania. The problem is that in our country, the language of instruction in primary schools in Isfahili, and in secondary schools and post-secondary, it's in English. Now, the argument that Malim put forward when this policy was enunciated was that if English is taught very well in primary school, then it will be possible at secondary school to have to carry on instruction in English and everybody will be comfortable. And as he said also, this was because English was the Swahili of the of the world. Some of us did challenge that position even as early as that, but never mind. That's what has come to rule. Now, the fact of the matter is that the teachers who go to teach in primary schools do not have any ability to teach in English, to teach English, because they themselves have not been taught well the language. And these are X from four students and they don't have even have passed English examination. They just have had a certificate of all level and they go to teach. Now, you can imagine that kind of English that is supposed to be taught and what would happen when then they come to secondary school and they have to switch from Swahili into English. It doesn't work. What is worse that that also goes on after secondary schools that at that A level, those who cannot go to the universities or other institutions, you know, other ones will go to teach. And so the net result is that even at the university and I know we have lots of debate about this, the command of English in our universities, particularly for literature and the kind of level we are working is really not that strong. And so the result is that there is a certain, how can I put it? It's a big block against creativity in language and literature. Now, the question is, only those students whose parents are rich and who went to private schools, good teachers and so on, are able to command English. And also that so happens that the ones who get pretty good jobs when they finish the university. And these are the ones who would be consuming literature. Now, the problem arises that they have been working in English. All intellectual work has been done in English. So if a book comes out like Paradise, for instance, and they will read it in English. Now, there certainly won't be a very good reason for them to go and buy a second copy to read it in Swahili, what they already read in English. So you can imagine then what happens that, and it's no wonder that obviously something will give, something will suffer. And perhaps it explains why we are in Swahili, I mean Tanzania is not being produced in English writing and so on. Now, what we think is something we have to do is obviously not to stop translations, but to continue to do more translations, but to have some way in which we make sure that those books and translations do reach the public and they can do so only for at least they are available in libraries. And one of the good models is the Norwegian model, where every good book that's published, every book actually, a thousand copies or more are bought for distribution to the library. Now, if you have at least a thousand or a thousand five hundred or two thousand copies already bought for for libraries, it's possible to cut on the business of publishing because both the author, the editors, the translators and so on will have been enabled by the fact that so many copies have gone to the libraries have been purchased, someone has been made by the whole production chain. Well, this is what I would like to say. Now, how would we do that? That's obviously, we keep saying the government has to implicate itself very seriously into the, first of all, reviewing the policy, but also certainly purchasing books and expanding the libraries as much as possible. And also institutions like SOAS and other universities may be contributing into purchasing those copies and go to the library so that we can continue to develop this this this work of literature, translations and so on. I think I have about two more minutes, but I'll give these to the next speaker. Thank you. Thank you very much indeed. And you will hear more from Walter later in the program as well. With that, let's thank us very much our panelists for the presentations, give lots of different perspectives on the work. I think it put a wonderful context to the rest of the proceedings. Thank you. I'm very pleased to welcome Professor Adam Habib, who is the director of SOAS. Adam joined us in January 2021. And there has been a lot of changes since he came. So if you've been to the Barraza before, if you look at the building, it's really much more pretty and clean. And, you know, it looks more professional than it would be used in the last last decades or so. But there was also lots of content we've been discussing, one, two elements, maybe one, one, which I think we all think is important is to re-concept less our relation with the global south, to put on a better footing, more equal footing, the way with academic relations are structured when engaging with the global south. And there's been lots of talk about equitability and what that actually means and how we can do it. And the other thing is linked to that, is to understand the world's problems through the lens of the global south. And I'm sure Adam will say a little bit more about that. But it's something which I've taken away from, which I think is really important, which I think links very, very well to our discussions today. Translation helps us precisely to do that, to understand different perspectives, different cultures and how things are seen from different perspectives. And, you know, language learning is of course important. But translation, as we just heard, is the other really key element in there. And of course, the study of Africa is close to all our hearts, and particularly Adam's heart, who comes, of course, from the universe of the Witzwatersrand before joining so was. And so it's my great pleasure to welcome Adam and give us a little introductory speech. Thank you. So colleagues, it's a real pleasure to be here. Thank you very much. Let's, you know, I've been asked to to do a welcome to this conference. And I think I should start by welcoming Professor Abdul Razak Guna to slow us. It's really a pleasure to have you here, sir. You know, it's a wonderful achievement. And I know a number of my colleagues have said that they're really proud as East Africans for somebody who's been born and lived in the continent for one stone of my life. You have done us all proud. Thank you very, very. I want to welcome everyone else. There are many scholars here from afar, near and afar. Thank you for coming. And to, of course, my, my, my so as colleagues who are here as well. It's really lovely having all of you. And of course, Ida, who's a real star for us. Thank you very much for inviting me. You know, it's a real pleasure to do a welcome to Professor Guna. You know, I don't mean to sound to be corny about this, Professor Guna. Really, it's, it's, it's a particular pleasure, not only because you're right from the continent about the continent, about humanity. But it's also a particular pleasure to have you here because of this moment we, and I want to explain a little bit. You see, about 12 months ago, we adopted a new strategic plan. Many of you would know that so as was in serious trouble for a couple of years. And that new strategic plan says a lot of things. It says about how we're going to make some money. How are we going to grow our student numbers? How are we going to break even? How are you going to drive research intensity? A lot of which we've, we've done over the last two years. How are we going to make the place look better? And you've seen some of this as we are. But at the heart of that plan is what we call equitable partnerships. Now, you know, when I came to the UK, I was truly puzzled because everybody spoke about equitable partnerships. Wherever I went, people spoke about equitable partnerships. But as a vice chancellor who worked on the continent and worked with probably the leading vice chancellors on the continent, I sat at the table with them. Nobody in the continent believed that they were equitable partnerships. We thought it was a quaint term coined by the British that they spoke about, but we didn't experience. And so when I came to SOAS and we started developing this new strategic agenda, and we put equitable partnerships at the heart of this agenda, I said to colleagues, let's really mean it. Not only the way we feel it, but the way people experience it in Africa and in Asia. That's what's the nature of what we wanted to do. And that's what we've spent quite a bit of time over the last couple of months, particularly. We're looking at a joint PhD with the University of advertisement. We're speaking to my career. We're speaking to gunna le gun. My colleagues are speaking and exploring partnerships with the University of Rwanda, Shivnada University in New Delhi. We speaking to colleagues in Japan and South Korea and in Thailand. There is a real desire to do a real equitable partnership that is about teaching, co-teaching and co-curriculation and co-research. It's about that. Now I don't want to say to you it's easy because I can tell you it's incredibly difficult because the political economy of high education in the UK is profoundly against equitable partnerships. The way the whole system works is we charge rich people from the South lots of money so we can cross subsidized middle-class people from Britain. That's how the system works. And then we all do that and we have a 400% markup. Of course that's a PhD and so as we just did the calculation there were 400, 4,000 pounds. We charge people from Africa and Asia 20,000 pounds. I don't know a private sector you can get away with a 400% markup. We do it as a public institution and we do it in the name of social justice. It's a hell of a challenge. So we need to address this in quite fundamental ways and we are working to it. And we'll see how well we succeed. It's an attempt I said to my colleagues instead of preaching about radicalism do it, subvert it, show you can create a new business model because that will have a fundamental shift. Now why are we doing this? Why are we doing this? Not only because it's important morally but we're doing this in a sense because it seems to me it is what humanity requires. I and my colleagues really believe humanity will not survive unless we reimagine our partnerships in an equitable direction. You might think that that's an overstatement but let me explain to you that all of our challenges are transnational in character, climate change, pandemics, inequality, social and political polarization. All of it are transnational and if you're going to have to fix these challenges you need to bring global science and global technologies in conversation with knowledge systems in other parts of the world. If you want to understand this why did it take us so long to resolve Ebola in West Africa in 2015? We knew what we had to do in clinical terms. In Ebola you keep people away, give them vaccines, we knew all of that. We didn't succeed initially because we forgot a simple thing. West African societies are Islamic societies. In Islamic societies the way the burial happens is by washing the body. It's called gosal. But when you wash the body you allow the Ebola virus to jump from host to another host. You needed an intervention that wasn't the doctors because we knew what to do. We needed a cultural and religious intervention. Now if you had been in the middle of West Africa if we had been engaging with its knowledge systems we would have known that on day one. So what we need is local understanding. We need interdisciplinary because if we don't do that, if we don't have our knowledge systems talking to each other we can't create universal solutions to transnational challenges of our time. And so what has all of this got to do with Professor Gunner? You might ask. Well really the reason I'm particularly excited is this is what Professor Gunner has been doing for years. He's been doing it for decades. In many ways his work he understood in his three literature, three novels that you cannot build a universality, a common humanity by thinking through the knowledge of a single knowledge system or from the perspectives of one part of humanity and not another. In many ways he speaks to that in powerful ways. His work speaks to and pre-figures our strategic agenda and so as that we developing now. You know think about it after lives. I haven't read all Professor Gunner but after lives it's about colonialism. It's about war and its effect on people and how its impact on the evolution on the simple aspects of humanity. The evolution of the emotions of love and anger and desire and dispossession. And he speaks about that and he speaks about peace and how he speaks about how people can live in one place and dream about another. He speaks about how you can speak in English and dream in Iswaye. That's the powerful thing. And the other thing I love about his work, some of the work, is the nuance of it. Really nuanced. So our politics today particularly in the UK but frankly in many countries South Africa and in many parts of the world the US, Europe is defined in terms of good and evil. It's defined by white and black. What I love is how you evoke an understanding that there can be empathy and brutality. That there can be peace even in war. But despite these contradictions there's no neutrality. In the end there's always the right problem. Even if it has to be grounded in the context of the historical moment and the place we're speaking about. So, but sir, it's truly a pleasure to have you here at SOAS because you symbolize what we want to do. I thank you for honoring us with your presence. Friends, colleagues, Professor Goodman. Thank you, Adam. That was wonderful. And I don't think I will interrupt much more. Abdul Razak, please join us in the front and honor us with a few words. I think this is a wonderful introduction. Abdul Razak Gona has been a friend of SOAS for a very long time. He's a emeritus professor at the University of Kent. Has been awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature last year. His outstanding books are Paradise, which we have the translation, of course, we are launching in the moment, Desertion by the Sea. As Adam said, there is so much in your work which speaks to all of us. I think it's about youth, it's about location, movement, place and displacement, about aspirations. Of course, about language. There's so much language and translation, as we saw earlier. The multilingual context of East Africa, which is in there. But I think the wider themes your address in your work about what it means to be human, what it means to have to engage with culture, what culture means for yourself and how you're constrained in what you can do, but also have scope to determine what you want to do. I think that speaks to a very wide global audience. The final thing, the Nobel Prize, I think the committee noted the uncompromising and honest approach to the effect of colonialism, but also the true engagement of culture and what culture means in that context. It speaks to these two things in a very warm and meaningful way. I'm very pleased to welcome you. Thank you very much, Dr. Rezak, and address us with the people else. Thank you. Professor Habib, thank you very much. And thank you all very much for being here. I'm delighted to have been invited. It's a bit a little bit overwhelming when you're sitting there and people are saying all these wonderful things about you, especially when you don't get a chance to say anything back. Like, no, it's not true. But anyway, it's lovely to see so much engagement, at the very least, but also so much, I suppose, appreciation. I'm very grateful. Thank you very much. I was asked, you know, originally was talking about this, and I'm really, by the way, really, really delighted that it's worked out, because I know how this started for you there as an academic exercise translating this novel, which she's been talking about, and then that it worked. And the way it worked is that when I went to Sharjah soon after the award of the prize by the Swedish Academy, I met Walter's son, Cookie there, Sharjah. And he became very enthusiastic about this possibility, found out that he had done the translation, and they both moved very, very fast. And I'm delighted that it's all happened, sort of like about a year or so, something like that. So I'm really pleased that it's worked out. Because, of course, it's been quite a while since Paradise was published in English, and it's good that it's there. I was very, very interested to hear that opening discussion about the translation issues, because of course, there's so many of those contributors there said translation is one of the things that concern that interested me in writing the novel. Not only is it written in English in the first place, of course, but also my own assumption was that many of these people, the traders in particular, because they are the focus, as they were the people I was traveling with, to a certain extent, that much of the time they wouldn't have understood the people they were dealing with, they would not have been able to speak to each other. And so how did they manage? How did this business go on? How did these different communities, not just the traders, but all the various contesting communities that we run into, how did they manage with each other? And so there has to be some translation, but this translation cannot be as accurate as Ida's translation, for example. It's going to be hit and miss, it's going to be slapdash, it's going to be, you know, traders talk. If you, I come from, not only from Zanzibar, I come from Zanzibar, I come from Malini in Zanzibar, right there by Gattini, but it's no longer that case now quite as much, but when I was growing up, when I was sort of in the 1950s and 60s, when the Muslim crowd still used to turn up every November, you'd hear different languages going on all the time, and you'd hear business going on all the time. These people were trading, and there is a trader pathwise, which doesn't have to be complete for it to make sense, because in the end it's that that makes sense, and somehow the other things happen. So I was very interested in that, but in particular, in the way that you, and the colleague, I'm sorry, who's from Bayreuth, the way you focused on particular texts, and so I thought I'd just add another little layer to that to see, because what I read was actually the Lyndon Harris translation, so I thought this doesn't sound right in English, it doesn't sound right. So I retranslated that into Swahili, which would be a spoken one, because indeed nobody refers to the text in the novel, but they speak as if they know these stories already from another source, from as it were an oral source. So I retranslated so that it sounded like a spoken story rather than, which indeed it was in the first place, of course, it would have been an oral transmission in well, you know, that have been collected. So that adds yet another translation on translations and other translations. It doesn't really matter. The point, my point really was to focus as much on stories, and the way stories circulate, and how stories are indeed a worldview. So those that are passed on do not have to be accurate. In fact, quite often they're not, because as they get told, somebody adds an interesting little invention to, you know, everybody was drunk, this kind of thing, you know, in the town, that kind of thing, just sort of make it more interesting in a way, because I believe that is also how stories travel when they're transmitted in this way. They change and they change in a way that makes them more receivable. We know this. We can receive this story now, because we recognize in it something about us, too. It's not just about another time. Anyway, really, I just wanted to thank the people who've been talking and discussing. Thank you, sir, for those grand words of welcome, and thank you for being here. It's been a pleasure. Thank you. Thank you very much indeed. I think we are now ready to launch the translation. We have copies, I think. I was told to have a bow, but I couldn't find one. I tried in the morning, so they couldn't find a bow, so it's going to have to be a bowless bow. So I think, can everybody see? Okay, so I got some books this time when I was in Tanzania, and I had the book in my bag in my office. So I said, I don't have a bow, I'll have the bag. It's probably good enough. And so this is a design it made me so happy. It was designed by Mkuki, Mkuki B'goya, so Wotab'goya's son. And what I love about it is it's the garden. It's Nipeponi. Oh, that's all that's left? No, this is... Okay, so we have some books, and so it will be in Olive with gold writing. Here we have the dark gold, but I will have the lighter gold after. But I guess it's Yusuf in the garden, and he's there with the pomegranates and Maturle, the queen of the night, and Jasmine and all the flowers. So we thought this was really... And he's wearing his Kizkofia, Nakanzu, and yeah, Tuesday I'm not better in 21. So I was meant to give this to you. So I'm not sure. Yes. And then you can... I don't know, I'm not sure how people launch books. Yeah. Yeah. The one principle of launching books. Yes. Don't give away too many. You're supposed to get them to buy. Okay, I'll get one back. I'm joking. So maybe you could say at least two of you in the book. I think that would be good. And the bag. And the bag. And the bag. And also we should get Walter on the screen as well. Yeah. And I think Walter was going to say something, actually. Is it muted? No. So maybe we can listen. Like should we hold the book? Please, please do. Like this, very good. Yes. And now this, I think it's now officially launched. Thank you. Professor Gurna, I'm going to read a book from Kinazindulia Aaleo, Paradise, and I'm going to read the book on the third page of the book. Professor, I'm going to read it. I'm I'm Shukrani Zakhwanza Nakhongezha Zakhwanza Zakuyakwako, Professor. Pasababu bila ya kazi ya ko ya si lihi o ya ne paradise to skekua na tafsili ya ichikitao. Koutuna kupongezha sana, sana tena. Nawa chani se me bidebile ko aba trai pongezha na bodi ya nobel koku faham uboru a kazi ya ko. Kupandua fani na mauzuyaki to noa pongezha wawo nao. Let's try again. Sasa takini leo nyota ya shuguri hi ni ida, pasabu yei ya ndi o ka faham ya kazi ya ko kitafsili kitabu na ka kitafsili vizuri sana. Koyuki itchokua kizuri ikati kaki ingereza, mi na hi si ko aba kimi kua kizuri zain di kati kaki swahili. Yes. Better in swahili. Pasababu kimbuko nake, yes flan ni wawa swahili, na mambo ya kizu swahili, mandari ya kizu swahili. Na, nga daniki jambo zuri dito bahati ni ko amba eida na mimi na wotet lo husika bahati in zuri chanza mbumbuza kingereza na chanza mbumbuza kizu swahili. Bahi hui rikuwa rahisi, tila mara kuku, kushrikiana na kuu, na kuu Saidiana kattaku, kutazama jis changamoto tu na wotet na kuzi maliza na kuzi, na kuzi kuepa. Sasa kueuna tuwa shukuran hi zu, na hongira sana ida, na ni se metu kwa sababu ni binafsili ni bintiangu. So metotua ida nasa, watu wangu wawau, kahito hi ni kaja nyombani, na hio na ula metu isem ku sababu, na nذا ni se hemu birebile ya, ya utamadu niway to kua babu metotua andubu yaako, iwarafikiya ko nimetotua. Pongera sana ida. Alafu vire vire na atlaka kum shkuru Stefani Kitchen wa African Books Collective wambaio pamojana namkuki wamekua kishirikiana kuhaki kisha tunanakara za kitabuhiki kateka shogulihi kwa sababu pulikwana wasiwasi pengine pi tabutinuku ato mechapisha visingewahi kuhanga wemewahi na jire vire planibi daya maisata nakara, kuhiahu kakiki kisha kuhanga tabu vii po. Kuhiahu nam shkuru vire vire Stefani na ABC wambaio kuhagioyote, kum ekua tunan shrikiana wamiakami. Alafu na mkuki, na tapiwa, na timuaty vire vire jamkuki na jira, paale, wambaio kuhakika wame jita hidi, kwa sababu. I will see you. I will see you. I will see you. I will see you. I will see you. I will see you. I will see you. I will see you. So, there are some copies left. I think they go for 12, is it? Eight. They're 8 pounds. In three days. You know what, if you want to pay 12 for, every 12 half a book we send to a library in Zanzibar. Yes. I think that's a really good idea actually. Good. They are available outside. I think now a tea break, isn't it? Yes. We, we overrun everything a little bit. I mean, we're back in time now. If anybody has any comment or anything before we let you go for the tea break. I think there's some questions online. And here. Yes, yes. Are there any questions from from the floor from the audience we can take maybe two or three questions together. I'll put the panelists to either to anyone who's been speaking. Yes, please. So that's a really good question. We spent, we spent many, many hours and days and weeks that was to discuss this, but the question is what is the relation and, you know, similarities and differences like between the East African experience, the culture, the literature and the West African experience, linking also of course the East African like we have tea and the East African experience with Indian Ocean on the one hand, and the West African experience with Atlantic Ocean on the other end. It's a very good question. I know that any other questions and we can group them together a little bit. If anybody, if you anybody wants from the panel wants to chip chip in on that question. There's online questions as well. Yes. They're all asking to come from masters in translation. I thought that you want one question that I saw with the creative writer, I but still far from your country. Is there any. Is there any way I think it's done. Is there any way, writing about East Africa, but living here. Do you, in your words, is there any way that you feel like you know it. And it's a question about roots and how you see in the in your mind as I am. Is there much more questions from the chat we should take. Yes, so we'll take this one but then there's one for somebody wants to know where they can buy the books. So there will be available on Amazon through a ABC the Africa Book Collective, and they will be eight pound or $9. How much the pound is going down. Here's the question actually as a creative writer of Arab or Tanzania ancestry was believing in the UK for a long time. Have you ever had a sense of being nowhere everywhere. But you are nowhere everywhere. Yes, I can relax. Maybe shall we take that for the up there as I can you. It's all literally, literally, questions. And actually also, also, you're very welcome if you if you have thoughts on the East Africa West Africa link that would be kind as well. I'm not nowhere anywhere or whatever. I know exactly where I am. I also know exactly where I'm from. And these things are not as divisive or destructive as you imagine. So I'm from Zanzibar. And I live in the United Kingdom and worked here. Other people, you know, have lived and work elsewhere but they're still all from Zanzibar in the same way as, you know, you don't leave a place, a place is in your mind in your imagination. And if you live somewhere else, you don't stop being whatever is going on in your head. So as that's concerned, it's not a problem. No, is it a problem to remember? Because that's what writers do. They remember they keep digging and digging and digging when other people have stopped digging, they're still digging. And so what you know and what you have experienced and what you keep experiencing is what actually provides the energy and the impulse for for the writing. And that I'm afraid doesn't stop. Sometimes you wish it would, but it doesn't. The East Africa, West Africa question is really, it seems to me impossible to answer partly because it's already. I think using categories which are very imprecise as I said, what does it mean to say East Africa. And the West Africa, how can we when we're starting with something already as imprecise then say we're going to prepare one imprecision with another imprecision. What are we likely to come up with another imprecision. So I think I'd rather not. I think so. I think we had to we had to busy program busy morning. It's time for tea break we have 20 minutes still. Yes, and then we reconvene at 10 to 10 to 12 I think for the next session. Good to have 20 minutes to pick which is outside in the fire. Thank you very much everybody's a great, great morning. Thanks for participants and everybody. We'll start with our next session. I'll be handing over to Jay Rubin who's the only presenter who's here in person. The other ones will come online. So yeah, Jay, over to you. Thank you all for this for this opportunity which which really does feel like a, like a very special literary and linguistic and intellectual opportunity so in particular, I'd like to thank two people who I think will be coming in shortly. And I'll just, I'll thank them at the end. I'd like to thank you for really encouraging me to be here. This is my paper on Abdul Razak Gherna from the translator's perspective. What does a sense of swahiliness sound like in English. See was it was a monkey foopie, but it's a matter that's been very much on my mind. For the past year and a half, I've been translating the novel Rosamistica by the late you phrase casual hobby. I'm bringing roses tail into another language is a foggy crossing with few navigational markers, only a small number of contemporary swahili novels have been translated into English. Last fall, as I was waiting deeper into my project, I was also reading all the novels by Abdul Razak Gherna, I could get my hands on in the post Nobel rush. I started off with paradise was delighted to find woven into Gernes prose delectable nuggets of untranslated swahili mungwana. In gravel heart, I began to notice how swahili plays a role in plot development. Take the superbly named Mr. Mgani, a man from Malindi who runs a London boarding house for transplanted African students. Upon their meeting, Mr. Mgani confides to the narrator Salim that he suspects he is swahili ones own fellow swahili person, but neither character explains what the word Mgani suggests. Translated as guest, it feels warm and avuncular and foreshadows the surrogate family figure that Mr. Mgani becomes. Translated as stranger, it signals alienation. I wasn't sure whether Mr. Mgani was Gernes way of indicating that Salim would become more settled in his adopted England, or just the opposite. But I appreciated the Zawadi, the gift for that small portion of Gernes audience who, like Salim and Mr. Mgani speak swahili. In the last gift, I found the use of swahili even more central to plot. The story snaps into rich but painstaking action after a character named a boss suffers a stroke. As he returns to cognition, then language, he utters a word that signals to his wife, Mariam, that he is on the verge of sharing aspects of his past he has long kept hidden. The word becomes a waypost on a boss's road to recovery, despite the fact that no one in a boss's family knows what it means. Later in the novel, a boss's son Jamal discovers through research what the swahili speaker has known all along. Mfenesini means place of the jackfruit tree. I'd like to think that the phonetic pleasure, the breeze that can be felt beneath the tree's branches is available to anyone who encounters the word Mfenesini. But Mfenesini is out to a real place in Zanzibar. Did Gernes think of Mfenesini in concrete terms, or did he ponder the word animal logic? Did he ever drift between the two, pausing at hybrid forms? Jack Fruitville, Finesi town. In my bilingual reader's mind, Mr. Mgani and Mfenesini formed a nexus and I began to ask myself if Gernes was both performing and obscuring a kind of translation. I couldn't shake the notion that he was translating ideas that existed for him in non-lingual swahili spaces into a lingual English. I imagine him drawing linguistic water from a swahili well, even if it was a private silent one. If Gernes is doing a kind of translation, potential parallels exist between how his novels are crafted and how to approach literary translation. Might Gernes be the quintessential example of how to convey a sense of swahiliness in English? The more I read, the more it became attached to the possibility that this was the case. When Gernes uses swahili words in his novels, they conduct themselves visually just like their anglophone neighbors. He almost never italicizes swahili and never uses glossaries or footnotes. Usually, he gives contextual clues as to a word's meaning, as in this sentence from Paradise. His right shoulder had not healed properly, despite having to be set by a famous Mganga. Sometimes the same word appears across different novels, as in this sentence from Gernes' most recent offering, After Lives. After the third miscarriage in three years, she was persuaded by neighbors to consult an herbalist, an Mganga. Does an herbalist reset a shoulder? No, but an Mganga does. By employing the same word in different situations, Gernes draws out the word's meaning, which is one that doesn't correspond to English in a one-to-one way. Instead of defining swahili words, Gernes often performs a kind of slant translation, a blurring or smudging of associations that reveals additional meanings. When a menacing older character says Kijana Mazuri to the protagonist Yusuf in Paradise, it's followed by Beautiful Boy. A more exact translation of Kijana is Young Person. The word is non-gendered and elastic, encompassing both adolescents and youthful adults. In transforming Kijana to boy, Gernes achieves a pleasing alliteration and also emphasizes the age difference between Yusuf and his overseer. Beautiful Boy suggests danger and taboo in a way Beautiful Young Person doesn't. Gernes' first novel, Memory of Departure, makes clear that this interplay between languages has been with him since the beginning of his literary project. The first literal departure of protagonist Hasan takes the form of a train ride to Nairobi. His travelmate with whom he shares a sleeping compartment is a confident young man named Moses Mwini. At first, Hasan is too anxious to speak in anything other than head nods or single word answers. Moses Mwini eventually charms him into conversation. What are you called, man? He asked, finally, gently. The phrasing of the question is a curious translation of what Moses Mwini likely would have said in swahili. A morpheme for morpheme translation of that, adjusted for English syntax, would be who are you called? By blending who are you called with what's your name, Gernes arrives at Moses' question. The near familiarity and at the same time newness of what are you called, man, creates a linguistic space in which English language sensibilities and swahili language sensibilities start to blend. Tellingly, the carving out of such a territory doesn't come in an arbitrary moment. The curious phrasing feels tied to Hasan's reluctance to speak. That moment of awkwardness before he and Moses Mwini break through to greater warmth. Memory of departure also contains memorable culinary moments that are imbued with swahiliness. When Hasan inquires about some unappealing meat that he's brought home, his mother responds proverbially. If you buy cheap meat, you can always smell the saving that you've made. When Hasan thinks back to a school trip to a seaside town in Zanzibar, he recalls, 10 delicious days of half-cooked fish and soggy pancakes. In my American mind, pancakes suggest fluffy flapjacks topped with sweet maple syrup. By opting for pancakes over chapati, Gernes gives the reader an opportunity to expand their own associations. Across his novels, Gernes combines colloquial English, literary English, and swahilified English, resulting in a reading experience whose complexity is masked only because it's so pleasurable. Is this not precisely what a translator from Swahili into English would aspire to be doing? As an emerging translator, it seemed to me an exciting prospect to have as my guiding light an author whose books charted a clear course. But what about that other side, that more political side of Gernes? Was there not something deeply suspicious, something paranoid about my theory that Gernes was performing a kind of hidden translation from his real language? Had I ever stopped to consider Conrad's use of English? Had I ever stopped to wonder whether Conrad was actually secretly translating from Polish? Hapana. If I was going to be at all honest, I had to admit an unconscious bias on my part. Granted, my own Ubaguzi wasn't the most overt kind. It was that more hidden but no less harmful variety that Gernes' characters encounter again and again when he finally gets them to Europe. My theory was either in need of abandonment or radical revision. Tired of speculating over whether it could be salvaged, I turned to where I should have looked in the beginning. Gernes himself. In a 2004 essay in Wassafiri called Writing in Place, Gernes discusses the youthful compositions he undertook as an adolescent in Zanzibar. His early writings were, in his own words, playful and serious tasks. He points out that the contemporary Swahili writing he was aware of at the time was all intended for popular consumption. Those authors of newspaper poems and stories written for radio didn't lack talent, but they had day jobs in a newly independent nation that demanded much of its citizens. He takes pains to not create any perception that Swahili is literally impoverished. But for all his carefulness never to diminish Swahili, Gernes is characteristically coy about the language of his earliest efforts. One has to look elsewhere and cobble together various accounts. On an episode of the London Review Bookshop podcast, Gernes reveals that as a student in Zanzibar, he wrote in both Swahili and English. It was in the English class that I would find this pleasure of writing, he notes, which is peculiar because he also notes that back then I didn't speak English really. But as early as age eight or nine, he attests, when somebody asked me to write in English, I could. In the Wassafiri essay, when Gernes says that he first began writing around age 21, he's talking about writing because he felt compelled to. Given how explicit he is about the connection between reading and writing, it's safe to assume he means writing in English. In England, he relates, English gradually started to feel to him like a spacious and roomy house accommodating writing and knowledge with heedless hospitality. If English was an airy house with Swahili, like many of the dwelling spaces Gernes depicts in his novels, a cramped quarters with stagnant air, dim lights and mold blooms climbing the walls. What he has to say on the LRB podcast suggests not. Asked at what point reading and stories became significant in his life, he mentions Alphalela Ulela, which would have been translated into Swahili right away. He clarifies that the Arabian night stories were not only read in his youth, versions of them, along with other stories were transmitted orally, often by people who weren't literate. In interview after interview, Gernes opts for a firm but neutral explanation for why he doesn't write in Swahili. Asked by a BBC correspondent, if authors are tempted to write in English in order to gain wider recognition, Gernes demurs. Relationships to languages are not something one decides and declares, announcing, I'm going to be a sprinter, does not enable one to run. Gernes uses a variation of the track and field metaphor on the LRB podcast. You can't ask a sprinter, have you ever thought of doing high jump? You can rather, but people usually don't. Gernes strongly implied suggestion is that it's no different with literary languages. The people who write in Swahili are the people who have that particular talent in that language, he explains in the BBC interview. Those that write in English presumably have that talent there too. He goes on ever polite but as if he's been here before. There's nothing troublesome it seems to me to have people making these kinds of decisions. The languages are available to them, why not? My experience, he elaborates, is I didn't start writing in Ki Swahili and I didn't even think about what language I was writing. In other words, it was never comparing English in Swahili. Asked directly about his experience of growing up with multiple languages, he answers without hesitation. I didn't have a consciousness of choice. All this deeply considered even handedness suggests Gernes never felt any glee or liberation about leaving Swahili behind. In fact, he never did leave Swahili behind. It's the language of his relationships with family and friends in Tanzania. Until last year, he served on the board of the Mabati Cornell, now softball Cornell prize for new manuscripts written in Swahili. Half a century after he arrived in England, he still reads for pleasure in Swahili and admires the people who can do it. Might he regret that he's not one of those people? That's how it happened, Gernes admits, with some resignation detectable in his voice but with no hint of Majuto. Besides, it's not as if Gernes can't write at all in Swahili. He writes utilitarian things but his Swahili, in his own words, doesn't produce poetry. Ask him if he's ever been tempted to write Swahili literature and he's liable to start speaking of shot putters and steeple chasers. It's not surprising that Gernes keeps an analogy handy to respond to these interrogations, especially when all that's needed to understand his deep engagement with an unshakable commitment to Swahili is a glimpse at his novels. I was ready to retire my theory when, in a moment of serendipitous timing, my thesis advisor at Queens College, Amory Drury, sent me a link to another interview. This one was with the German broadcasting network Deutsche Well and it was conducted in Swahili. Pressed about his relationship to Swahili in Swahili, Gernes responds with surprising answers. Translated, one key question corresponds to, why do you address your recurring subjects in English and not in Swahili? The follow-up is less a question than a comment. Because so many of your books discuss the loneliness and isolation of leaving Zanzibar and arriving somewhere foreign, perhaps you would use the Swahili language as part of your culture. The push in Poland Swahili inspire and garner different reactions and similar questions posed in English. He doesn't become angry or appear uncomfortable. If anything, he comes off as more charming and more humorous because he's more animated. But ironically for a language in which speakers are more likely to invoke the whimsies of God over human decisions, Gernes answers in Swahili emphasize individual will. About why his books are in English, he says, it's what I chose. English is a language I know and a language I read it. Also, I can choose which language I write it. I chose to write in English. If another person wants to write in Swahili, fine. You want to write in German? Write in German. Really? He chose? What about Gernes other explanations? The people who write in a particular language are the people who have a particular talent in that language. Does one choose talent? Ask the sprinter or the high jumper and I think they'll tell you otherwise. Why does Gernes sound so different here than he does in the patient English language interviews? How has choice moved to the center of the story? It may be the case that Gernes feels he's being hectic. Add to that the slightly more pugilistic conversational style of Swahili and the barely submerged suggestion of missed opportunities and Gernes suddenly declaring total agency. To the rhetorical question about if you could have written about East Africa and the language of East Africa, Gernes responds, perhaps, but I didn't do that. As for writing about colonialism, immigration and displacement, he notes that these subjects aren't exclusive to Tanzanian stories. Many people the world over migrate and counter misery, he says. The person I'm writing for is any person who was able to read my books, whether they come from Tanzania or Argentina. The translator's task, or perhaps just a literary one, is to consider the ground from which seeming contradictions spring. I wonder if what translator and theorist Matthew Reynolds has termed present. I wonder if what translator and theorist Matthew Reynolds has termed prismatic translation and as described as a release of multiple signifying possibilities might provide a glimpse between the lines of Gernes various accounts, not to put words in the mouth of a recent Nobel laureate, but to use the statements as raw materials for constructing a vessel capable of carrying a diverse array of sentiments. I'd like to close by sharing a paragraph that I came up with using some of Abdel Razak's words as a point of departure for my own. I chose it. Okay, I didn't simply choose it. Writing in English came out of what I was reading at the time and what I had an initial talent for. Did I choose English over Swahili? Not any more than a person chooses to prefer the taste of fish over the taste of mutton. So don't suggest I'm somehow writing in English at the expense of another literary career that was never meant to be. If you do, I'm going to push back. What I'm really saying, if you must know, is that a person has the right to choose. A person can write in whatever languages are available to them. English is where I arrived at and a person is at liberty to arrive where they arrive, whether it's via a path of wandering or via a set of lamentable historical circumstances. A person has the right to make a home in another country, especially out of a language that is not even new to them. That's how it happened. Asante Sana. Thank you all for this opportunity. Fantastic. Thank you very much, Jay. So the format of this will have all of our talks first and then we'll have some time for questions and answers at the end. So if you have a question already for Jay, knock it down, put it on a piece of paper, don't forget it. We'll have time for discussion afterwards. So our next presenter is online. So we have Clarissa Birka from BioWrite. Yes, just a second. I think I have to share my screen as well. Can you give me the permission to share? Yes, we'll just try and do that. Do you want to try it now? Does it work? Let me see. Let me see. Yeah, I think it seems to be working. Looks good. Okay, can you see what I see? Can you see my screen? Yes, I think we can see her soon. So yeah, we'll hand over to you, Clarissa. 15 minutes please. Yes, thank you. Well, thank you so much and thanks again for having me and Ida and Angelica. Thank you for organizing such a wonderful Baraza again. I must start with an apology. So I'm not going to talk about Mahmoud Maou and I'm not going to talk to take you to Kenya. I'm not going to talk about Kenya next time, but now I'm going to stay on Zanzibar with you simply because these are some very fresh, probably premature, premature at least comments on some kind of poetic experiences. Let's say that I had just in September, so very, very recent. But let me give you a bit of the background to that. Hi, my colleagues, Ute Fendler, Micho Kote and Duncan Tarrant, we've been running a project on literary entanglements in the Indian Ocean. And my colleagues, they bring in their competencies in Francophone and Lusophone Africa and Duncan Tarrant and me, we've been working on Swahili poetry also with some kind of links to Oman. And we wonder, so do all these literatures have some common imaginaries of the Indian Ocean, which imaginaries travel and which also do not travel. Wow, there has been very little research on the interrelationship between English, French or Portuguese literature in the Indian Ocean. And let alone then, of course, then the non-European languages. So there have been recently quite some critical comments on that, both by historians who say that there is an overdominance of European language archives. I mean, like Nile Green was actually arguing for a reconfiguration of Indian Ocean studies around its own sources and languages. So we have three studies, Evans Mwangi and Tina Steiner. Also, we're talking about a super canon of Indian Ocean literature that exists and that's mostly the novel in English. So we are trying to kind of work across languages and also bringing in other languages from the Indian Ocean in this project. And don't get me wrong, I'm not saying that we should give up the novel, I'm just saying we should broaden the spectrum and we should also not give up the English novel, of course. So, but back to Zanzibar. So Duncan and me, we've been working very much on contemporary popular poetry on Zanzibar. You see some snapshots here and for many people, this is very much an everyday practice. They do not even keep track of what they are writing. It's very much written by the common man and by the common woman as you want and as the right kind of small little photo shows you. It's also very much recorded and played actually on the radio and discussed a lot on the radio. And it's very much about everyday events. So we've been talking to lots of different people, interviewing them about their poetry. First of all, not even asking them about the Indian Ocean, but simply why do you compose, what do you compose, why is poetry so important to you. And as it turned out for many of them, this is something we did in 2019 already, the Indian Ocean didn't really matter much. So I asked Farooq Topan, should we probably thinking, should we probably think about forgetting the Indian Ocean? And we had a very lively conversation about that, but that's more, that's more a joke to it. People, however, they take actually enormous pleasure, as you might all know, and actually all kind of heart-hitting verbal duels carried out on the radio on the newspaper. Lots of mafumbo, for instance, the guy on the upper right hand side, wearing the kofi, so he just parasite the bad bug or the mosquito and then people were discussing if this is political reference or it actually refers to a love relationship. And I think Natalie Arnold Koenig's framed this beautifully by actually saying how there is a constant interrelationship between the private and the public in this kind of poetry. But what did this kind of finding, first of all, due to us that there is no ocean, no Indian Ocean in that poetry. First of all, it made me very skeptical about Indian Ocean, kind of our emphasis on transnational relations and cosmopolitanism, probably also very much born out of our self-referential. There's an absence of the Indian Ocean we noticed earlier on in lots of poetry, and then what we did this year is actually organizing a poetry workshop together with the State University of Zanzibar, actually inviting people to compose on the Indian Ocean and seeing what comes out of that, actually with the idea of publishing a book. A lot of the poetry and I'm just going to give you a kind of also with an idea probably we get some other categories of looking at the Indian Ocean from there. There is a lot of Indian Ocean poetry that we found where the Indian Ocean turns actually into the Ujumiwa blue, which I found quite curious we didn't have that in 2019. But now so to say it seems to be, it seems to be all over here this is a poem by Raya Mohammed Said she is a secondary school student actually from Pemba. And it's a quite typical kind of kind of poem, this kind of faida ya kind of style of poetry in praise of mostly progress which one can also could tie into an idea of writing poetry, thinking about the progress of the nation. On one hand, one can also see so to say some continuities of how to write poetry so I'm at the same time there was lots of poetry fighters sensor about people. Or faida ya chanju about so to say the benefits of the vaccination here is about Ujumiwa blue, which is a kind of a policy which was very much promoted by Zanzibar's president Hussein Winnie in 2020 already and in 2022 there has been I mean, so far they have spent 70 million US dollars on actually developing the archipelago blue economy the Ujumiwa blue, mostly actually investing into industrial fishing and that also feeds back into the school curriculum because we found many actually schools, actually talking about the blue economy now and we which we find here reflected in the poetry. So, here, so to say looking at at her poetry in particular so I am Mohammed say it's a way I'm kind of wondering. So how do we also include critically these notions of the Indian Ocean as a blue in blue economy into our discussions of literature which are terribly romanticist often as it seems to me. So how do we bring in what the Kenyan author even at the end of the war called the cacophonies of the Indian Ocean present. How do we bring in, in a sense, the capitalist view on on the Indian Ocean, and do we also not contribute with our kind of views in a way sugarcoating also these other aspects of the Indian Ocean as a geopolitical space as a very economically debated kind of space I was this time in September I went to a tarot concert at the emerson spice hotel very expensive hotel, and I really saw also how the tourism industry explores the Indian Ocean as a kind of Orientalist show, which made me also very much reflect on, and this of course also then feeds back into local discourses I could show you many much more poetry on tourism. How do we take this loops also critically into account with which with the whole cultural industry in there. I'm going to do a bit of a different poetry that's had him I come and had he used to be a school teacher on Pember and here we find the kind of the lyrical idea observer standing on the beach seeing container ships passing by and actually there is not much of an idea of that that you could see in this over rupture compared to the past so previously there were dolls now there are container ships, and the Baharimuru brings them all so it's an elegant ocean probably also a good ocean there is an aspect of morality in there as well. The observer is striking about this poetry as well as in others it's the ocean which brings all of this and the observer is quite and then writes from an inert kind of position. So it's it's kind of being acted upon rather than acting in this context. In a poem by Ali Moanim Ali he used to be a university lecturer also teaching about poetry, who talks about the winds and the winds with, I mean which brought the Arabs and the Omanis and the Suranamese people coming from the east and it's like the human being just being a relative category actually in these forces which are much more which are very physical forces as well. There are historical agents in the Indian Ocean, not the human beings they are just being brought by the winds. The force of the sea and I think that comes out also in some poetry which I really liked a lot by Abdullah Ali Abdullah he is a student he's just taking a BA in education but he has also worked a lot on daus. So you can also see from Shambali so palisi, which you can also see each stanza that's an across the show so the stanza starts start with the letters and the letters together form the word Bahari. So we could see some palimpsest here which would could explode further. But what I find really interesting here is, there is the idea that you really can't domesticate the ocean it's not a field, which needs weeding, it remains largely as you see in this Nekma or Riddle, it's deep and traveling on it is kind of a very lonely trip can also come with lots of calamities. In the next stanza, it says so there is brightness and color in it, but it also wounds us terribly and wears off our skin. So, and another in another poem he wrote Hamkani which probably one could translate as fear or anxiety or probably even terror. It's a huge fear. There is this invincible kind of ocean the brutal force of the ocean which comes in even even more profoundly. At the beginning we hear actually the captain shouting get control of the sail if you want and then the crew is there's a huge chaos breaking on breaking out on the dowel. As to see actually heaps up and and this at the end of the poem actually I have to preempt that already the ship is going to sink so it's a very so to say dramatic kind of poem there is no beauty there is just the brutal force of the ocean in here. In the late of the last stanzas you have done the reference actually to to judgment day and the and the ocean. The ocean is boiling, which reminded me in many ways also of there is a there are many stanzas in earlier poetry, which I've worked on much more than the popular contemporary one where, for instance, in the inky Shafi you have a lion only when go by a Tessie so the world is a temp is a tempester see the wild sea, which then here becomes also a metaphor of the deplorable nature of of human life. And one could wonder so to say if Ali Abdullah Ali also plays with this kind of trope which I've called elsewhere a kind of a cultural figuration so it's an imagery that has become part of a of a Swahili archive, which of course interacts with people's experiences. I could give you another example, I just want to say beautiful example but in fact it's a it's a terrible example of which is of a poem which is called Ginamisi by one I'm she go, who actually in his poem reflects upon the terrible ship which happened roughly 10 years ago of the MS buys a ship which sank between Pemba and and where 3000 people died in in one night, where in a sense this this this thinking of the ship is again so to say being kind of kind of re explored So what I'm what I'm basically in a sense, I'm trying to say which is this is now has been a very rough right through this poetry, there's there's a lot more to say about that. What I'm what I'm trying to say here's in a sense that we I'm looking at this poetry on the one hand with the idea of editing and of course also providing better translations but also which kind of notions of the Indian Ocean do we get out of here. I find very striking is as I said this concrete physical reality of the ocean one could even say it's a kind of questioning the Anthropocene the centrality of the human being. And the human being has been so prominent in Indian Ocean research thinking about how we focus, we've been focusing on trade relations how the ocean is often also in lots of literature even absent. It's it's really about the cosmopolitan links of people. So, coupon in a recent article actually argued for the concrete material aspect of Indian Ocean objects. Because she says there are the sensuous materialities which cannot be paraphrased and, and I think one also needs needs to think more about the ocean this has been done already but I think there is more work to do about the ocean which leads us as human beings as the poem wonderfully says in some parts budget which is on the one hand then also really a very physical experience for many and a constant experience but then of course it also becomes formulated in relation to a long existing cultural archive like the Inki Shafi, but also then recently coined tropes so this is not at the cultural archive is dynamic so the Uchumiwa blue is in a sense the new trope or some new kind of narrative devices here which come in. So I'm very much interested in the lift realities of people in relation to the ways the Indian Ocean has been talked about, and is being talked about either in poetry or also in these political tropes, and I think I'll, I'll stop here. Sorry for the disruption. Thank you very much Clarissa and thanks for rejoining us those extensive applause in the room as well so hopefully you can hear that. So again if you have questions, make a note of them, if you're online you can perhaps even put the question in the chat but we'll take questions together after our final speaker. So I think next we have Francisco from Mainz. Yes. Hi. Great. Thank you. Thank you very much. I lived in London, while I was writing my PhD in anthropology at SOAS I kept a crumpled printout of one of the Zanzibar born artist Lubena he needs paintings on the walls of my London homes. I do not remember how I came to own it. Five, a painting of two black women in debate and negotiation at the table had kept me on my academic toes. I remember a lot of positionality, representation and diversity in a parent union, while I was researching and writing about children's lives and their experiences of protection and violence in Zanzibar. Now almost exactly a year ago at her largest solo exhibition to date at the Tate Modern in London, which ended at the beginning of this month. I had not seen Professor Himead's works in real life. So looking through her show then again an internal dialogue was said in motion over matters I've more recently been thinking about, including varying ideas of the Indian Ocean, or the Afrabian the Swahili or otherwise see how we as academics with the words of Ivana the story, the ocean, how we are giving voice to these seas of the networks and the practices, the diasporas and languages that constitute those realms and the role that women play amid this imaginary. So over the next 12 minutes or so I want to take as point of departure some of the meets paintings that stayed with me in thinking about these themes. I also propose that this can help to sketch out a range of questions that may be worthwhile if not necessary in contemporary reflections on the networks that span the Indian Ocean in anthropology and across the disciplines in which we theorize the subjects of Swahili studies. So my presentation is an attempt at a very condensed summary of a paper that Cleversa knows about which is a work in progress, and in which I argue that by thinking about the ocean with counter archives of contemporary feminist engagement with the sea like one of the people who as Julia van puts it nicely carry the ocean with them, we may become able to better understand the sea intersectionally. I'll be most grateful for your feedback and suggestions in taking this argument with them. This is a technical context that frames my ideas are growing expressions for the need to think about the Indian Ocean through a decolonial multi vocal, effective and intersectional lens, as expressed, for example, recently by Smith's universe between the Indian Ocean and Neelima J. Chandran in reimagining Indian Ocean worlds, or elsewhere by Marcus and Julia Verna for example who argue for thinking about the Indian Ocean worlds as a space as they write characterised by and constituted through translocal aesthetic practices and by taking into account the aesthetic experiences of those we try to understand. So back to the book in it Schrinos and Gwenoa and J. Chandran set out to look for new units of analysis or keywords to shed light on this dynamic oceanic space, and to push for an epistemic shift in thinking and writing about Indian Ocean worlds. The office attempt this by emphasising the importance of analysing lives beyond the historical that is with a specific focus on the contemporary and the contemporaneous. So in the book, they articulate the need to counter to centre conceptual and theoretical relationality over area based geographical approaches, privileging place making and quotidian practices over mobilities to think with new networks of memory and maps, alongside older histories of connections and to rely more on ethnographic and humanistic methodologies that examine memorialisation in contemporary contexts over historical archives and textual sources. Now this call for reorientation in the study of what we commonly refer to as the Indian Ocean can also be understood and here as formulated by the feminist futures in the Indian Ocean cluster at UC Santa Cruz, as a reaction to the lack of explicitly feminist scholarship in Indian Ocean studies that moves beyond prioritising the male gaze in the study of the sea. Now by taking this push for an epistemic shift in thinking and writing about Indian Ocean world seriously I propose as one way of thinking through this lack of female or relational relationally gendered framings of the ocean that we turn more frequently to contemporary art here in the Bainahimid paintings of women and water. Her and other artistic practice may contribute to the search for new units of analysis or keywords in writing oceanic worlds, as they speak to us as aesthetic and political productions in their own rights, as a neglected body of knowledge that scholarly discourses include, and ultimately, as an alternative navigation chart for a potential reconfiguration of Indian Ocean studies or Swahili studies of the sea. In Himmits works, oceans and water are everywhere, but not in the way historical narratives have often viewed the sea scenarios through the lens of the masculine and by neglecting what Nidhi Mahajan in her article Seasons of the Sea tells the women who stay or who do not move with seafaring men. Instead of sailors gliding dows or scenes of arrival and departure and oceanic trading ports. He made offers us large scale paintings that depict women characters in situations with the sea. On no maps from 1992 we find ourselves in a theater box alongside two black female protagonists who gaze over what appears to be an empty stage past a red curtain that half covers the turquoise in black blue background. Looking again we may also see these two women aboard and at the front of a vessel with a red sail observing despite in different directions, the waves of a stormy sea. The two acts of seeing what he meets presents us with are a strategy she operates with through her art that leave the audience guessing unsettled in regards to what it is we're looking at. Act one, as possible beginning or a turning point a reconsideration of what it may mean to think with no maps that fall as ripped up paper from the two women's hands. There are two active and reconfiguring subjects that refuse the maps of their worlds and the knowledge of their histories they have been presented with, maybe as Bernie has put it, ideally placed to generate alternative memoirs and a new narrative of black diasporic lives. In between the two my heart is balanced from a year earlier from 1991 a painting from the same series titled revenge, several aspects encountered in act one no maps echo. In other words, this painting was an attempt to show, as she states that we all have subtly different strategies from each other. We appear to be doing the same thing, but are not. The women are the woman on the left in the painting is taking navigation charts from a pile that separates them, the two women, then rip these up, discarding the fragments. The other woman is ripping up maps and engaging with the rower of the boat, the audience and quote. The individualized subjects, or what she herself calls the device of placing to black women in a painting together is devoted to as she emphasizes counteract this assumption that there was only one story, and that the black woman never spoke. This is the Zanzibar series of nine double paintings from the late 1990s, of which, for example, in women's tears fill the ocean from 1999, the visible women protagonists of her work shift shape and appear through the effective aspects ascribed to them as their tears here. In referencing her father's sudden passing when she was a baby which prompted her relocation to the UK. He made explains that the thinly applied pain sometimes green sometimes pink or gray drips splashes and falls endlessly in monochrome tears in painting after painting and helped her to as she states, and the consistent themes of melancholy, fear of flight and unresolved unbelonging present in most of her works. He means concerned with the sea she explains further stems from many things among them her personal history, as well as as she states the reading of narratives about and by people taken forcibly from West Coast Africa to be later used as slaves and quote. In referencing her gaze on the elsewhere though, however, she qualifies this interest, referring to her own comorian grandmother's history of of being taken to Zanzibar, having been bought from her parents by a Portuguese woman and wonders that she must have traveled in a dow in around 1900 from one of the comorian islands to Zanzibar. With the notions of fear and unbelonging central here. The Zanzibar series that reflects him needs fear of and obsession with the sea shines a light on that part of female ocean journeys, both personal and political, voluntary and not so that former critical current to understandings of the sea beyond male memories of trade and torment and extending to places away from the more thoroughly documented women histories being central here that allows us to shift to effective dimensions embodied through caused by and related to the Indian Ocean to what the sea does to people physically and psychologically, or to what it comes to stand for. Finally there's him needs more recent body of works from 2019 that includes three architects and the operating table, and after centering women and the audience at sea, and the sea as embodied by women through the 1990s in these works now we re encounter both themes and yet the sea now has become less central, it is either lurking in, sometimes haunting the protagonists at the center of the paintings are now the actions and operations performed by the subject at stake. What he needs women do against the backdrop of the sea or despite of it is now emphasized as the three architects are working on their own visions while sharing a space re invokes the theme of multiple quality, but one ocean stretches across their view of the horizon and the floor appears as a changing shore. And reset that who puts it the protagonists are radiating the confidence and purpose to build a new world together this world potentially belonging to the one we associate with the Indian Ocean. The operating table offers yet another angle to these themes, the audience now taking a seat at the table with again a constellation of different women who unlike the three architects interact more obviously get hesitantly with other with each other, certainly echoing with deep in discussion and potential disagreement over a map that includes a body of water developing what value has aptly termed an embodied governance of land, and possibly as I would like to add also of the sea. The embodied governance of spaces land and see ocean and shore that involves that evolves from women in collaboration and conversation makes it possible to think with but farther than acts of refusal, such as the tearing apart of maps and toward generative practice and constructive change that is already taking place. While recalling Trinivas adults call to think afresh with the Indian Ocean and if as him eat states painting is indeed about filling in the gaps in something, her contemporary practice may well fill or guide this call to thinking the ocean otherwise extending to include diasporic or post diasporic artistic negotiations of the sea and grounding it in the present contemporary moment, and it's associated practices such as him eat political painting may move the field into the present moment and out of older archives. Well and theoretical relationality if he meets practice that foregrounds themes entangled in aesthetics and affect, such as women and water pleasure and discomfort dialogue and collaboration disagreement and refusal multiplicity reconfiguration loss in memory trauma and the body, move the imaginary of the oceanic out of the realm of external or area based descriptions and toward image perspectives of what the worlds can be. So focus on women's everyday practices in the places they are in. Let's us think with the Indian Ocean is thoroughly rooted also in the present moment and not only a long for futures or places that could be achieved by way of mobility. It means protagonist refusal to operate with external colonial navigation charts and maps, they're ripping apart and getting rid of points to the generative potential inherent and refusing certain frames of thought that pertain also to our disciplines. A call for thinking with new networks of memory maps against the backdrop of older histories and connections resonating or was reflecting on Swahili navigational poetry that you correlate your places using the memory of maps that are instilled in you is housed and he needs works. Finally, if oceans challenge and change feminist research, the sites and forms of knowledge production and not to mention the ground beneath your feet. Anna Hithkert, Eringadalov and Joanna horror arguing the introduction to their recent special issue of the feminist review on oceans and the gendered aesthetic embodied and effective relations at the heart of him needs practice that delineate what the authors call the forgotten erased and inaudible voices that otherwise fall out of the visible spaces of the vast volatile histories of seafaring journeys may also change the knowledge produced on the Indian Ocean. Having such alternate effective histories or what Mina Alexander has aptly called nervous knowledge may help orient Indian Ocean knowledge production to move towards thinking with that which is as Alexander also puts it, not static in the way that an old fashioned map is something that has to be rekindled time and again. With her art that is quote about encouraging agency through our ability to inhabit paintings to engage with them, not as voyeurs, but participants. And as the political strategist who uses a visual language to encourage conversation argument and change that he meets self describes as her contemporary practice is a promising guide towards a genuinely endless ocean. Thank you very much. Thank you so much for that. So our next presenter is here in person. Okay, great. Fantastic. So welcome. Sure. Thank you. How about is I know. So thank you so much for this opportunity so my presentation is also here with feminist publishing networks, investigating in the vision publishing editorial and marketing strategies for you. So this is the, there is it is investigating the editorial and marketing strategies through which there is some based feminist publisher in the publishing has produced the biography of people will amazure her, which was the only woman who was published at the front line during the Zanzibar revolution in 1964. And so it accounts for her life. And it's written by Zohra Yunus, a former BBC journalist. And this publication is not only written by a woman about a woman but also is published by woman and co edited by a woman. And coming up with this research is a product of my own ongoing PhD project, and it involves some interviews with some of the people who are involved in this publication, including Zohra Yunus was the author and then Alicia Lema the publisher, the American Tunga is also part of the publishing team and then say the year here was the editor and close reading of the text itself. So the over amazure and analysis of the social media content. So, yeah, so that's the front cover of the book. And so, so it's getting back to the research. It involves research has been done on the development of print culture and publishing in eastern Africa. And it has highlighted the shifting role of women in the industry and the relation to the wider economic dynamics. There are a lot of research that have been done on that. And then one of the important scholar work that I'm involved with is women in eastern Africa, which was written by Amanda and other and then this documents the role of women writers in building feminist consciousness through written text. However, little attention has been paid on the role of women in the Tanzanian publishing industry through knowledge, which is being produced and that's this paper investigates the role of women in the publishing industry through the work of END in enabling this literal production and this circulation of feminist voices and histories in Tanzania, a publishing space, which is said to be dominated by men. So it's possible important to account for END. And it's important to note that the the company was registered in 1989 as a publishing consulting firm, and it is owned by Elie Shilema and America Tunga. And this publishing house currently END is working its aim is to be operating from a feminist perspective with the aim of bringing more gender balanced view of the social development into literature and publishing. Which is various fiction and fiction books and social on social, political and economic areas, as well as textbooks and children's books in different levels. It should be noted that women have been involved in the writing, even before independence. Yeah, they have been involved even before independence, but however, it's after independence that we are seeing feminist, sorry, publishing houses that are owned or co-owned by women starting to emerge. And it's particularly important to note that END so far is their first feminist owned publishing company and which is operating owned by women that is Elie Shilema and America Tunga and has survived for a long time. So that is very important to first of all account for the histories of these two women and how they get involved with the company. So these are Elie Shilema and America Tunga. And it's important to note that while Elie, she started her publishing career at TPH, and then it's her own work with Cody as a director for East Africa. And then let's her own join America Tunga to establish END. America Tunga's publishing journey started when she joined DUP as an editor. And then let's let's her own. She moved to work with Tanzania Bureau of Standards as a librarian for two years. And let's her own. She worked with other women to form Tanzanian Gender Networking Program, TGNP, where she worked there as a chairperson for some time before establishing the END company together with Elie Shilema. So the, this article is informed by the theoretical framework on African feminism. I'm looking at works by Susan Arndage, Shima Mandango, Ziadice, Obioma, Nemeke, as well as Boussir. And so we, these women are interested on what they think of feminist publishing mostly as what that aimed at liberating women from the patriarchal structures and bringing a more inclusive society where women's voices are valued. So building on this, I just explore END publishing and their role in producing feminist knowledge, aiming at liberating women from all forms of oppression. And so, so the work that I'm working on is Bilwa Amor Zahar. So accounting for this book, it's, this is about a phenomenon woman of Arabian origin who was born in Zanzibar. And Bilwa, her name is Bilwa Amor Zahar and not only talks about her life before independence, it also accounts for her life after independence and the new Zanzibar. So the book aims to narrate the contribution of women in the creation of Zanzibar history during the independent struggle and the contribution that has not previously been documented, as it said in the foreword by Marie Mhamdani. And although it's a historical account for you was like the book also illustrates the lives of other important leaders in Zanzibar and as well as the revolution fighters is written in a narrative form using standard Swahili, which is very rich in vocabaries and sayings. And it makes it easy for somebody to follow and read it and very interesting to read. So, for example, when I interviewed Lema and she was commenting about the main character, the main focus of the book that is Bilwa and how this book was really interesting for her. She said that she thinks of Bilwa as a very free soul, free spirit, who chose what she wanted her life to be and that also very patriot and committed to her country. And in line with that, Zuhura Yunus narrates that Bilwa, in the book, I want to read this quotation, which I think is very important. Bilwa, in the book, I want to read this quotation, which I think is very important. So this is very important because Zuhura is actually making an imperative point here, highlighting on how Bilwa, a woman from the cost, was able to carry out these duties fearlessly. And then this means that she was considered as someone who was different from other women of her generation. She's even when in this book talking about her own experience and how other women were viewing her. So Bilwa saves as an inspiration to the young generation on patriotism and for the readers of the biography of her status and her contribution to her own nation. So during my interview with Zuhura, she informed me that, yeah, that's the publication process now. So during my interview with Zuhura, she informed me that the writing of the biography was the results of an ongoing discussion that she had with her friends through WhatsApp. Complaining why African history was not written by Africans themselves. And then she was like, she decided to be different and take an initiative to write because she felt that if the history of Africans is not written by Africans, then the Zuhura is even worse. And then when thinking of women who are always voiceless, it could have been really interesting to write about them. So she said that she didn't know actually a feminist publishing house that was owned by women and the recommendation to work with END was a result of her discussion with her friend Dr. So when commenting about the editorial process, Zuhura pointed out about the role of her publisher END through Elie Shilema that it was real amazing working with her. And then she talked about her co-editor Saida Yahya-Othman, who was somebody who was very good, thorough and tough. And then she said that although she was a co-editor, she also commented a lot on the content as well. And then she said she also not only worked with women, but she also gave her publication to two reviewers who are men. Ahmi Rajab, who was an experienced editor and a former BBC journalist and a columnist for IEM Wema, who was originally from Zanzibar and who kept checking on facts, but also giving it a different perspective that is a male perspective, and thinking of it from a different angle, but again gave it to Chambiche Chage, who was the second reviewer working in the US, who pointed out on historical aspect and what historians would be interested to learn and what is really important to the American nationals' history. So according to UNUS, while women had their own opinion on what they thought is important, may reviewers provided a different view to the work and that it was really important considering how controversial the subject was. So during the interview with Lema, she said that the book was so much focusing on Zanzibar. And so working with Professor Saeeda Yahya, who was a scholar from Zanzibar, but had a global perspective, was very important because, for example, she questioned, if you had an editor from the mainland, how would you do it? Saeeda does not only know Biuba, but she knows Babu and the history. She was part of the history. Choosing Saeeda was strategic and it was not automatic. So it was a good experience working with her. So this is very important thinking of how this network of friendship and network of professionalism and how different people from different backgrounds were working together to make sure this publication was successful. Another important aspect of this book was how women-to-women relationship was important to its publication. So Lema maintains that when she was working with Yunus, she said that Zuhra is somebody who is inside her work. And I allowed her because it was important. If I blocked her way, it could have done a lot of disservice. So I let her move. She's someone who would give her, she's someone who needs to be given the courage not to worry, just do it, because some of the things she was writing were critical and controversial. So this is important thinking about how it was important for Zuhra to work with another woman supporting what she was writing about, because some of the things that needed this kind of relationship, which was very important to uncover. And then in one of the part where Elie, she was still commenting on how the book came out, she was saying that women's-history about women is always covered. And so if one is going to write and she's going to publish, then they have to work together to uncover what is hidden because women do things courageously and they're suppressed. So Yunus's book discusses a number of critical issues, including Zanzibar revolution, death of the first president of Zanzibar, and then the death of Bill was further. All these things are very critical. And they raised a lot of debates, not only on digital space, but also on the physical space on the role of Bill when what she did. And even the Zanzibar history, and it was written, it brought a lot of memories about this publication. I just add you on the importance of this supportive structure, which was built between these women as writer for the publication. So one other important aspect that I want to discuss is on the question of language. Bouguere said that the use of, yeah, so Bouguere said that the use of the foreign languages hinders the development of indigenous publishing because there is less development in the creation of a literary reading public, which might result from wider publishing in Kisohiri. This affirms a positive reception of Bill was booked because the readers could easily read and understand the text. That accessibility is clearly something prioritized in Zuhara's work. For example, the book makes use of simple constructions, pictorial language, and then people could really associate themselves with what is written. So the use of Kisohiri has been one of the reasons for the books immediate success because there's a wider reading public for books in Kisohiri compared to English as it has been said by other scholars who have been doing works in publishing and writing in East Africa. And so you can see that although the Swahili that is used here somehow resembles Zanzibar Ki Swahili, but the book has been read not only by people from Zanzibar, but a lot of people also from the mainland. And that is really important thinking of the relationship between people in the mainland and those of Zanzibar. So this signifies a revolution in readership, feminism, studies and Swahili literature in Tanzania, arguing for the role of African writers in knowledge circulation through which the use of common language plays a major role. So the development of technology which paved the way to the development of digital publishing was another important factor for the success of this book and making it easy for marketing of the material. So when we talk about digital publishing and we see some of the work scholars who have talked about it, including Jay and Bugoya who talked of the quick access of the material provided through the forum given by the to the readers. The internet also says that the internet is a huge and a rich source of book professions, which serves as a powerful marketing medium, which with relatively medium cost and wider reach promote publication to targeted groups. So it's really important because even when I interviewed the Mary she said that internet and the digital publishing has made it easy for people to access their works throughout the world and using different platforms and using different ways. And so it was important that this work was successful through the use of social media. So now getting back to this publication, where the publishing idea came out of the WhatsApp group is marketing or through digital platforms such as Facebook, WhatsApp, Twitter and Clubhouse. So thinking of success of the book, Eunice explains that the subject matter of the book Zansmer Revolution, the use of Kiswahili and strategic marketing for social media platforms really contributed to its success. And the book was really well marketed two weeks before its launch was already in social media. And a lot of people who commented on that, including Zito Kabe and who is a famous opposition politician in Tanzania. And Taji Liundi, who is a journalist and engineer, and they all talked about how the book was important. And another thing which was really important about how the book was marketed and was the book launch. So the launch which included high profile people from the government. And it was held on one of the expensive hotels in Dar es Salaam and Zanzibar. As you can see the launch in Zanzibar was at Gordon Tulip on the 6th of November. And Sada Mkuya, who was the minister of state in the first president's office was a guest of honor. You can see the picture on top. Sorry, the picture down there. It was during that launch. And even the brother of the former president of Zanzibar and of course the son of the first president of Zanzibar Ali Karume was part of the book launch. In Dar es Salaam, it was launched at U.S. Near International Conversion Center on the 15th of November with Hon Parah Magamba Kaboudi, who was the minister of constitution and legal affairs was a guest of honor. And that was really interesting because you can see both the places were launched in the high profile people who are part of it. But again, it was really interesting to note that not only women and high profile women like Hon Balazi, Manahidi, Getruda and others were part of it. But again, even other men and ordinary people were invited and so the forum and how people were engaged with this book was really interesting. So therefore, the editorial marketing strategies that was used to publish this book was really important for the success of this publication. And so in this paper highlighted how it was important to have this kind of network of people working from the mainland and from the from Zanzibar bringing up this material which involved not include the history of not only Zanzibar but also the mainland and how we think I think of this work not only as a work that documents or talks about the history of Zanzibar but also important way of thinking about the engagement of women in history of building up Tanzanian history. And so, yeah, thank you so much. So our final speaker in this session is another online presentation. Yes, fantastic. Yes, we see your screen. So 15 minutes, please. So Ahmad Kabbacha. Okay. Thank you very much. Thank you. And Makalayangu I'll be speaking in both languages, sometimes Swahili, sometimes English. I call it sometimes intermarried the agony of misogyne, misogyneation in three Zanzibar in all those. If you take this phrase sometimes intermarried out of context and compare that to that picture. And it tells you something else, it tells you something else, which also fits the, that the two, the two men and women there as you see a strolling into a Q&A, and it's the most recent picture, and it says a lot about my, my topic but my topic is about this issue here. So I have translated a literary mixed erase his bull Zanzibar is a country for Africans. Machotara, his bull Zanzibar in our Africa. Well, I'll be talking a lot about this machotara. And I tried to find out what is his book. And I came to realize that it has also been used by politicians and to mean the party, which was there before who are after who and it says a lot about what is happening but my interest is actually machotara. Okay, can you hear me. Hello. So my interest is different is the, is from the reserve Guna. And in this book, page 66 to page 67, there is this thing. We think of ourselves as a moderate and mild people. Arab, African, Indian, or more and we live alongside each other. Corrid and sometimes intermarried civilized that what we were. And he also continued. We were nowhere near we, but in our separate ads logged in our historical ghettos, self forgiving and sitting with intolerance with receiving and with resentment and politics brought all that into open. This is a summary of everything that I can say is about Guna's work. Can you hear that if taking seriously this phrase, especially the phrase that says sometimes intermediate has a lot to be needs to be paraphrased. So instead of paraphrasing using Guna's work. I decided to choose two more works from Zanzibar. And the work that I'm going to choose is from Shafi Adam and Zaina Baharoun. And if you can, you'll see later on why I have chosen them. But from that particular passage, which actually Guna has presented through a protagonist and named the protagonist. And some will make some of some is a critic, a normal critic in literary critic who says this package actually epitomize that Zanzibar is a fragmented society. So in my own view, I see that Guna sees a rift on the basis of as them cleavage, but also hints about intermarriage or rather miscegenation and miscegenation. And according to Esther Pugioro very recently, she she defined miscegenation as the infamous forged in mixed-dress relationship. But more important, miscegenation is a very complex issue because it lies at the intersection between private sphere, mid-selection, conjugial relations, and family transmission. The word conjugial mixed-ness entails also equality and takes marital norms in equality between partner and social disapproval into account. So it's not a simple miscegenation. It's a very complex issue that is involved in miscegenation. According to work by Esther Pugioro very recently, she has done something on miscegenation in Guna's decision 2005. She simply said Guna has laid bare some theoretical, has laid bare the act of miscegenation as a product of intimacy in the private sphere, which threatens to contaminate the presumed whiteness in postcolonial Zanzibar. As you can see in his book Desertation by Guna, there is an English man, Martin Pease, and Chopara, and the Chopara of Asian-African descent, Rihanna, who are shown to be in miscegenation courtship, but of course they end up in separation. I wanted to go further into using Guna's decision, but I will be taking you to the following books. Wutanku Wutay of 1999 and Moon Waku Peshwi 2017. If you look, if you're examining from 1996 to 2017, there's almost two decades that have passed. And the two, 1986 and 1989, Shafi and Guna were born before 1964 revolution, but Zaynab Alwi Baharoun was born after 1964, which is very, very interesting. But I need to paraphrase these mungu hako patients by exploring more evidence from Baharoun and Shafi. I will use the AG for Brzezak, Guna is a Shafi Adam in ZB for Zaynab Baharoun. And of course, Bhutan Kuvute is a novel, but as well as a movie that has just won several film awards, best feature film in Zanzibar this year. And Zaynab Baharoun also is the winner of Mabati Literature, Kiswali Literature, award of 2018. Interesting, both three novelists, if you read their work, they try to blur the line between fiction and history. Interestingly, all the fit the category of post-colonial writers, there's or unidonized categorization. Unidonized categorize the post-colonial writer as those who actually often return to their own sites of trauma, which usually has to do with period of colonization, decolonization and all post-independence. She further said, post-colonial writers feel the necessity of rewriting the past because the dominant version of history have left a blanks, gaps and misrepresentation. Segenation, misgenation and trauma of being discriminized as unbelonging, early and ingaining, or rather, paper season, are late motifs that characterize these three texts. And I propose that Guna Shafen Baharoun can also be looked within the lens of nativism and fragmentation. Nativism in the sense that, according to John Haitian, is an intense opposition to an internal minority on the ground of its foreign connection. But also nativism is about who belong to the political community, who has the right to rule, who has legitimacy to determine public discourse and who has the right to constitute the African public sphere. So these two theories, or the theory of nativism within the post-colonialism, I think this could be the discussion that we are talking about, the Assetian Guna's remarks in his work. I divided the remarks of Guna into two media issues, nowhere near we and sometimes intermarried. In nowhere near we, I'm looking at Zanzibar as a contact zone and also examining the issue of nativism and fragmentation in post-revolution Zanzibar. But in sometimes intermarried, I look at the issue of miscegenation and the fate of Rara in Zanzibar. For a case of Zanzibar as a contact zone, if you examine Shafen, you read in page 71, and also Zanzibar is something about it. So here it shows Zanzibar hybridism itself through the image of variety of breads and their origin. Of course, they are a member of issues which actually show that Zanzibar to borrow a barbarian is a hybridized nation. Zanzibar treats also the so-called contact zone, the concept coined by Mary Louise, that it's a space in which people, geographically and historically, separately come into contact with each other and establish ongoing relation. But nowhere near we, we look at the seclusion system as made visible by Shafen through a married scenario. Alan Ricard also opined on East African urban setting of Uhundini, Uzungun and Oswailin. Here the neighborhoods are the picture of a divided world but where coexistence here, the fact of living together without necessarily liking one another has been part of the landscape for a long time. There are issues of pure-brained Arabs, Indians, Africans, bloodline in the work of Shafen and Zubahun. We are talking of the issue of contamination here, blood contamination. We see as them leverage rotary in the two ways of of Shafen and Baharun. Wow! And sadly they have failed in the work in the wake of Baharun, where we marrable Mimi and Swahili. But also Africans are lamenting that and in Shafi you also see here we see as them leverage clearly depicted in these two work. It also continued when now so these issues can be taken on homelessness and dislocation issues which have been discussed in much much much in post-colonial workers. But Guna has just said something and the politics brought all that into the open. This is what Guna said in that phrase. And here we see Baharun showing us Bahari. So, contesting Zanzibariness, see the issue of a crisis of who is a Zanzibarian. Zanzibari, see you in Mimi. At the same time we see Yasmin, where we're to, she's a welcoming and also being accepted as a Zanzibarian. So, the look of Zanzibarian is to look after that. According to Karim Hidji, he described the issue of Zanzibar. And he says that after 1964 revolution, the post-revolution government of ASP has turned the colonial era racial equation upside down. Now, the darker your skin, the more authentic Zanzibar who are those with the lighter skin tone are treated with suspicion. For here, we feel, I feel that native using is still, this is still the theory that any help us to understand this issue. So, again, but also natives are saying the issue of who is native in Zanzibar is very controversial. And we look at the, in some time intermarriage, the issue of miscegenation. And I examine this in within the Ovid and COVID miscegenation and the issue of Tukara is a by-product of miscegenation. Ovid miscegenation is some in Goulam and Amemoua in Kyokiswaili, I'm a Zanaewa daughter, Amemoua in Kyokiswaili, Yasmin Nayanatatapu in Suhi, Ovidli. And we look at the work of a sociopathologist in Masa'a Kenbapu, in 2015. And when they say that some Indians have come to bind, though when they take them for wives, marriages kept secret until the end of this union are excluded from inheritance. For here, we also look at community, easily adapting to the interracial contact between Indian men and African men, but not vice versa. Women can fit as purity, because this is one really number of ways on purity, the issue of purity in as far as miscegenation is concerned. But the quality of Tukara is don't be or racial hybrid. Rehana remembers this child being called Tukara, which means bastard. They call this from Luna. But Rehana is a hybrid of Indian father and African mother. So Kutua also in Shafi is a Tukara on Swahili Nam-Shihili. She have a lot of Tukara on Marabu and Africa. Me, me, Ahmed, been siding the conversation to talk to him today. So these are issues of disparity between the races. Saidi Kalagayu and I am Tukara on Africa. So Publix is Ahmed, the son of Arab, African Arab, as Tidiana on Karabu. So the society observes that is seeing itself within these lenses of who is the national and also the contamination class and racial barrier. So these are actually issues that is happening of self-identity of the Tukara themselves, but also how the others view them. And the racial category is also shown by fellow type markers. And this is, they look at non-pure bread and pure bread. But for non-pure bread, we read it at Shafi. But Dahi, an Asian African hybrid, Shabana Bapayaki, but poor then is coming out, Farahat Somali Arab hybrid, and Bwana Ahmed here is pure bread. So African race markers such as full lips, broad noses, and pink braided hair can be used to discriminate Tukara. Sorry, Prof Kupacha, sorry to interrupt. Can I ask you wrap up? We're sort of running a bit over time. I don't know. Okay, thank you. You can move towards the conclusions. Yes, the conclusions. My conclusion is, yes, the Indian Arab Tukara African intimacy heavily dominated the theme of Zanzibar Swahili literature, but the matter appears only in passing, growing few critics and writers. However, as I said, sometimes Zanzibari novelists, at homeland and in diaspora, may those mixed breed you or Tukara themselves dare to transverse this intricate subject of racial intimates during anti-colonial struggle and post-region era in their writing. But it is also by allowing interracial intimates of friendship is to accept sharing of space and resources. Therefore, I said, all is well in Zanzibar. Anyone is welcome. Thank you very much. Fantastic. Thank you very much. Yes, so just so we don't lose out on the chance for discussion on these fantastic talks, maybe I can ask the two speakers who in the room, so Jay and Zamda to come back down to the panel at the front and we'll get our online panelists back. So a reminder, we've covered topics from poetry, novels, translation, the ocean, economy, feminism, publishing, and obviously our most recent talk here as well. So do we have questions in the room? We'll take a few in the interest of time. So, yes, just while Zamda is joining us as well. Could you ask Arumne to stop sharing? And yeah, Proctor Padra, can you stop sharing your screen, please? I think you can actually take it over. Okay, so fantastic. So I saw one hand there. Let me start there. I'll move over there. Thank you. I'd like to ask a question of you, Jay, made an awesome reference to, say, Swahili having, I think, a hugely conversational style. I'd just like to expand on that and perhaps some of the channel might present to you at that point. Just take a few questions in the interest of time before you respond to that one, and then maybe some of them relate. So there was a hand over here. Just a quick question. In East African literature it is mentioned, or somebody's going to mention the aspect I've seen, and also the last thing I talked about, the complex interrelations between different languages. Does it show that there is a trend, that there is a sort of struggle between the postmodern aspects? Fantastic. And there was a hand at the back as well. Just yes. We'll take another one. Fantastic. So maybe we can take those questions. I think they're particularly aimed at our panellists who are here in the room, and do remember we've got our panellists online as well if people have other questions. So yeah, would you like to start? Sure. I'll just return to that phrasing. It may be the case, Garnofilse being Hector, and after that the slightly more pugilistic conversational style of Swahili. And I suppose another way that I might translate that idea would be to say the slightly more animated style. Pugilism, as I understand it, comes from boxing, and I don't mean anything aggressive or violent. I mean expressive, animated, even if one is to watch the video of that interview that's conducted with Swahili, compared to other interviews that Garnofilse has given since his novel rise. I mean, it is more animated, there's more hand gesture, there's more facial expressions. And I'm also, I'm not using that term in that, I guess, in an anthropological way. It's so much, it's based on my own experience of being in Swahili speaking spaces and how people interact in a way that feels more animated and warmer to me. So it's actually, I could say it's the just, as I said, pugilistic, I could say it's, you know, the opposite in some senses of the word. But the thing connecting them would be the animation. But yeah, I didn't mean to suggest any sort of violence in conversation style. Fantastic. Do either of you have a response to the second question? I want to comment on that because the other, the third one was specifically Emda, so maybe you want to comment on the publishing question? Should I? Yes, yes. Yes. Hello. Yeah. So, responding to the question, of course, to the second question a little bit, Zuhra is also talking about interracial relationship when talking about Bilbo's and her personal life. She was married to different people. She was an Arabian woman but never married to an Arabian person. Of course, she was born in Zanzibar, but her parents were Arabian and she of course, because she married an African man, she was just away from her home and then later she wanted to marry a British man and the parents could accept that and the man ended up killing himself and then let her own. She married another man who was, I think, when she came to the UK and so you can see that though she was Zanzibarian, she decided to really act different when it comes to that and that really caused a lot of problems because people are like, she's really doing it differently. Yeah, they would accept that, they would expect that she was an Arabian woman and so she would be married to someone of her own origin and not like what she did, but of course that is really a question about, yeah, we talk about interracial relationship and that was really strongly addressed in this book as well. Yeah, so now to the question about the context of feminist publishing in Tanzania, I think that's somehow linking to what Mzegwe was saying today earlier. Yeah, so when we talk about publishing, feminist publishing is still developing and because publishing in itself is still developing in Tanzania, especially after 2014 when the government took over the role of publishing textbook, which was really the sustainable way of them making profit and being able to produce other books. So when we talk about feminist publishing, we don't have companies that would say they're purely feminist publishers, but I'm talking about women who are involved in publishing and having the feminist outlook on what they published, making sure that the gender aspect is being addressed as well, talking or raising female voices, something that has really been left in most cases, something that has not been really been taken into account because when we talk about producing general books, talking about these kind of books like biography of Bill was or Zahor is something that we don't do a lot of time because of course, we are talking about publishing in general books with a limited market. So END is a publishing house that has survived for a long time and that position it as a very committed women's owned publishing with a aim of supporting women's voices is really interesting. Yeah. Wonderful. Thank you very much. We have one more question. I don't want to start. I can smell the food. So I don't understand between people and lunch. It's tantalising, but we've had fantastic presentations here. So we want to make sure. Remember, we also have Afved, Francisca and Kluis are online if anyone has a question. So one question there. Do we have one other hand? Very quick question. Yes, please. Yeah. So my question is in response to something Francisca said. So you cited the sort of reimagining the Indian Ocean book, Francisca, and I wasn't sure whether it was cited as a approval, but there was one comment or one quotation you had saying that we need to we need to privilege ethnographic or modern day sources over historical ones or archival ones. I mean, I can see the argument for extending our sources when we're studying the Indian Ocean. I can see the argument for extending sources beyond historical ones or archival ones, but I wonder why we should privilege ethnographic sources over historical ones. Would you like me to repeat that question for those online? So I think in summary, there was a reference to Indian Ocean work and the idea of privileging present day ethnographic work over historical sources. So the question is, do you need to privilege present day modern work or perhaps take both and all together and specifically at Francisca? Aimed to quote in your presentation. Yeah, thank you. I'm not aware of the quote saying privileging. I will have to go back and have a look again. But I think the argument that Srinivas and her colleagues are making, because this is the theoretical argument I'm drawing on. It's not my idea. It's just me bringing that into conversation with the Meade's paintings is really grounded in what they say is a necessity to think with exactly Hannah, as you were saying, with historical sources and with other archives, but also to arrive more in the present moment and that being done, for example, most effectively in the way that Clarissa showed us by working ethnographically, working on the ground with people outside of, yeah, of archives only, but of course, together with them and against the backdrop of that. Wonderful. Thank you very much. So I think we will stop there. Can we thank all of our presenters again? Hello. I hope you can all hear me. So I'm the chair of this session. I'm Martin. You'll see me again later. And I'd like to, without further ado, I'll just welcome our presenters. We've got four talks, as you can see in the program. We're moving now into Mandialuga, some culture as well. We've got something about myths and talks which, you know, look really appetizing. So please welcome our colleagues. So I think our presentation will have to pass the difficult test of engaging you enough so you don't fall into post-food coma. So hopefully we can do that because it's interesting. So my name is Teresa Poeta and together with my colleague, Dr. Julie Stagi, we are presenting on behalf of a larger group, as you can see from all these names. And actually, everybody's here, although Frida is joining us online, but Hannah Gibson, Luz Martin, Tom Jeltke are here in the audience. And we are part of a larger group working on a project on Swahili dialects and variation. And if there's this one, then can I just so I can move the slides? Yeah, okay. And if you attended the Baraza last year online, then you heard us presenting the project and we basically want to pick up where we left off last year and tell you what has happened since and what we have found out. So as we explained, maybe some of you were not there last year, we are sort of looking at present-day morphosotactic variation in Swahili. We are focusing on how it links with multilingualism and language contact, as well as how it links with a sort of how speakers navigate sort of constructing their identities and what the language variation means to them. So this is all happening sort of often the work that has already been done because we know that there's variation in Swahili, but sort of mostly phonology and morphology have been explored a bit more, although this is now changing also thanks to other people in the room. And so today we will say a little bit about what is known about colloquial and mainland Swahili, tell you a little bit about languages of I ringa, because we are really bringing to you data some like preliminary initial data that we've collected in I ringa. And we'll hopefully excite you with some morphosotactic variation that we found in I ringa, specifically suffix aga, evaluative morphology and suffix echo and co. Don't worry if you don't know what these things are, we'll talk you through this. And also some initial notes on things to do with how speakers perceive this variation and sort of their attitude to their language use and then conclude. And so we are already sort of aware of, as I said, of some variation in Swahili. But because it mostly focuses on coastal varieties and when we speak about Swahili dialects, that's what often people think of. And we really wanted to expand that beyond this and look also at other areas, other places, and especially multilingual contexts where Swahili is spoken. So this is sometimes discussed at colloquial Swahili or mainland Swahili in other work. But the attention sort of that has been given to this hasn't been sort of extensive so far, especially in morphosyntax. And this is what we want to look at today. So what we have done is sort of we will come back to some examples that we showed last year of variation that we already know is there and then see how that played out in Iringa and see that there is sort of even more to it than we thought. So maybe I'll, Julius, do you want to say something about languages? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Thank you very much. And here you can see some data on the languages that are being spoken in Iringa. That is our focus area today. And as you can see, we have Swahili, which is a dominant language actually in Tanzania and the national language. And we are trying also to compare it with some number of speakers. I mean, in Iringam Gini, that is Iringa town against Iringa as the region. And this data was based on the language atlas of Tanzania that was published in 2009. So it may raise some questions as regards to how is this number was arrived at. It was based on the question about the first language of the speakers. So the speakers were asked about what is the first language that you speak or the language that you acquired first. So Swahili has that number, 53,000. And then in Iringam Gini, but Iringa as a region, the number is 55. It's followed by Hehe, and Bena, and Kinga, as well as Chaga. The Chaga are all over the country. So people will be shocked that Iringa is typically a Hehe community, but we also have the Chaga. They are a significant number over the Chagas and other languages. Asante, so now to some of the examples of variation. So we started off with this, what you see on the slide, and this is what we presented also last year, that we know there's the suffix ag, or aga, has been talked about already a little bit. People are quite aware of it because it's very widely used, and it's mostly connected to habitual meaning. So maybe the comparison with sort of the coastal way of expressing habitual meaning, which is with the hu, hula, you can have something like una kulaga wapi. So we knew this, that this is sort of happening. It's also linked to the fact that in proto-bantu the suffix existed, and that also other bantu languages have it, and it plays different roles in different languages. So we wanted to sort of dig a bit deeper and see how this aga plays out. And now we want to share with you what we find in Iringa. So the habitual meaning that we were aware of, we did indeed find it. So these are two examples, sort of the first one very clear, sort of someone is harvesting and someone else is commenting. Normally you do this much earlier, no, sorry in the evening, today you are doing it much earlier. So the habitual una chumaga, and here is our aga. And the second one, this was a conversation about the production of alcohol in Itamba, in Iringa. And here the speaker sort of commenting on some people sort of not dealing with alcohol. We weren't sure whether it's about consuming or selling, but that's up to interpretation. So you see in Hamsugulikagi, that's our aga suffix there. So also they sort of don't normally usually deal with alcohol. And this also I guess it's good to point out that the negative form is actually really, really common. We found a lot of examples of aga with a negative form. And sort of we want to explore the fact that with the prefix who, the coastal hula, usually it doesn't really have a corresponding negative form strictly for the habitual, while the aga does. So we want to explore where there's something in there, that's why it's used maybe. So just to point out the negative there. But apart from the habitual meaning, we actually found much more and much wider use of aga. And one that kept coming up again and again was the use of aga with the subjunctive. So you see the first example, to endage, to endage, Bajaji drivers sort of trying to get more passengers onto the Bajaji proper relief. Let's go, let's go. And you see the aga there. So this is really, doesn't quite struck as habitual meaning. And this was very common. So you have other two examples. Should I start speaking, let me go to mine, all with aga. And I just kept hearing it all around. So really quite common. And this is where we start sort of going into the neighboring languages, other languages that we find in the area. So here we have an example of what aga does both in Kihehe and in Bena. And especially maybe to sort of save a bit of time, I'll point you to the Bena example straight away. This let's start to sleep to go nage. So you can see the aga there. And what Morrison says is that when aga is added, the effect is this inceptive. Let's start. So the examples that we have seen are really sort of seeing that huge similarity. So we can already start thinking about the Bena effect on Swahili. So this is really nice. And we'll continue investigating this. But it wasn't sort of as simple even, not that that's simple, but as simple as that, because aga just kept coming up also in other examples, where it didn't seem not the subjunctive and the habitual, I glossed, we glossed as habitual just because that's what we know of it now. But it doesn't quite seem to be that meaning. So especially the first one, Nita Kulipaga, I will pay you when asked, speakers said that this implies some sort of, I will pay you eventually. I'm not sure when, but I will eventually pay you. So that's quite interesting. But then sort of the second example, very in contrast to this, as someone saying you haven't paid him yet and replies, Nilem Lipaga, I certainly did pay him. So that's quite the opposite. But still we have our aga there. So some sort of like imperfecting thing maybe going on at the beginning or could even be linked to the inceptive or sort of like, I'll start paying you. But this is sort of the exciting things that we want to really explore more because they don't, they go a bit beyond what we thought we would find. So I'll move to the next example so you can have a variety of things and we can come back to this in questions if needed. Another area that we talked about last year that we were going to explore was what we call evaluative morphology. So mostly this we mean diminutive and augmentative. So how do you express that something is small or something is big? We started off with this prefixes ka, ka and two, which are a way to express diminutive where in Proto Bantu are present in other Bantu languages. And in Swahili we would maybe typically think of using class seven and eight as a diminutive. So like Kimti for a small tree. But this sort of comes up again. It was quite interesting in some of the talks that we have given people were surprised we even think of this as variation just because it's so widely used that so like, where is the variation there? But class 12 and 13 is maybe not traditionally thought to be there in Swahili. So that's interesting. So now let's see what we found in Iringa. So I'm not going to talk extensively about sort of the morphological patterns here. But we did find both class seven, eight, and both class 12, 13, quite a lot, widespread and singular and plural with, yeah, with different nouns. And I would maybe only highlight this example here in the middle. Because this is something that I overheard and I asked about I really liked it. I've never heard that expression. I became a favorite sentence of mine. So sort of to be very, very busy. And while sort of discussing this, we realized that maybe in terms of the prefix use, it's not unexpected that is the class eight that we would expect a little jobs. But the fact that it's used so widely the diminutive turned out to be quite or perceived as being quite specific to Iringa. So that using that expression when I then used this sort of jokingly, people laughed and sort of like, Oh, you're sort of, you know, some local expressions now. And I was wondering what about it made it sound sort of local. And then discussing with colleagues, it turns out that using the vikazi was thought to be sort of quite Iringa specific. So we want to look a little bit more into that. And then some differences in the semantics. I haven't talked much about it before, but we know that it can have some sort of negative connotation sometimes. Also, some speakers had a different perception of using car meant something is smaller than if you use key. So can we buy like a little thorn key was used when it was like negative because it hurt the speaker. But if they wanted to say that there were small thorns on a plant, they would use Ka Muibe. So some interesting differences. And I'm going to get into augmentatives now because that was quite exciting looking at that. So traditionally, maybe in Swahili, we think of saying that something is big by using class five and six. So Lee and Ma or G and Ma. So that indeed came up, although also two different suffixes were both used. The first example comes from discussing how to cook chapati on a big sort of plate. And we also have this mention of class four. So a driver talking about being used to driving big cars rather than small cars. So we don't have much to say about that just that we want to look more into that what is happening there. But then quite well, we thought it was exciting. People kept really, really often when asked how would you say something is big in Ringa using goo. So a big house who knew my go cool. And this would many different nouns. So we thought that was very exciting because as a student of sort of standards for Healy at university had never come across that. And here again, we can show you a little bit about the connection to surrounding languages. So in Benna, in fact, the goo prefix is class 20 and is specifically there for augmentative. So there are no noun classes that belong there, but it's used for augmentation. So that's quite quite a nice link. Okay, maybe Julius, you want to say, I think we have to wrap up. But yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So also we saw it, the echo and the core, which in many other languages in the country would be used to indicate some locative sense or locative reading. But here we couldn't tell precisely that they indicate locative. They may they seem to mean something else. So like who are who are naleko or sileko to mean I usually eat or I don't eat. And napikeko or I usually cook food. So sometimes they seem like indicating habitual or something else, but we're still we are still looking into it to see whether we will arrive at a precise conclusion. So I'll leave you with the last example of variation that came up and that looks quite nicely to some of the other talks coming up. And this is some young university students giving me examples of something that they perceived as being a way that young people in the ring a spoke. And that's using the plural when they mean the singular. So instead of saying, my phone is out of if it's not charged, our phones are not charged. But really what they meant is my phone is not charged. So we definitely want to look more into that. That was very intriguing. And and to sort of finish off, just because we also part of our research is looking at how this this is perceived by speakers and what they think about the variation language use. So just the sense that the speakers first language was what mostly influence variation. This is what we got in conversations a lot. And even though nobody would really say this is Eringa Swahili, things like to end aga or that Vikasi Vyango, when I did then ask about those that I said, oh, yeah, this is very from here from Eringa. So not tied to speakers of a language, but to the place that I was quite interesting. And and this are just a couple of quotes about sort of people's perception on how the language use is changing. So this is sort of older generation talking about in town, people switching to Swahili and people sort of perception of a big difference between urban and more rural places and how this changing over generation. So we also want to sort of continue investigating this. Yeah. So hopefully we can we have excited you with this and you're not falling asleep after the biryani. But sort of we just wanted to share that if what came up from Eringa is that there's definitely scope to research this much more that there's more to the variation even than we thought. And that the highlighting sort of the link to multilingualism, language contact, and also the social linguistic part is important to give us fuller picture of this. Maybe I'll let you do it so I don't mess it up. Yeah, next to Meshimiwa Ben. Now when's like, see where is it? Abari Yamchana. My name is Ben. I've just finished my MA in African Studies here at Swahili. And I'm joined by Dr. Niko here from Mainz. And online we're joined by Wilfred. Wilfred, are you there? Hi, I'm here. Can you hear me? Yeah, we can hear you. Yeah, we can't see you yet. So maybe because Wilfred will start actually, hi everyone, and Karibuni Tena. So if we can maybe see him in the video, that would be perfect because he will start with the first part of the presentation. We'll try to be brief. And it's a perfect overlap or connection to the previous talk actually. So thanks a lot. It's as if we had all set down and prepared the slides and talks together for this panel. But maybe it's just a coincidence. Oh yeah, perfect. Wilfred is there. All right. Wilfred Karibu. Yeah. Hi everyone. I'm Wilfred Sekibuang, expert translator and interpreter. So we're on the high court in the DRC where I work as a language in several international projects. And I'm honored to be part of this conference highlighting Swahili in different areas, along with my colleagues. To be brief, I would start and say about Libumbashi, known as Elizabeth, is the third largest city of the DRC after Kinshasa, the capital in Kisangani. The dialect, Kiswahili, is one of the national languages spoken all down the east side of the DRC and Libumbashi in the southeast. The city as a narrative, Kiswahili are in its unique form. As we all know, Kiswahili comes from Swahili, which means the coast, and Kiswahili means the language of the coast. So there is a large difference between Kiswahili of Libumbashi and the east coast Swahili. As an expert translator, I can notice the difference in pronunciation, sentences, culture, and behavior while working in this language. While translating some English document related to Kiswahili, because it's the most document come from NGOs, I tend to interact with people and you would always learn a lot and discover new worlds while writing Kiswahili of Libumbashi doesn't bring a big difference to the east coast Swahili. Speaking can be confusing because the city has developed its Han Swahili expressions, which are linked to a mixture of whole colonial French English and Arabic words. A study of Kiswahili and Libumbashi will demand a lot of resources that will allow you to reach deep on people's mind and understand their perspective of life while discovering the reasons of creating their Han Kiswahili words and developing slangs in Rural Harriers, which makes the beauty of the language and its uniqueness in Libumbashi. I will give a few examples to be quick. This example will highlight the east coast Swahili and the difference to the Swahili of the Libumbashi. I will start with just the example in east coast Swahili, we say Leo Miniliam Kavizuri. In the Libumbashi we say Leo Miniliam So there is those differences and you will see those old colonial world like the Bien is the French word that's came to the Swahili and it's like a mixture we use here. And I will go to just take an example. In the Libumbashi we will say Unaykala Wabi. So there is always those different expressions that come along to the difference and then according to the old colonial French and English speaking was working around here and practicing the language to the mixture of the Swahili. This there is also the third example. Ukifika Nyumbani Unipidesi Mutafadai. Which means to say Ukifika Nyumba Unite. This is very, very small words that we use in the Libumbashi. So those are the few examples and a brief summary that I can give you from the Libumbashi. So you have an idea on what to expect on my Harrier. Thank you Asante. I will give my power to my colleagues. Thank you so much Wilfried especially for this perspective as a translator based in Libumbashi working on the different Swahilis and on ECS or Coastal Swahili and also the Swahili from Libumbashi. And the problems we come across when we work on these varieties especially in the western periphery. So in the Congo. So from the Ituri forest in the north to the Katanga or for Makatanga province in the south are not always work related as for Wilfried for example to choose from different Swahilis and also to be confronted with different perceptions and attitudes towards Swahili but also for example when you work on the grammar which at first seems to be something that is beyond specific judgments and maybe based on more for syntactic rules and forms and regulations and so on. But we have been working on different Congo Swahili varieties over practically the past 10 years and we came across several of these problems especially of folk linguistic judgments around Swahili for example as a colonial language first of the so-called Arab Sanjibaris as they were called in the literature very often who came to the Congo from the 1850s onwards for example for slaves for ivory and so on. Then later as the language also as a colonial language of the so-called explorers from Europe for example brought Swahili along who spoke Swahili very often and also recruited the same Sanjibaris to get back into the hinterland and the interior of the continent and then in more recent years in the Congo the overthrow of dictator Mobutu through Kabila for example which was also a Swahili speaking regime for more than 19 years practically. So perceptions around Swahili are very much embedded in specific historical facts and historical developments but also in the grammars and resources that are available very often and when you look at and when we have studied the grammatical means and functions of the different Swahili varieties it becomes evident and obvious that specific lexical but also morphosyntactic differences are quite striking if you look for example as the most at the most recent description by Aurelia Ferrari and two colleagues from Lubumbashi the non-class prefixes for example Mutubantu instead Mutubatu further north in the Congo Mutimichi the tree the trees or Mutimiti further north. Ritjo versus Lichu as the eye so you see the different non-class prefixes also different systems of agreement for example animacy based in Lubumbashi so also animals would fall into an insects and so on would fall into class one and two very often and the altogether package of these things have often triggered linguists to call the Swahili from Lubumbashi a Creole language as Walter Shishu has sometimes called it in his works or for example a contact language or a pigeon or something worse and very often we come across these labels as Potopot Swahili for example in the old colonial literature so they're somehow muddy Swahili or something or also the for the Swahili further north in spoken in Ituri the Mipana Jua Swahili or the Mipana Pana Swahili or something like that then the me not Swahili or I don't know Swahili or something based on the structure so specific colonial historic effects were projected on two language structure very often a language structure was explained and also lexical the lexicon through specific often very folk linguistic judgments and perceptions and ideologies and often also linguists linguists ideologies so these so we ask ourselves what do we miss out on when we study Swahili from Lubumbashi grammatically in this context of existing studies already looking for example at the morphology and syntax of the language and practically reproducing some of the perceptions that we may not know sometimes is linguists but are very evident and their speakers like for example Wilfried working on this variety is something that he or others face very often so and in many ways we know that these debates of pigeonization creolizations in the study of Bantu languages or to call them pigeons and creoles is highly problematic so for tendencies in the study of lumbashi polo me as an influential Swahili scholar has started in the late 60s and has somehow also well started to to lay a ground for these descriptions as and and designations as a pigeon or creole in the congos for different varieties the contact processes are more complex though so if you look at for example the negation in it's one example that we can give you here negation in the swahili from lumbashi you can have something like michi yua or michi michi yua for i don't know so the secondary negation she uh comes after the the the subject prefix me which is not less complex than a prefixed a negative prefix as see julie for example in some ways it's even more complex maybe because very often this verb can be followed by something like apana or ata so if you say something like michi yua apana put emphasis on it very often linguists have then said well the apana which is invariable not changed this is something very pigeon like this is something where negation is not very complex all together this is a structure for example that can be seen as a replication from luba from kiluba or chiluba whereas not a double negation but a negation that consists out of two elements is for example very frequent and so on so we could go on so the these processes to to and also from a linguistic view to reproduce a perception and also judgment of those as pigeon creoles is highly problematic and we ask ourselves here and then i hand over to ben who has worked on attitudes what is the kiswahili kiamulu lumbashi or the shaba swahili katanga swahili the poto pot swahili a language of very many names based on the perceptions and ideologies of the person working on them and why is it important also to change both to a more fine-grained focus on contact processes beyond this simplification argument and mofuen and others have worked on that and also deconstructed somehow this idea but also the change with a focus on our own perspectives when we work in lumbashi as the two of us have done this summer just with a few days of difference actually there a few days apart and more ethnographic data when us as linguists work on these varieties is important and self-reflexivity in the field or in the so-called field as well in our own language ideologies and hand over to ben thanks um so my sort of contribution to our tripartite presentation i guess is the study that i did in lumbashi this past summer in july which focused on language attitudes so sort of giving life to the story that people create about language and how they use it kind of every day and i wanted to do this because i was learning that language attitudes in sub-saharan africa especially in the drc have been very neglected as a sort of academic subject and i found this neat quote when i was when i was researching from the late dr william samar and he says languages do not acquire social meaning and therefore do not have attitudes linked with them until as far as we know they began to be written down um and the key swahili that's in lumbashi has been an extremely fluid language that is changing every generation essentially um and this is what people were telling me when i spoke to them in lumbashi um so when i was there i did a 16 sort of semi-structured interviews with predominantly young people about um their language attitudes and their use and so the sort of because it was an exploratory study um the the findings are you know sort of preliminary um but as niko was saying one of the the common um labels that people call swahili and lumbabashi swahili facile or simple simplified swahili um and so using the um the framework of acrolectic and basalic languages um key swahili and lumbabashi would be considered the basalic language um to its parents of east coast swahili um but then also to french and french became also a dominant um part of the conversations that i was having um and similar to other afghan colonial lingua franca is like portuguese and english um french continues to reign as the language to achieve higher education and then respectively paid employment of course too um and then to the framework of um prestige and languages um we can see that french um as the second last point there is this english becoming desirable language french and english um have this overt prestige in um the ability to create social mobility for people um and then of course the the key swahili that's found um has a bit of a covert prestige in that no one could contest that they use it every day and it's very important for um everyday tasks of you know going to the market and speaking with your friends or your family um but people tended to rate french as sort of a more um prestigious and important language and then there's a little bit about english and um about half the people i spoke to um expressed a large interest in learning um english but there are some financial barriers and just infrastructure barriers to doing that um so i approached it with just interviews and as a sort of an exploratory study um i think it would be really important to have sort of a hardline survey to sort of accompany that um that approach for a future study in the area so um to conclude from wilford's perspective as um an expert interpreter and translator um key swahili and the babashi can give us insights into the different ways of expression in the city um from nico's point of view of um grammar mapping you see fine-grained insights into structural properties of the language um and then from language attitudes we can get this sort of starting line um idea as key swahili and the mushy being basselectic french is acrolectic and then um there'd be an interest in learning what people think about english as well um so the aim of this was to kind of bring together different perspectives of how to approach studying a language and then also being um reflexive as the researcher and you know being aware of your biases and the way that you're approaching the study of a language excellent tessana well uh first of all uh with afternoon it's a great pleasure to be here i would like to thank the organization of this beautiful event with so many special guests and scholars um it's a great honor to present my university university that i was able to do so from brazil we do not actually have many scholars in the field of swahili studies in brazil uh so it's it's very meaningful to have my work accepted here and i have titled my presentation hand and design an assessment of the hermitic myth in 19th century east african chronicles well uh i i dealt in my research with two chronicles produced within the scope of 19th late 19th century and actually early 19th century uh in the swahili coast which are very interesting works historical chronicles which contain at their beginnings evidently the narrative of the hermitic myth the the narrative of ham and it's some canon which has been heard by nola and the old testament narratives which call upon my attention uh and therefore i i don't know the possibilities of what could be the the reasoning behind that the present of certain narratives so therefore i have organized my presentation for basic topics which i will i'll try to do a little briefly i i actually got a little carried away in the making of this presentation so i'll cut it short well uh first of all i will what is the hermitic narratives it is widely known it's a it's almost a cliche in the field of uh biblical studies so to speak and it's influenced in the other non-christian religions of course uh mainly islam which is my my focus here secondly i'll deal with the one term that is central to my analysis which the term zanj very widely known which gives the origin to zanzibar for example but it is very crucial in the uh the adherence of the narrative of the hermitic myth in 19th century islam in east africa according to uh my research uh currently i'll delve a little bit into the swahili ham what this specific etiology version of the myth which is uh which appears which is featured in these chronicles and finally i'm going to make uh a relation between ham zanj that they are very approach and slavery in 19th century which is crucial to all this scenario and i'll be dealing with two but basically the two documents i'll be analyzing in my research in my master degree research i'm master's candidate i'm writing currently my dissertation in this field is the kitabah zanj produced in the 1980 in the 1890s approximately and there are two versions and the and the calcab al dury al asbari prikiyya from 1913 is a very dated document but first of all as a recap of this myth i would like to delve into what is it and what are the versions of this myth because we are dealing specifically with an islamic etiology of the hermitic narrative well the hermitic narrative is the narrative present most widely known in the book of genesis genesis nine versus 18 to 27 which deal with the so-called curse uh declare upon ham and his son canaan and they are interchangeable at times but in the bible it is upon canaan uh which noah uh due to the crying perpetrated by by ham which which is he saw noah naked in his tent and he left with him he made fun at him while his brothers helped actually helped noah and their father uh was naked after he was supposedly drunk in this version in the christian and old testament version which the story actually the historiography recognized as a political myth regarding the enmity between the israeli and the canaanites in the ancient world in the ancient 11 so but that that is the original formulation of the myth the oldest one of the oldest and original one but we are interested actually in the development of the of such myth across time as an intertext between juda and christianity and islam so therefore as an intertext we understand is not as a a fulfilled or a a given text but as a as something as a story as a narrative that is constantly changing across time and space between these three scopes these three ontological perceptions of the world of judaism christianity and islam across the first millennium of the christian era mainly into all across the middle ages uh and we are aiding this processed by the the concept of benjamin broad of the sacred sexual spaces which deals with the intertext strategy between the extreme monotheistic religions and they work most famously why am i delving into the curse of ham because it it would work as a framework for prejudice and for the construction of negative alterity in relation to the other so it is a device across this intertext of construction of the other which in the most most famously with the christianity and also islam uh resulted in an etiology of the curse of ham as a curse of slavery which is it originally can be interpreted as a curse of slavery ham was condemned with this thing to be and his progeny to be the slaves of the sons of jaffa and of uh sam sam which in the in the islamic etiology would give origin to the Arabs for example and jaffa to the europeans in the in some etiologies just to find this this slavery of enslavement of blacks uh in the modernity in the modern age and also in the middle ages so it is developed as a dual curse of blackness of slavery david goldenberg is a story in which uh develops it in its in such terms and it results in an automation of different etiologies association hands punishment servility to his brothers the servility to the arabists for example with blackness in islam in islamic scholarly traditions of the middle ages this the ulama the the scholars are actually invited for this matter some accept such narratives uh there there which derivate from the old testament some are actually refuted because they are israeli they are narratives from uh the ahl al-tukab the people of the book which of course that they have uh some in particular value but they are disputed they are questionable they are partly uh so they are it's all depended upon the the chain of transmission it is not wahd and monabee which is one of the uh which one one of the traditions quoted by many historians of the medieval period is is taken upon as a week not for example when there are others or the narratives from from the hadith which are more which are strong they're actually in this and in this in this matter so it is very disputed it's not taking a face value not so some some authors some medieval muslim authors actually accept the the narrative and reproduce it with some uh in some ways and some others such as ibn al-jawzi ibn hal doom refuse it they prefer other explanations for blackness for example not that not that they are not that they see uh black society especially africa society in a good manner they prefer other explanations for their inferiority we can we can still speak but what does all have those all that have to do with is africa well uh is africa since all across the the second millennium of the current era uh it's mainly because uh has a strong connection to islam and so it's a color tradition by extension so it reproduces and the in the text in the islamic sphere a lot of these narratives including an incorporation of the hemitic myth is mainly in the 19th century in the form of chronicles so the chronicles in the in the late 19th century we have the context of slavery we have context of an upper class uh which has a strong feeling of a ravenous that wishes to distinguish from the hinterland and they see in the in the course of time a viable explanation for the differences and a genealogical explanation for the different origins of istharican societies which obviously elevates the uh rbs of the the coast or so or self-proclaimed in some cases rbs in the coast as a superior and which relegates the hinterland people to inflatable uh barbarians so to speak we can can translate terms such as zange which is employed in the which is also borrowed from the context from the media who was the contest and reappropriated and also utilized in this distinction so zange very quickly speaking is actually an an arabic version term of disputed origin but which always referred you know one way or another as a derogatory manner to societies of each africa and utilized in the in the arabic version tradition of geography historical writings in reference in a very generic way to societies of each africa mainly at one point to the sides of the horn of africa but uh gradually gradually associated in the in the later centuries with isthafrica and swahili in the swahili so uh i i i i like a lot to use the the conceptualization by professor paul penant morais farias who is one of the greatest brazilian historians we have uh from he made his korean and german and he speaks of uh mobile clasicatory labels so he sees the term zange uh in close in close proximity to terms such as hibash which means obscenance is the origin of the term obscenance barbara birbira which is an incorporation of greek tradition into the islamic sphere and other derogatory all derogatory and generic appropriations of of description of isthafrican or african ingeneral societies because the term zange doesn't actually have the mobile clasicatory labels don't have actually uh uh basis a basis a solid basis on the empirical world the zange in the medieval tradition as in this map produced by professor farias in one of his articles uh derives its its power from the imaginative geography of muslim authors one which for example sees the nile as a as threefold nile which goes from senegambia to all the way to isafrica and the zange permeates all this all this zone for example and we are going to see that of course in the sources which we selected for our research mainly the kitab al zanouj which well i'll focus on the terms zange or zanouj in the plural because it brings this chronicle brings in the title in the title so it's it's a foremost question of importance the kitab al zanouj is composed mainly of two known anonymous manuscripts which were collected in the early 20th century by an italian scholar and they they contain historical narratives that make up for an arab history of the swahili swahili coast mainly an arab history swahili the swahili coast which attests for arab founders of the cities but also amalgamates uh natural narratives in circulation at the coast with narratives from the written or the islamic tradition or widely speaking and it also introduces this zanouj of which it speaks in an alterative manner referring to various societies of the hinterland such as mexican societies and others and introducing them of course as descendants of ham with a specific etiology of the myth which is reproduced right at the beginning because which is very noteworthy here's some information concerning uh how it is managed to be obtained in a colonial situation of course so we have all these italian german british scholars trying to apprehend the african continent and appropriate of the knowledge via informants in the east africa and we have Enrico Cerulli who happened to be a fascist also very unfortunate but he obtained in the 1920s the two copies of the kitab al zanouj but he will publish the translation first translation into a western language into italian only in the 1950s so and also the second our second source is the Calhavuduri al-Aqwadi Fikia or the chinese star concerning information about africa which is a much more polished work i i hope i don't i'm not uh breaking through my my time i'll i'll just finish somehow ne gabriel um we've just got a small amount of time left can you wind up now please of course of course and i write at the end of actually well the the second chronicle is very similar follows the kitab al zanouj and both present a very similar narrative although this second one is much a much more prolific work in literary terms of course and we have one name and author Faudel Benomar al-Aqwadi which happened to be a shape a mudir in the because we're just following the administration in malindi and other cities of the east african coast so by knowing the the author and who possibly was also the author of kitab al zanouj we happened to know a little more about who was producing such chronicles and their obvious interests in uh i'm gonna skip the really it would be very extensive but who was producing such chronicles and who was attributing such narratives to the permanent fold uh what happened to uh what happened to be labeled by the coast of tahini uh are of uh scholars as barbarians as zanj as shanzi which i happen to know it is not a very positive word in ishahili um well uh my conclusion just just to wrap it up uh finally is that the appearance of the hermitic myth in the ishahili context is in direct relation to the semantic native of the term the zanj because zanj is a term that connotes uh both slavery and blackness as is in the its original uh medieval muslim version also is the hermitic myth which amalgamates the the blackness alleged blackness that includes in the construction uh in its intertext with Judaism Christianity and Islam and the curse of slavery so being those closely related they had this adherence very uh strongly uh very terrified in these chronicles well uh i'm sorry for my english and for uh violating this limit of time but that is thank you for the attention okay so we're back to our morpho syntax for our last session before the the break um and we're going to be talking about some selected features um from two areas of swahili speaking world yes okay fantastic um so there are some interesting things here we want to talk about uh young people young people's speech so there's um variation across east africa given the focus today we'll be talking about swahili um and we want to draw some insights from youth language practices from Dar es alam and then um we're going to be focusing on micro variation or morpho syntactic uh micro variation so small grain fine grain differences between closely related languages or in this case one language or a sort of continuum um and thinking about structural properties um and this talk is part of a larger research project looking at micro variation and youth language practices so the sort of strand of work on youth language practices um that's been happening for several uh decades now and then a kind of parallel strand of work on morpho syntactic uh micro variation um and we're bringing this together um focusing on eastern central and southern africa um so i'm just doing a very short introduction and i'll hand over um to Andrea who's our colleague who's um online joining us from Germany um before we pass back um to Nico so Andrea over to you and thank you very much Hannah hi everyone i hope you can hear me about iseno i want to give you a few insights from my research in Tanzania about Lurayam Tani which is um a language practice of young speakers of Kisweli in Tanzania especially in urban areas such as Dar es alam and Darusha among others um Rojstajan and Kisling state that Lurayam Tani is a cover term for a spectrum of informal urban speaking practices based on Swahili and um that it has no discrete boundaries but must be seen as being on a continuum between style and social act Lurayam Tani exhibits different linguistic manifestations especially in terms of lexical innovations through semantic manipulations morphological and morpho syntactic um practices have not been studied much and Rojstajan and Kisling claim that processes such as morphological hybridization are largely absent from Lurayam Tani but um we have so far in our project found a few um morphological devices that are being employed by young speakers and one feature that is very common in Lurayam Tani is um a suffix that we have heard um before in the same panel earlier by Julius and um Teresa who have talked about the aga suffix and we find that one very commonly in Lurayam Tani so semantically um as um they have also explained earlier this may add a habitual meaning to the verb although um yeah in Lurayam Tani we can see that sometimes the form is also used without expressing expressing additional semantic nuances but here we do have the habitual meaning in the first two examples um like in Ananimalizaga or the other one it's the same verb that um Teresa and Julius talked about then um there is another feature of youth language practices that we found in different variations of Kisweli and that is the use of noun classes yes because may use different noun classes and agreements either for statistic reasons or to add semantic nuances for example a statistic practice in Lurayam Tani is um the use of noun class prefixes for class one and two with nouns that um yeah are found in this class but that usually do not take a prefix this includes for example kinship terms so like in example two with the word mdada sister and then we have another example where we have a term that is not a kinship term but another noun um that is usually in class one and two but um it's normally used without prefix where we're to mean and now I hand over to Nico to present data from Luombashi thanks so much Andrea and um thanks everyone here we know already we have learned not long ago that Luombashi is the capital of the old Katanga province formally also of the Katanga province from Alishaba and so on and licensed the copper belt um in the southeast of the DR Congo the population is around two million people approximately and of course there are diverse cultural linguistic influences in the city and its surroundings Luombashi is an economic hub which is connected very much with the capital Kinshasa already for several decades which also of course uh explains the influence of Lingala since um we could say 50 60 years ago and um there are many local languages that have also left traces or their impact in the local Swahili spoken so for example Kiluba, Kiluba Cut is the one that we mentioned already closely related to Chiluba but also other languages and also to some extent Bamba from across the border in Zambia and so on and the youth language practice that is spoken in Luombashi was described by uh George Mulumbua in 2009 as part of his dissertation at the ULB in Brussels and he called it or labeled it kindubile and this is a problem this is not George Mulumbua's problem but this is a general problem when we speak about youth languages or youth language practices on the African continent and these that these names that these language practices are given are not um accepted or used by speakers themselves or by all speakers themselves so nowadays when um we we are researching um this youth language practice based on the Luombashi Swahili in the streets of Luombashi very few or almost now no speakers will relate to it or describe it as kindubile um Wilfried Sakabwang who you have met also shortly before as a speaker is currently conducting research in Luombashi on this youth language practice and will come with the data and analyze the data in minds next month for a couple of weeks so this youth language from Luombashi whatever the name may be or whatever we can call it here just call it the youth language from Luombashi it's characterized by the creative use of phonological manipulations turning syllables around for example which is very common for African youth languages and lexical material from Ningala a lot of it um a bit in analogy with the young people's Swahili as used in Goma and Pukavu further north in the Kivus that I and several others have worked on so the users of these of this language are usually street children, street vendors, taxi drivers, some extent also police so some extent also soldiers and university students so um what we see is um noun classes as Andrea has pointed out for Dar Salaam what George calls class secondaire, locomotive, diminutive, depreciative, depreciative, abstractive so we have a very uh it's also our our colleagues in the first talk in this panel have shown a very creative and productive use of these uh evaluative classes and noun class seven and eight in this youth language practice use as an augmentative so if you have Kimuana, you can see the the double plural here the prefix stacking of class eight plus the bar of class two would be obese child obese children big child big children somehow that's what people would say and um but if you use Mutoto by Toto which would be the Luombashi Swahili equivalent you can't say um Kimu Toto or something you would say uh Ki Toto so this is the replaceive strategy that was pointed out earlier on uh Bi Toto so the youth language here makes uh use of a different kind of maybe clitization more than prefixation or something Kamuana Tuba Muana would be small child small children according to uh George Mulumbas data so this is class 12 and 13 which has been lost in most coastal varieties and is was reintroduced quite early um after Swahili was introduced and implemented in Luombashi and then we have an example here Kale Kademu Keko Tuangaria that girl or also maybe cute girl small girl beautiful girl is uh is looking at us um and we see that agreement patterns are mostly maintained and kept um and the questions of course does this work with all Lingala and French like sims it works for example with Moloji uh Kaloji Moloji is the sorcerer but also used for a person a young person in the streets who does not cooperate and so on who does things that are not really well um well considered Kaloji works but um what about Ndule music for example a loan word from Lingala is there Kandule is there Kadule that's something that we will still investigate how this works for example um and then we have an increased use of the noun class two mark a bar in these prefix stacking processes so in analogy to Babor, Bor is the thing can also be the male sex uh Babor the things uh speakers can also say Babintu so class two and class eight uh and here it's not only the double prefix that marks something but there's also a specific expressive stance that's expressed through the class two which is also practically taken as as a whole from Lingala which means those worthless things those dubious things these things that I don't know about very much and so on um and then uh the Josh has also another example bankaka Babmoja specific thieves so agreement patterns are maintained usually this intimacy based agreement there's nothing that we could detect so far in this example that you see the Uyujo Nmoloji, Arigonga, Ilelar, Yenye, Ilikua, Muvil that guy is a sorcerer he stole that money that was in town and then the pre-final Ak the suffix one example is Petit Anarivakakule does the girl girlfriend usually arrive at that place that we see it's habitual use which is also the same in the Swahili from Lubumbashi um and the interesting thing is in all these Congo Swahili varieties and also in these youth language practices it fulfills two functions it's not an emphatic one as we saw earlier on for example it's habitual or sometimes iterative and it's the remote past something that was long ago for example so if you say something like Petit Arivakakule the girl arrived there a long time ago so it's somehow a functional split that the Lee has become the recent past and Lee Ak has become the remote past but that's something that not only young people say that everyone says that now there is an interesting thing that when we have verbs from from French kubolone from bolo the work kuboche also to work kudaye from English to dye and kubaye from from French to yawn for to drink so the same kind of movement when we have these ones with an ending on E and not on A on A very often speakers would according to the few examples we collected so far drop the Ak because it may be ambiguous it may not be very clear what kind of verb it is that's our preliminary explanation maybe so ulejo aridaye did that guys that guy pass away a long time ago instead of maybe ulejo aridayaka abulone does he usually work or instead of maybe abulonaka and so on and then there's an interesting thing that um what we could not detect in the youth language so far we are looking more into that that kapanga is for example said that in lumbashi sometimes the habitual akka to distinguish it from the remote remote past um akka uh it takes on tone for example um this is not um the case in lumbashi is really for all speakers for some among the youth we couldn't detect it hand over to umana yeah so we just have some brief um conclusions so there we've just presented a sort of snapshot essentially of some features in both in both settings um so there are features that seem to be shared across youth language practices and sohili speaking areas previous talk as well so we saw the diminutives again from tanzane to drc in this case um the the youth register and this is ongoing conversation we've had um from lumbashi seems to be perhaps not very different from sohili spoken in the city so that's an interesting question like to what extent is this different to speakers perceive it as different or are the differences that are more subtle that we've not quite got to the bottom of um and then this also goes back to the idea of like the name and and perceptions which we've seen um in the previous talk as well um and then in the lugiam tani example that andrew shared um we have these sort of again similar question in that to what extent does lugiam tani differ from a daraslam sohili or urban center sohili like is this a distinct thing is it a distinct patterns of use or are we seeing again you know diminutives tense aspect marking the same kind of thing so like is this is this a thing um so we want to know more about urban centers we want to know more about youth language practices more broadly different age groups also the difference between rural and urban areas so people tend to associate youth language practices with urban centers but of course there are youth um in lots of different places um and so with our work wanting to extend that to lots of work on kenya as well obviously but different areas within these within these countries um yeah lots of work from nico on the kubernetes provinces um so that helps us better understand the variation that we see in sohili but also youth language practices um more broadly i think that's that's us i'd like to say thank you very much asa and tenisana to our um speakers we're running out of time we're still about sort of uh half an hour late since lunch um so i'm not going to give an opportunity for many questions some of the speakers are already in the room so you can grab them at coffee or afterwards hopefully or write to them at their addresses um i just wondered if uh if if uh is it gabriel is still online in in brazil because he's so far away i wondered if anybody had any questions for him um i thought that would be a fair way to sort of squash the time um so does anybody have any questions about the zen zanj and ham not the ham you eat but the the hamitic ham oh yes yes maybe you want to come down here and then he can hear it is he still online he's still there yeah if you come down maybe he can hear the question himself thank you and thank you for bearing bearing with us it's um inevitably these things get a bit sort of we carry for salmon yeah you just speak to that oh okay yeah so what's his name again what's the guy gabriel all right so uh well i thank everyone for being here i was invited but this notion of uh somebody having some three children or whatever it is ham versus whatever i've never get it that as a black person right that skin person to be discriminated because somebody look at somebody's nakedness it doesn't make sense to me it really doesn't i wish somebody can explain why slavery years ago and not to date daskin people are being discriminated so whoever invented this notion i think i don't want to use the word but i don't agree with it so that's mine thank you do we have a another comment or question and does gabriel want to um comment on that yeah of course it's it's actually very starting this matter is always very always a bit comes to slavery and racial prejudice even when it predates notions of race through modern notions of race it's very uh it's very hard you know and it's hard to understand even to understand the intricacies of it but uh sometimes it comes down to the reduction of the human being to a chateau and the to profit the unfortunate profitability with some very sketchy human beings end up uh seeing in it in proxying of it and they have to justify it you know one way or another slavery and that being in the modern era one of the most unfortunately profitable uh businesses and both in the christianity world as well as in the Islamic world and uh this this myth this particular myth ended up being due to this religious nature due to its original uh genealogical nature genealogy genealogy in these societies but very valuable uh resource of power it ended up being a very very powerful tool for the justification of such uh atrocities so it's it's very hard but it's we have to unfortunately we have to study it and comprehend it thank you very much it's a fascinating question and um it also relates back to some of the things we were hearing this morning I also want to thank you for um presenting from Brazil because I think that's a that's a first for us and and um you're very welcome I hope we see you in future meetings as well I'm going to wind it up there because I say we the other teams um we can we can speak to them at coffee and uh because we are running late I'd encourage you to if you need a coffee or need a bathroom break just to sort of go and do it quickly uh you know grab your drink have a quick sip and then join us for um the final session of today and hopefully we'll we'll make up a bit of time thank you very much thank you fish so that's the subject of my talk and let me say before beginning that the slides um as usual I post my presentation with the speaking text online so uh don't worry about trying to capture all of the detail that you can see if if anybody wants to follow up then it'll appear on academia.edu at some point this this continues work I started during lockdown on the vocabulary of nautical technology a couple of papers so far both of them which need correcting by the way but and then I extended it to um marine fauna including fish and today I'm just going to focus on fish um why lockdown because it's one subject that I could study at home because I actually had a lot of the lexical resources with me and also uh I had uh I have my um I've got my own Zanzibarie consultant at home consultant in vertical commas who sometimes agrees to answer questions um um so that's what this is so Swahili and Komorian have hundreds um I do mean hundreds of of names for fish and other marine creatures um and where did all these names come from the northeast coastal Bantu ancestors Swahili were originally only familiar with inland waters and fisheries um as they sort of swept up historically in that uh direction um so how did they acquire the knowledge they needed to exploit the marine resources that they encountered on the coast so we're going way back in time um 1500 2000 years ago so when did you get that knowledge and what do their names for marine species tell us about that process of adaptation so a group of mixed farmers arrive on the coast this is obviously a simplification but arrive on the coast they've not encountered marine species and now we find that there are hundreds of names for them where where did where did they all come from um and the following is just a preliminary sketch and I won't really go into Komorian in this talk because it introduces a whole set of complications some of them have not worked out for myself yet the classificatory position of Swahili um and approximate dates are shown on the slide on the right there and note the distance between Swahili and Komorian Komorian is not a Swahili direct it's actually it's actually quite separate and a lot of its fish names are quite different there's some overlap because some of them um can be traced back to Proto-Sabaki um others have been borrowed backwards and forwards between the the two languages but there are also some that have evolved quite separately and this slide is just a reminder it shows you the primary dialects of Swahili and their classification so primary being those original coastal dialects and to reconstruct fish names to Proto or early Sabaki um they have to be found at least as cognates in both northern and southern branches of Swahili dialects as well as in Komorian it's not perfect but there are no other languages in that group that have that sort of um you know have an extensive fishing vocabulary maybe maybe some of the Mijikenda but I don't think it's particularly separate from from Swahili and here are some examples of general fishing vocabulary sort of generic terms with the old Bantu roots including the generic terms for for fish that's that dialect Sui um or the Arabic derived Samaki um and eels um Konga um plural Mikunga in in standards Swahili those are very old terms and obviously because you get uh you know fish a fish and that's same in freshwater marine and also eels you find them in both environments and the only fish names that were carried over from freshwater to marine species were those for groups of fish that are recognizably the same across both environments such as eels and another group catfish you find cat in fact some species of catfish are found both in in in freshwater estuarine environments as well as um in the sea and these include eel the so-called eel catfish and the just to give an example that Amvita dialect names for eel catfish um are both inherited Bantu terms so Tandi and Ngogo they have a longer history um that said uh so I get my pages right that said whilst Swahili has as actually few inherited fish names relatively few there aren't many more than that there might be a few more that have not picked up yet but a larger number have been taken from other languages and it's possible that some of the names that can't now be explained um were borrowed from the languages of earlier coastal fisherfolk so whoever it was who preceded the incoming Swahili and Komorians on the coast we don't actually know much about who they were um or what languages they smoke and and so it's difficult to prove in the absence of comparative vocabularies um it's no good looking at the vocabularies Sandawe or Hadza for example in the interior of Tanzania because they don't have vocabularies for for marine species they're just you know and they're too far away um and uh and so so it's difficult to know what might have come from a non-Bantu African language in this region except perhaps Somali that there is a set of Somali fish names so the possibilities of comparison with Somali and there are one or two examples that have come across so far of fish names that might be related to the Kushitic names used in Somali and there seems to be little evidence of old loan words from Persian or Arabic for those who know this linguistic history there's this old layer um of Persian and Arabic it's not always clear clear which is which or to know the difference um but there's very few of those loan words from Persian Arabic or even South Asian languages I haven't hardly been able to find any Chaffee um a fish similar with no rabbit fish Tassie to others Chaffee Tassie in the north is one candidate um so if you look at the Arabic um I'm not sure I don't know how to pronounce this but Saffee and the Persian um also Somali possibly there's it looks as though there's some relationship there I can't prove it but it's possible that that's an inherited an old inherited term old because it has the it has the the bit the Bantu prefix the 910 class prefix the reconstructed form is in Chaffee and there are also relatively few names for which an Austronesian and specifically Malagasy source can be proposed very few I've you know I've looked but I can only find a small number um which is those at the top and some of those are only possible and here's one of them um a local name for the emperor red snapper so in the sort of a marima dialect area tanga and thereabouts this word dumwara sometimes it's also been recorded as dimwara you can make a case for it being um descended if you like from this old Malagasy term uh also in in old Javanese originally old Javanese uh lembwara or or um lambwara and as it's coming to the Swahili the initial the lap bits at the beginning or the layered lap bits and that has been reinterpreted as though it were an old Swahili prefix either Lu Lu Lumbwara or Lee 5th the class 5 prefix is Lumbwara and that's how you would generate dumwara and dimwara that's a proposal it's not proven but it it looks quite strong and in the in the process did the name of this the meaning of this word has changed as it's as it's moved into Malagasy right now refers to dugongs to those marine mammals but in in the Swahili dialect it still refers to this big fish the emperor red snapper which can be quite big in size um and the largest and most easily recognizable set of loan words is from Arabic and these are all relatively recent borrowings including fish that were imported in dried form or originally imported rather than fished and they're also predominantly the names of large oceanic species reflecting the expertise of the Arabic speaking crews from whom Swahili learned much of their knowledge of deep sea sailing and fishing and that's where you get all this later vocabulary for different types of boats that obviously come from the Gulf and their routes but what about what about all the rest of Swahili names for fish and it seems that many and perhaps most of them were lexical and semantic innovations names that Swahili speakers and their immediate ancestors coined themselves using their own lexical resources to describe their fish they caught and in most cases eight the original meaning of many names has been forgotten in some cases it can only be guessed at while other names are evidently more recent innovations so it's a process that you find happening up until recent times but also with a lot of these old names older names that you can reconstruct to a you know the priest Swahili stage of linguistic development um you can see some of the and because some of them are shared with Camorian as well um and there's some examples in that table I won't I won't go through them but these are all names which you can you can hypothesize that they're derived from the language itself or whatever that language was proto-Sabaki Swahili uh protest Swahili and so on and one category um yeah one category of these innovative names is especially interesting um names like Pungu on the last slide Pungu from an eagle it's also an eagle ray which have been taken from other animals the whole class of these these words that have been adapted or just taken straight from the names of other animals and here's as you know some obvious ones Nungu, Pansi, Sangi, Tembo in some Swahili, Kipepeo and as the second column here shows the English names um this suggests it also been a productive process in English a lot of our you know we we call the fish lizard fishes that also some Swahili called Goromwe which is a um a local name for um um particularly on the Kenya coast for lizard fishes and it's derived from the name for a particular kind of lizard and the most to me the most remarkable a big example of this that I've come across so far is the adoption of the names of male and female bush book shown at the top um for snappers um according to their color resemblance to one or the other sex so male bush book a darker in color than female bush book the names for them um which you can trace back to to Proto Sabaki in fact go much earlier there are all Bantu names those but the basically the names for the male male the name that's used for a male bush book has become in many three lead acts the name for the darker colored snappers whereas the lighter colored snappers um are called by the name that was applied to the females so that kind of gender description of bush book has kind of come down in Swahili in a different form as a term for different color variants um which I find fascinating I mean the standard forms of these names Akungu Anambuala again as I say they're they're all Bantu uh Eastern Bantu names and this happens these names have been carried I think as loan words on two islands well I guess it includes Bantu as well but on two islands um the Kamoros that Madagascar where there are no bush book there's no bush book nobody would know that in connection anymore these are words that originated on the mainland there are no bush books present on the islands off the east African coast now in the time remaining I can only show a small sample of the names I've been looking at here's Chewa for Kenyans that you'll know that as the Tewa of Shibola Tewa famous location um location of a prison as well um lightly named and it lightly named I think the name for their habit of staying put literally floating um rather than swimming away when discovered this is one reason why they're actually quite easy to spear they're really big fish these are the rock called the groupers but they tend not to swim away like other fish they sort of just lurk in their in their holes um and they are actually quite easy uh for for modern fishers as well to to kill when they come across them here's Changu a name which many of you will be familiar with um probably derived from a verb describing its social or swimming behavior um down there it's the uh descendants of this in territory of Kuchanga what was originally Kuchanga to collect or wander around in another set of meanings and here's Chazzo the suckerfish that was once kept in order to catch turtles I don't know if any of you are familiar with this this um this history of using fish to kind of capture turtles but there's some really nice descriptions of of the um the remora is being kept in cages by fishermen and then used because they attach themselves to other fish they do the same to whales and porpoises and all sorts as well but they they can they can be trained you know trained is a loose use of the word but they can be used to haul in attach themselves to turtles and then you haul them in um and that's that's that's possibly an early loan word I'm not sure but there's there's some similarity um with that um Arabic word um which ultimately derives from the verb meaning to attach I'm not sure but I don't otherwise know where that name comes from and bunjoo one of my favorite names bunjoo put for fishes and they're named I think for their poison um and those of you uh worked in Zanzibar or knows Zanzibar will will know this word punjoo it's the most notorious uh poison of the week so punjoo it's it's a typical sort of witch's brew of lizards and amphibians it's it's it's it's been much feared and really nasty also appears in the name of the Zanzibar red colobus which is known as uh keema punjoo um because um other animals dogs and sort of um don't like its flesh so it's said and to give an example of a marine animal that is not a fish and I could do many more of these including shellfish um it's not a fish zoologically speaking um Puezza named after the time and place they're usually speared by these days women perhaps always women but um you know derived from this verb koopwa um about about their ebbing we're describing the ebbing of the tide well this is you know classically when you encounter uh octopuses and let me close by reiterating that there are history that there are histories of adaptation and innovation in these names that can be matched with evidence from other sources and they don't have time time to sort of start um looking at that in detail but this is is what I'm working on now and in particular zoological findings findings of archaeologists about the changing prevalence of different marine vertebrates in fish middens so archaeologists I mean the classic site of shanga in the north in the Lamar archipelago um there's a very nice sequence and description of which types of fish over the centuries were the most popular or the ones that you could find most and you can match this kind of linguistic data to see you know how far back can a name be reconstructed does that match um the archaeological evidence we need more archaeological evidence but it's a possibility that you can do that kind of matching and last but not least thank you very much thank you very much now we welcome our second speaker of this final afternoon panel um Marianne de Ham welcome from the British Library she's the new curator of the AFKA collection at the British Library therefore if anybody needs any advice about the British Library now we know where to go and so we welcome um the presentation yes this one right here yeah thank you so hello everyone um how about is that you any salam aleikum and whatever other greetings you would like to use um and today I'm going to be talking to you about the how the knowledge creation and transfer of fishermen networks shapes the Swahili language culture and community in the mafia archipelago um and however before I start answering this question if it was working for me ah okay uh one thing that I've come to realize is a lot of people don't know where mafia actually is so uh mafia is in the south of Tanzania it is south of the Zanzibar archipelago and the mouth of the refugee river actually flows straight into uh mafia mafia is made up of eight islands and mafia island is the main island of the archipelago um it also hosts the largest marine park in the west indian ocean measuring at 882 kilometers squared and actually this red line that you find in this map is actually the marine park the mafia island marine park boundary um it is also the oldest marine park in Tanzania having been established in 1995 what this means is that whenever marine conservation is being discussed in Tanzania and east Africa a lot of the times the mafia archipelago is being referred to and used within scholarly debates and also within political discussions and this inadvertently means that what you find is the international governments the Tanzanian government the world wildlife fund and mafia island marine park all have their own ideas of what the marine ecosystem and marine environment should look like and what marine conservation looks like and they feed these ideas to mafias fishers and mafias people through regulation and through projects but at the same time mafias fishers and mafias people have their own ideas of marine conservation um and what you then see is that because they have their own ideas of what the marine environment looks like they find new ways to use Swahili and their community and their culture to actually uh to shape the Swahili language in order to actually describe this marine environment i'm going to be focusing predominantly on uh mafias fishermen and when we're looking at shaping the Swahili language and culture and community in mafia this occurs in four main ways so essentially that's measuring the moon measuring the wind perceptions of marine animals and perceptions of the marine environment so when we're looking at the fishing industry in mafia it's important to note that most of the boats actually use sails instead of engines and because you're using sails on boats like Mashua which you'll find in that top picture over there and this bottom picture here um and also Galawas which is this little boat here um and they also use Vitumbri which is a dugout canoe boat so predominantly the boats that are used within mafia's fishing industry are plank boats and they use sails what this means is that you need to be able to measure the natural elements like the wind and like the moon mafia has two monsoon seasons like most of the Swahili coast and this is Cascasi the northeast monsoon season and Pusi the southeast monsoon season at the same time when we're discussing the moon and measuring the moon we need to bear in mind that not only does the moon affect the tidal variations of low and high tide but also you have spring and neap tide so this is actually a picture that I took while in mafia and it shows the different variations or how far the tide can go out when it's actually Cascasi and when it's neap tide so usually when it's low tide in mafia in this beach you would actually find the waves right here where those green structures are but because it's Cascasi you find that the waves are or the ocean is much further out than it usually is and this is one way that affects fishermen's because you need to be able to measure the moon in order to ensure the optimum time to actually go out and fish and another way that the moon influences fishermen is in the form of night fishing now in mafia you find a fisherman who fish at night for Daga and Daga is a name for a group of fish essentially and they're small like anchovies or smaller and night fishermen use light to actually attract Daga to their boats in order to catch them now you can imagine that because they're using light in the full moon this is impossible because there's too much light in the ocean so again they need to use some sort of measurement in order to measure this the moon in order to determine the right time to go fishing and the measuring of the moon actually occurs through the use of the lunar calendar in mafia it also occurs in Zanzibar but I'm talking about mafia today so because there is the use of the lunar calendar and because fishermen are such a prominent and large group in the mafia archipelago what you find is actually that the rest of mafia's community actually uses a mixture of both the lunar and the Gregorian calendar in order to communicate with fishermen and that's one way that the Swahili community of mafia is being influenced towards the ocean when we're looking at measuring the wind we see how the Swahili language is being influenced within mafia because here we find there's a creation and adaptation of the Swahili language so one such term is Wanafunzi Wanafunzi usually means students however in mafia the fishermen use the term Wanafunzi to actually refer to a specific kind of wave which has blue at the bottom and it has a white crest or white foam so kind of like in that little clip art image and the reason why they do this is it's a visual cue for them to determine the intensity of the wind at a specific time and from a distance and the reason why they use the term Wanafunzi is because the primary school uniform for public schools in Tanzania is a blue trouser or blue skirt with a white shirt and so it's a not only a visual cue but also a reminder of this kind of this kind of it's a sort of mnemonic device in a sense or a way to remember it. Another term that fishermen have actually created is kucharaza and kucharaza refers to the cha-cha sound you get when a wave hits the reef so depending on how well first of all this is an audio cue in order to actually measure where there is a reef and where there is a reef while you're on the on the ocean and depending on how intense it is you can also determine how the wind intensity sorry is everything okay yeah okay well yeah so kucharaza is a term that has been created then to actually refer as a as a audio cue to within the to measure the the wind when we're looking at perceptions of marine animals the first animal that we find is fish and sadly i'm not talking about any specific fish just fish in general now the fishermen of mafia perceive fish as highly intelligent and highly adaptable animals and it's really interesting they've actually created this a new term called mavovi and i've only ever found it in in mafia um and when we're mavovi um it's a very interesting term because it takes the root of vuvvi which is fishing because when we refer to fishing in swahili you use the term ovovi when you refer to one fisher you use um vuvvi when you refer to multiple fishers you use wavuvvi and when you're talking about fish you would use the term samaki but uh what the fishermen of mafia have done is actually used the term uh the root of the term uh for fishing vuvvi and then uh added this prefix of ma in order to actually refer to fish and in a way it ties their fishing activities and their fishermen knowledge to uh fish the second animal that holds a lot of perceptions is whale sharks um and whale sharks present frustration because uh they get stuck in the fishermen's nets so they will actually swim into the nets and it's it's really annoying for fishermen because they have to stitch up these large gashes um and at the same time one thing that i noticed is that every single fisherman that i talked to told me that they would never hurt the whale sharks because they believe that they share a symbiotic kind of relationship so what this means is that the fishermen believe that whale sharks will follow their boats in order to determine where they can find algae and this algae uh well the fishermen uh know where this algae is because this algae is also eaten by the fish which fishermen catch and at the same time fishermen will follow whale sharks in order to determine where they can get fish um and it's quite interesting because uh the fishermen uh whale sharks can only be found at Kilindoni which is the largest town uh of of mafia uh so they can only be found at that ocean they can't actually be found within the marine park boundaries and when i asked uh a fisherman about this uh he told me that the reason why whale sharks actually like the ocean at Kilindoni is because it's like uswazi um and the use of the term uswazi is particularly interesting because uswazi refers to a neighborhood where um everybody's house is very close together and there's a lot of culture there because there's a lot of commotion and a lot of people live right next to each other and you know what your neighbor is doing essentially um and it's specifically interesting in mafia because in mafia the majority of people live in the uswazi and if you don't live in the uswazi you live in Uzunguni or which refers to where the white people live or you live in Warabuni which refers to where the Arabs live so the use of the term uswazi here is actually including the whale sharks within their own community and here we see how the Swahili community in mafia is being influenced when we look at the perceptions of um the marine environment here we have a very interesting phenomena um and this phenomena actually occurs well it's an aerial view of a phenomena this phenomena which occurs uh during kaskazi and during the beginning of the kaskazi period um and those in mafia who have a western scientific education will say that this is because the the waters from the refugee river are flowing out to mafia and there is more of an algae production within the ocean but the people of mafia actually refer to it as a ritual that occurs every single kaskazi where the ocean cleans itself and it spits out all these materials that it no longer wants which is why the ocean has a specific smell and it's also why the shores are littered with seaweed and plastic the people of mafia view the ocean as something to be feared and loved at the same time there's so many stories about how fishermen have gone further and further into the ocean to chase greed and never came back and um when you're a girl and or when you're a woman in mafia you'll be told uh don't go to the ocean during high tide because that ocean might take you the current might take you and pull you further into the sea um and actually some of these stories are backed up by dead bodies actual dead bodies that will wash up on the shores of mafia and these also come with stories where is it the fishermen or the young girls that went out uh during high tide or is it from bodies in in Somalia civil war or is it from killings in comoros so these are all the different kinds of stories that you find um that are horrific but at the same time it is the fishermen who uh after a long day on the ocean go and jump into the ocean and they frolic along the seaside so they are very connected to the ocean at the same time and it's also the people of mafia who have these horror stories who refer to themselves as watch what funny we are the people of the ocean or uh they will tell you 20 to 24 to Baharini so let's go throw our worries away into the ocean so i would like to conclude my presentation today with a personal reflection um i speak swahili fluently uh but when i went to mafia uh i realized that there was a language barrier between me and fishermen i was speaking swahili they were speaking swahili but i did not understand a single thing they were saying and this would come about because they would tell me things like and so to translate that they would tell me you see that wave over there that is a student wave if you look underneath the fish are moving in a chaotic manner and this is because we are on the third day of this lunar phase during uh the kaskasi season so the northeast monsoon season so it it was a completely different uh mindset and what i'm speaking on today might seem quite abstract but in mafia it's a day-to-day reality and it's only when i actually shifted my perception to view the ocean the wind the moon marine animals within the ocean and the the fishermen on top of the ocean as an interconnected entity that i was actually able to understand them and it's only when you shift that perception that you'll be able to understand because otherwise you'll start asking yourself heavy or in translation you'll start questioning yourself was that fisherman talking about fish or fishermen thank you thank you very much excellent presentation uh i'm sure maybe there are some questions sitting to connect this but we're just going to go through to the last presentation and then we will take some question from the floor and and from online so i think our next speaker is online uh okay now now you go uh Christina Nicolini and i hope you you can um you're there and we will um ask you to uh share yeah yeah so yes the title of the presentation is weaponizing litcha shares wailing ovals on hv8's party journey in the epistemic resistance war um christina welcome christina is the soas alum she's just completed a phd at soas um i think is a couple of years ago now um so welcome back christina and the the floor is yours now and you can start your presentation thank you okay thank you can you just confirm that you can see the slideshow yes we can yeah we can see the slideshow and i think you guys on the audience uh online you should be able to see it as well okay thank you so first of all i would like to congratulate ida on a great work of translation and of course the Nobel Prize winner um and yes my presentation is about um this concept that i called weaponizing literature so it's a kind of metaphorical way uh let's speak about how to use literature as a tool uh to operate a kind of conceptual decoronization of quotes and so i started with this metaphor so uh as a kind of compulsion between the partisans of qiesion resistance and the resistance of local epistemology as described in afro from literature which are active in this resistance movement against the intellectual occupation since colonial time and does they define literature in african languages as kind of partijani fighting against epistemological fascism we know that we had a long history of epistemic injustice which happens to to be in very different forms like especially and menautical or testimonial and a great work has been done from sociologist uh the susa santosh who describes the modern western thinking as an abyssal thinking which divides social reality into this side of the line and the other side of the line that is produced as non-existent so as to grant the monopoly to modern science this epistemological fascism results in epistemic side um which has been described as the murder of knowledge however on the other hand we have also um this movement called epistemology of the south which is a cluster of multiple epistemologies born in struggle and anchoring the experience of resistance which engender a new process of both production and validation of valuable knowledge whether scientific or non-scientific in this framework african-centered knowledges are also located which are conceptualized as the third african centered space in between uh euro-centricism and afro-centricism it also includes the african struggles for epistemic freedom against euro-centric thinking as well as to provincializing euro while they provincialize african particularly one example of the struggle of knowledge from the global south are example or an example of epistemology of resistance is the case of traditional healing practices in african therefore the treatment for illness in literature has become a form of epistemic resistance and in fact from my analysis of swaley literature i define hiv-8s as a divisive disease and indeed the divided debate about hiv-8s treatment consists in a kind of balancing and rebalancing of the scale in between modern hospital and traditional healer performances who have their their epistemic role to play in fact the inadequacy or inaccessibility to hospital care pushes people to prefer the traditional expert counseling who intervene to alleviate hiv-8s related disease particularly in swaley literature the healers are portrayed either as professional or as swindlers as well as the hospital are in question for scientific efficacy yet they are viewed as morally corrupted in my case studies i will explore three selected swaley novels from tanzania dealing with hiv-8s namely kisiki kikavo or thrice stamp firaumi the deboshe and finally kuakuama owa the existence of flowers the first novel at new time this novel kisiki kikavo is a historical and documentary novel entirely based on his empirical findings collected during the authors research on the ground conducted in the kagera region in between 92 and 2006 and the novel is set in the aftermath of the ganda-tanzania conflict also known as the kagera war a period between 1969 and after 1983 when aides started spreading in the country in this in the period described in this novel hiv-8s was an unknown and uncurable disease which was challenging both hospital and herbal treatments in addition to this the region was economically devastated because of the war does not only were the hospital lacking adequate equipment and treatments but also swindlers and cheaters took their advantage of the situation pretending to be professional healers hospitalini hauakuna ogonjavo oote kumuambi arudi nyumbani oakana oakana heri oende kuavaganga oajadi kuulisakulikone alikua mepigua na yembe gini anarotu piwam tu nahuatu oabaia alikua na gini yembe ilo nilauga urbune sio yembe la kawaida naku liondoa yembe li lo toka nchidza ngambo sioki to chan chesu so here is presented this vampire spirits theory as an explanation for hiv-8s people were struggling and starving because of the war and because of the ignorance of both medical doctors and healers about this new disease therefore in the end the solution to both injustice and aides seems to have a supernatural key element in fact the off-screen voice of an invisible narrator who is bewildered in the face of dissonant epistemologist that clashed one against the other maintains that the solution which appears closest to program understanding is the one that must be allowed to prevail so once again the bloodsucker theory was the first explanation in the second novel after money obvious novel is a realist novel set at the threshold of the 90s which criticizes the socio-political condition of the Tanzanian society following from the process of neocolonization started after the implementation of the neoliberal reforms the effectiveness of scientific medicine for treating hiv-8s is unquestioning this novel however not only the privatization of the health sector made hospital treatment expensive but also corruption spread among medical doctors as a result once again traditional healers both honest and dishonest came into play to cope with the situation on the other hand the healers perform genuine efforts to cope with which is a typical disease among the zingu ethnicity which affects people who have incestuous relationships and it has the same symptoms of AIDS to some have science and modern medicine are in question but cure are available for those who cannot afford it in fact several socio-political institutions are criticized because of the cut and the privatization of the health sector as well as because of the networks of corruption and bribery in the end the fairest answer to both social injustices AIDS has a kind of supernatural witchcraft finally in William Kufia's philosophical novel is a fictional work based on an intellectual quest regarding the meaning of life, sexuality, fear of death, fate and existential absurdity in connection with hiv-8s which celebrates both scientific and embodied knowledge thus the realistic narration is often unexpectedly enchanted by the complementary inclusion of these non-tontologies from the spiritual world as well as extra sensory perception and paranormal cognition we want quasi the climber baobab is the guardian of my yuyu the fleeting mortals ali ebaki in quasi peke gake la kini atam quasi atam quasi aliche uji am tu huu ni ma buyo si o kisa na kini sama yuyu shani iandamani o kuakua so once again the solution is shani so it's surrounded by some kind of mysterious answers and the principle symbol of connection between the material world and the supernatural world are the owl the bone the boondi or the lightning baobab buyo waradi which are also means of access epistemology of marburg through paranormal cognition extra sensory perception and parapsychological phenomena buyo alimsiki abundi aki uchukulia kaurosi aki suza na kunmise so the baobab could hear the owl's ominous chanting of an evil spell and divination is a way to access the supernatural and the unknown diviners and again diviners unveil a hereditary curse kindalam la peke the chick who is alone or the child who loves only himself this is a traditional course which implies someone whose existence destroyed the other existence so in conclusion we can say that swaley narrative describes the treatment of illness as a battlefield where in plural epistemology cluster and coexist swaley prose fight against epistemic side with with its own style by means of different static weapons stylistic and narrative devices such as generic fracturing fragmentation self-reflexive narrative metaphysical metaphictional devices made up of intertextuality meta references across chance and magical realist style where the conjuring of spiritual ontologies magic and the supernatural interfere in the phenomenal world and where clashes between diverse ontologies and incompatible epistemologies are displayed so not only are swaley novels partigining the war of resistance against epistemological fashists that they fight by means of narrative style and aesthetic of language but they also are an example of a pre-emptive style of writing to avoid repeating epistemic violence and injustice which was perpetrated in the past and score if you would like to score a match about this research you can read my monography which was published in july 22 and thank you for your attention thank you thank you very much Christina okay we can stop sharing now perhaps we can give it a few a little bit of time for a few questions and then we're going to conclude the day I will show you I think I've seen in the program a new database that we've created about a kanga but perhaps before that maybe we can take some questions from the audience or also online yeah is there any question from the audience first yeah Clarice have you got a question you can speak you need to unmute yes yes thank you can you hear me yes we can yeah yeah I have a question actually to to Martin Walsh or probably also to Miriam de Han about dialectal variation of the fish terms because you also have along the coast of course the ecological the maritime environment is similar but also you have on the one hand you have different fish population as well and then of course you have different languages or different dialects so I was just wondering if Martin would want to say something about dialectal variation thank you thank you for beautiful presentations oh it's a very good question and because of time obviously I couldn't go into a lot of detail but to look at each fish name it would typically take me at least half a day or a day to go through all the sort of vocabularies and dictionaries for different dialects that I have and then there are also resources that are not written by linguists but by you know there's the FAO data from fishbase and another other literature so what I'm talking about is actually based on datasheets which in which I have written down or typed all of the variations that I know of and as far as it's possible to know where those terms were recorded so in able to in order to reconstruct for example a term to proto Swahili obviously need to find it in northern Swahili and southern Swahili dialects you also need to be sure that it's not a loan word from one to the other so the sort of starting point of this is the detailed data and this will also give me an opportunity to say to anybody who has a list of fish names and dialect knowledge of fish names please please write it down publish it and before that send it to me because data are the key and so for some groups of species this is really hard to do because of the lack of data it's quite difficult because I don't have a lot from northern Swahili dialects I've not been through the sort of classical literature of northern Swahili but have relatively little data from you know Bajuni and and Mweenie and you know the dialects in the Lama Occupelago so that's a constraint on your ability to do that but it you're right to ask that question because it's fundamentally about that detail and we now at least I you know from sort of personal communications and the literature and work I've done myself when living on Pemba and in Wasini and elsewhere um you know that that that I couldn't do this without all that data and that's why you know during lockdown my wife's a Zanzibar and a speaker of of Kiongugja as well so I have an extra resource there but I couldn't do that work without without that level of um of detail yeah excellent and and please please if you have it don't throw don't throw it away give it to me or or anybody who who who who is interested in it because some of this knowledge is is disappearing and you're right there's there is a lot of variation and I didn't focus in the talk upon variation but if you looked at some of the etymology that I gave you'll see there's quite a few differences but there are some terms like the snappers for which there are a whole series of different terms there's that Dumbwara, there's Tembo, there's Kongu, there's Umbawa and there are other ones that I haven't listed so it's a really big job I mean I kind of think you know well if I have nothing else useful to do maybe I can spend part of the rest of my life just teasing out some of these etymologies because I find it fascinating and it's about the sort of historical genius of the language and it tells us something about where it came from it's only one view it's based on reconstruction you have to match it with the other events we'll never know everything but it's it's I think it's it's you know a really fascinating aspect of Swahili although it's historical roots so thank you. Thank you. Martin okay unless anybody has any other question we can just move on quickly to the as I said I just want to thank you so much Clarissa thank everyone I just want to quickly show you now hopefully it's gonna work okay so just very briefly the center african studies at Swahili has been partnering with the Victorian Alba Museum that is currently exhibiting an exhibition called Africa Fashion I'm sure many of you have probably seen it if you haven't you must go because it's the most one of the best exhibitions I've seen this year and so it's called Africa Fashion at the Victorian Alba Museum because of the exhibition we have decided to create a partnership and we are doing a series of artist talks at Swahili and at the VNA and we launched the first event a few weeks ago with the new director of the Victorian Alba Museum East I'm not sure if you're aware the Victorian Alba Museum is opening a new site in East London and the director is our alum Dr. Gas Caseli Hayford so we are very excited and Dr. Gas Caseli Hayford is also one of our professional practice and he has been helping us with the series we launched it a few weeks ago so we're going to have more events coming up again so follow us at the Centre of African Studies if you're not on the newsletter let us know we can add you and then you will receive all the information about the upcoming events so just in brief as part of the series of events we basically at Swahili there is a scholar called Ezbet Court she's an expert on East African art and in fact she's very sad not to be here today she's a aficionados barasa she's been coming many times and she's an actor on a Kenyan in particular also Tanzanian contemporary art and she's also been collecting Kanga for many many years Ezbet Court is you know it's fairly elderly lady now she is an emeritus and so she had this big collection of Kanga and the Victorian Alba Museum we're very interested in seeing the collection and so they asked us well there's Ezbet to create a spreadsheet through a database and so I helped her with the development of the spreadsheet and today Ezbet was supposed to be here to present the spreadsheet but today Ezbet is turning 80 years old so she had to have a big family party that had been booked for you know a couple of years given the big milestone but she's sending greetings and then she's hoping that the resource that I'm gonna now gonna open if I manage with the help of of my assistant yeah okay move it over no okay there you go okay so we're bringing it up to you yeah yeah there you go so basically what we did ah yes another thing I didn't mention very important obviously okay so now I'm talking more specifically about the the the database as you can see and so this database is now available on the center of african studies website and we hope that it can be used as a resource for teaching as a resource for those interested in art but also those interested in culture and language because one big element of this database as you can see I'm just kind of scrolling um where am I okay there we go so we I just want to show you the the entries that we capture so we capture the image we capture the you know the dimension the manufacturer which is very interesting when Ezbet called collected it what she bought it from so there's a lot of things that she collected from the 80s onwards and and then there is obviously as you all know the metallic the the private on each kanga and that those metallic have been translated by our own Ida and Adam I can see them next to each other yeah a big thanks to them because they've been very very very supportive of these they translated most I mean Ezbet and I tried but then yeah we had the editing of the expert of Swedish language and so yeah so there is also like notes about how some of the kangas are used inscription but again what we would like to also do it maybe if you find information that is not correct for instance or especially when it comes to these parts like the the teams the notes we're trying to sort of bring up a little bit more information about what they offer what they can tell us and so it's an initial study basically it's just a sort of a way of trying to make make the collection more available to the younger audiences and then maybe first further research around the use of kanga about what kanga mean the first way the culture and language as well so yeah so I hope you will you you will browse it and thank you so much for listening about this okay so now we're just going to move on it's been a quite a long day for everyone yeah Wangui has a question there's a question yeah yeah yeah it does here like as you can see I mean from the image you can see it very well but over here here I might just need to be scale open it I might lose the the image so but I think you can zoom in you can see the metallic the the proverb and then we typed it out here because if you see the top so that will be the inscription so those are that's what's in swede and then there is a translation I mean we did find a few very few in not in swede but obviously most of them are and then there is a translation the translation there yeah and the team as well which we thought was gonna be quite useful for people trying to understand the culture of kanga um South Africa so yeah so that's the the database as I said is an initial we might hope to also extend it again if anyone else has collections of kanga they want to be available maybe talk to us we could you know take them on and also expand add to this database because kanga as you know has been a topic of research for many many many years there's a lot of book written about it and I think it's a topic that interests still a lot of people um okay so thank you so much now I'm just calling my co-convener ida to come also we wanted to make a quick statement like um we have our um support today Rebsicele Makami is a SOAS PhD student just graduate she's been helping us a lot today so thank you so much and also people have been approaching you if you want to say a few words about aware about the abstract yeah come I had I had promised to the people that approached me about being sent either abstracts or papers of the presentations today that I will ask Angelica and ida to circulate a paper for your emails but Angelica has just made me aware that all of you who have registered online already have um your emails inside with Angelica and also online the abstracts are there but if you specifically want somebody else as paper from today you can ask Angelica to talk to that writer or to that presenter on your behalf in that present that that present I can send you that paper if that's okay with you thank you okay thank you so much thank you thank you okay so now we just have a few words from ida please come on the stage our sorry uh yeah today you know I just want you to yeah we can close this yeah no thank you very much I had actually wanted to say Mariam Dehan like I absolutely loved your presentation and I wanted to hear more and I was waiting to hear about that you know see that's sort of like um eat the fish event when they're at sea and all that so brilliant thank you very much thank you very much everybody for your presentations um no thank you all for coming thank you very much Excellent. Excellent. Thank you. Thank you so much. I think that I can see. Again, and yeah, one great question. No, I don't have a question, but I want to ask the audience to permit me to thank you very much and also to congratulate Ada for this translation, because I think that was here today really as Walter said, in your time, Leo, you have seen some of it. I want to thank you all so much, and I'm very proud to be proud of you. Thank you all. Yes, I have to add this. Yes, I want you to say, Ada, please say a few words. Yes. Thank you. Thank you so much. And on the note, yes, I want you to say also again that this year Barraza, as we remember some of you, maybe the last Barraza we had was a commemoration of the work for October. And so for me, this year Barraza has been a celebration of Ada Ajiva Giannis. And so the whole generation, the new generation. And as I said, personally, as well for myself, it's been a pleasure working with Ada. Thanks to her. It's like we really feel like we really want to continue with Barraza, because myself I've been here for so many years and it's always like a bit of a struggle to keep going. But then when you have colleagues like that, you just see that it's actually worth continuing. And thank you. Thank you everyone. And yeah, I think we close it now. We all had a long day. We probably want to go home. But yeah, we hope to see you all again soon. Let's stay in touch. And let's keep talking. Thank you.