Swahili Beyond the Boundaries: literature, language and identity (review)

This book explores a complex issue: the relationship between writers from the old centres of Swahili culture on the East African coast and the wider intellectual milieu of writers using the Swahili language across East Africa. It is very knowledgeable, often enlightening, and occasionally frustrating.

Alamin Mazrui sets out from the term ‘hybridity’: he asserts that the Swahili language and its literature were hybrids from the beginning, the product of an encounter between ‘African’ and ‘Arabo-Islamic’ peoples. Swahili then crossed further boundaries so as to create the far-flung literary ‘space’ of the present, which includes not only much of continental East Africa, but also Swahili scholars in the Western academy. Yet this hybridity, he argues, should not be allowed to obscure the fact that there are people ‘of Swahili ethnicity’ for whom being Swahili is a distinctive whole rather than a hybrid mixture.

Although the book mentions the milestones of pre-colonial Swahili literature, its focus is on the twentieth century. Mazrui’s command of a large and diverse body of literature and his insistence on connecting literary events and debates back to history and politics are the greatest strengths of the book. He makes clear how vividly writers in the Swahili language have engaged with and reflected every stage of the colonial and post-colonial history of the region: from poems about the German occupation of the Swahili coast to novels addressing the differing post-colonial politics of Kenya and Tanzania.

Writers whom he describes as ‘ethnically’ Swahili form part of this adventure at every stage. Mazrui uses two literary debates among authors using Swahili to trace the role of these ethnic Swahili in relation to the shifting boundaries of the Swahili literary sphere: one about the use of non-traditional metres in Swahili-language poetry, and one about the status of works translated into Swahili from other languages in the Swahili literary canon. He shows that both debates were informed by a vast variety of sometimes conflicting points of reference, which included the history of Swahili prosody, English-language academia and various forms of East African nationalism. Throughout, ‘ethnic’ Swahili held on to a sense of stewardship for ‘their’ language, but they were flexible in integrating innovations and by no means unanimous. Thus the Swahili ‘literary space’ continues to evolve.

Given the elusiveness of definitions of the term ‘Swahili’ and the changing subtexts of ethnicity in East Africa generally, it is hardly surprising that the author has to use some problematic terms in the course of this investigation. Academic attempts to define ‘Swahili’ and identify its (or their) origins have gone on for at least a century, and for about half of this time were put in more or less explicitly racist terms. It is surprising, though, that the author does not do more to interrogate the terms he has to work with. Arguably, even the idea of Swahili as an ethnicity is a post-colonial one: for a long time, members of Swahili-speaking towns identified more closely with local lineages than with any notion of ‘Swahilidom’.

When ‘Swahili’ did become an ethnic label, it took on political connotations informed by the colonial dispensation. For a while (and in some contexts even now) it denoted ‘plebeian’, ‘of uncertain origin’, as former slaves claimed Swahili identity. But Mazrui gives the impression that uninterrupted generations of Islamic scholars and notables (whom he calls ‘priestly poets’) readily identified themselves as Swahili, in effect obscuring arguments about inclusion and exclusion within old Swahili-speaking communities.

Mazrui also argues that the continental spread of Swahili entailed the ‘secularization’ of a language which at its inception had been intrinsically Islamic: he speaks of the ‘Arabo-Islamic’ contribution to its creation. The importance of contact with the Arab and Muslim world for Swahili is uncontroversial, but it would need balancing, for instance, with the role of Persian (‘Shirazi’) influence and...