Swahili Origins PDF Download

Author: James De Vere Allen
Publisher: James Currey
ISBN: 9780852550762
Category : Africa, Eastern
Languages : en
Pages : 272

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Author: Kelly Askew
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226029816
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 436

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Book Description
Since its founding in 1964, the United Republic of Tanzania has used music, dance, and other cultural productions as ways of imagining and legitimizing the new nation. Focusing on the politics surrounding Swahili musical performance, Kelly Askew demonstrates the crucial role of popular culture in Tanzania's colonial and postcolonial history. As Askew shows, the genres of ngoma (traditional dance), dansi (urban jazz), and taarab (sung Swahili poetry) have played prominent parts in official articulations of "Tanzanian National Culture" over the years. Drawing on over a decade of research, including extensive experience as a taarab and dansi performer, Askew explores the intimate relations among musical practice, political ideology, and economic change. She reveals the processes and agents involved in the creation of Tanzania's national culture, from government elites to local musicians, poets, wedding participants, and traffic police. Throughout, Askew focuses on performance itself—musical and otherwise—as key to understanding both nation-building and interpersonal power dynamics.

Author: Stephanie Wynne-Jones
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317430166
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 672

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Book Description
The Swahili World presents the fascinating story of a major world civilization, exploring the archaeology, history, linguistics, and anthropology of the Indian Ocean coast of Africa. It covers a 1,500-year sweep of history, from the first settlement of the coast to the complex urban tradition found there today. Swahili towns contain monumental palaces, tombs, and mosques, set among more humble houses; they were home to fishers, farmers, traders, and specialists of many kinds. The towns have been Muslim since perhaps the eighth century CE, participating in international networks connecting people around the Indian Ocean rim and beyond. Successive colonial regimes have helped shape modern Swahili society, which has incorporated such influences into the region’s long-standing cosmopolitan tradition. This is the first volume to explore the Swahili in chronological perspective. Each chapter offers a unique wealth of detail on an aspect of the region’s past, written by the leading scholars on the subject. The result is a book that allows both specialist and non-specialist readers to explore the diversity of the Swahili tradition, how Swahili society has changed over time, as well as how our understandings of the region have shifted since Swahili studies first began. Scholars of the African continent will find the most nuanced and detailed consideration of Swahili culture, language and history ever produced. For readers unfamiliar with the region or the people involved, the chapters here provide an ideal introduction to a new and wonderful geography, at the interface of Africa and the Indian Ocean world, and among a people whose culture remains one of Africa’s most distinctive achievements.

Author: Derek Nurse
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 9780812212075
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 148

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"As an introduction to how the history of an African society can be reconstructed from largely nonliterate sources, and to the Swahili in particular, . . . a model work."—International Journal of African Historical Studies

Author: John Middleton
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 9780300060805
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 554

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The Swahili of East Africa have a long and distinctive history as a literate, Muslim, urban, and mercantile society. This book presents an anthropological account of the Swahili and offers an original analysis of their little-understood and unusual culture.

Author: Dainess Mashiku Maganda
Publisher: Adonis & Abbey Publishers Ltd
ISBN: 191223470X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 249

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Book Description
History is a testament to what happened to a people or a place. It shows how things were and their transformation while explaining why the changes happened. Not only does history allow human beings to trace their trajectory in dealing with specific issues they face in the affairs of making a living, it also highlights movements between people around the world while showing their role in creating systems still in place today. History reveals to us major contributors of the trading systems along the east coast of Africa, documenting the role of the Swahili people and their interactions with different people of the world.The Swahili People and Their Language discusses ways in which the Swahili people came to occupy a prominent position in the world's trading system and how they lost their wealth through their contact with the outside world. The book highlights the strategic position occupied by the Swahili people, their natural resources, their skills and their rich cultural mix and how the contact with the outside world played a major influence that is clearly noticeable to date. The book contributes to the on-going discussion about Africans and their participation in today's development and reminds readers that the creation of the current economic, social and political situation of the Swahili people mirrors the history and positioning of many other formerly independent societies that became colonized nation-states. The authors provide discussions that shade light on critical questions such as: Who are the Swahili people and why are they important? Is there such a thing as a Swahili Civilization? If so, what is it and how does it relate to modern civilization? What place does the Swahili language occupy both in its history and usage on the continent and in the rest of the world?

Author: Kai Kresse
Publisher: Indiana University Press
ISBN: 0253037557
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 256

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Book Description
Swahili Muslim Publics and Postcolonial Experience is an exploration of the ideas and public discussions that have shaped and defined the experience of Kenyan coastal Muslims. Focusing on Kenyan postcolonial history, Kai Kresse isolates the ideas that coastal Muslims have used to separate themselves from their "upcountry Christian" countrymen. Kresse looks back to key moments and key texts—pamphlets, newspapers, lectures, speeches, radio discussions—as a way to map out the postcolonial experience and how it is negotiated in the coastal Muslim community. On one level, this is a historical ethnography of how and why the content of public discussion matters so much to communities at particular points in time. Kresse shows how intellectual practices can lead to a regional understanding of the world and society. On another level, this ethnography of the postcolonial experience also reveals dimensions of intellectual practice in religious communities and thus provides an alternative model that offers a non-Western way to understand regional conceptual frameworks and intellectual practice.

Author: Jan Knappert
Publisher: Edwin Mellen Press
ISBN:
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 370

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Book Description
This two-volume book is a series of essays on the culture of the people who live on the east coast of Africa between the border of Somalia in the north and the Mozambique border in the south. The term 'culture' is to be taken in the widest sense. It includes ways of earning a livelihood, pastimes, sailing and other occupations as well as religion. Obviously not all aspects of culture could be represented in this work, which is the fruit of a lifetime of study. Every chapter in this work is the fruit of the author's own investigation of the East African coastal culture. Students of African Studies and advanced anthropology who read these essays will benefit from this work

Author: Patricia Caplan
Publisher: Africa Research and Publications
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 260

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Book Description
This book considers the themes of modernity, identity and politics on the East African coast and islands. This area is undergoing rapid change as globalisation makes its impact. Tourism, increased monetisation, emigration and immigration and various multinational agencies are all significant factors. The volume also focuses on how the Swahili language, literature and culture have been affected by modernity and the way in which Swahili women continue to live under the strong social constraints that this community place them under. - Verlagsangaben

Author: Philippe Beaujard
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9781108424561
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 946

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Book Description
Europe's place in history is re-assessed in this first comprehensive history of the ancient world, centering on the Indian Ocean and its role in pre-modern globalization. Philippe Beaujard presents an ambitious and comprehensive global history of the Indian Ocean world, from the earliest state formations to 1500 CE. Supported by a wealth of empirical data, full color maps, plates, and figures, he shows how Asia and Africa dominated the economic and cultural landscape and the flow of ideas in the pre-modern world. This led to a trans-regional division of labor and an Afro-Eurasian world economy. Beaujard questions the origins of capitalism and hints at how this world-system may evolve in the future. The result is a reorienting of world history, taking the Indian Ocean, rather than Europe, as the point of departure. Volume I provides in-depth coverage of the period from the fourth millennium BCE to the sixth century CE.