Swahili Literature in the Arabic Script, part 1

(Editors note: this is an old article from a journal called Manuscripts of the Middle East, which I transcribed for the blog, as it contains a lot of useful information unavailable elsewhere on the web. I will continue to publish snippets of it in future posts. The article was written by Jan Knappert, a well known scholar of Swahili poetry, with several books to his name on the subject. In the interest of space, I have not included all the relevant citations, although should anyone want to consult them, I will be happy to provide them; simply leave a comment on the posting.)

In this article, some aspects of the vast subject of Swahili documents in Arabic script and their contents will be discussed. I have published seven books on the subject, during 36 years of study, but much more remains to be done. In spite of the enormous losses through neglect, vermin, floods and fire, there are still hundreds of Swahili manuscripts in Arabic script in private collections in Barawa, Lamu, Pate, Malindi, Mombasa, Tanga, Bagamoyo, and Zanzibar. Together, these texts comprise the content of Swahili culture: there are texts on theology, law, medicine and many other subjects. Many of the texts are in verse; there are seventy-two known epic poems in Swahili. Three unknown epics have come to light in Mozambique, about which I will report in a later publication. This article will deal mainly with the exterior form of the manuscripts and how they are made.

We do not know when writing on the East African Coast was first practiced. On the basis of archaeological discoveries it has been established that there was contact between the Kenya Coast and Mesopotamia as of c. 750 AD.[i] The oldest known mosques date from the late eleventh century.[ii] Swahili was spoken on the East African Coast when al-Mas’uudi visited it.[iii] Structurally, Swahili is a Bantu language.[iv] Swahili literature has been written in the Arabic script for three centuries[v] until the colonial period when Roman script and printing were introduced.[vi] Still in AD 1900 the German scholar Dr. Seidel could write[vii]: ‘The Swahili language is written in Arabic letters’. We do not know when the Swahili poets first began to write down their works, but the oldest surviving Swahili manuscript is dated with the equivalent year of AD 1652.[viii] From that time onwards there is a steadily increasing stream of manuscripts in the Arabic script. In the library of the University of Dar es Salaam, there are almost a thousand Swahili manuscripts; other collections comprising a few hundred MSS each are to be found in Mombasa, Lamu and London.[ix]

The term literature here includes the complete writings known in a given language. Manuscripts may be handwritten poems, letters, contracts, deeds, and other documents of just one or a few pages each, like some of the long epic poems with over three hundred pages per text.[x] The interest of this literature is in the first place its historical importance: the Swahili are the only people in tropical Africa who possess a written literature going back more than two hundred years.[xi] Many historical data could be gleaned from these MSS.[xii] Secondly, there is an interest for students of culture, in particular Islamic culture, of which the Swahili people have developed their own typical variant.[xiii] Thirdly, students of literature, philologists[xiv], will find some unique works especially in the more than sixty epic poems, many of which have never been published. Some of these are extant only in one manuscript, so that it is fortunate that the Library of SOAS has acquired photostatic copies of many of the MSS in Dar es Salaam, which are now available for study in London, bound in eleven volumes. Many manuscripts are still in private hands in the towns and villages along Africa’s east coast. Not all of them are kept under ideal conditions: the climate is too hot and damp, the houses are not free of insects. But many Swahili manuscripts are part of a family heirloom which owners will not readily part with.[xv]

The tradition of writing Swahili in Arabic script is very much alive today. Poets still write verse in it, including long poems, and letters of all kinds are written in Arabic script, business as well as personal letters. Some enterprising people have begun to print manuscripts by photographic methods and make books from them that are distributed.[xvi]

Originally Arabic script was not very suitable to represent the Swahili sounds, but over the years Swahili scholars have improved it by adding signs, partly taken from the Persian and Urdu traditions, so that today Arabic script is in many ways superior to Roman in showing phonemic features. There are two major conventions: the old ‘stenographic’ convention, in which the writing is clearly used as no more than an aid to refresh the reciter’s memory, and, at the other extreme, there is Mw. Yahya Ali’s perfected adaptations of Arabic script to the Swahili language, in which all the alveolar and aspirated consonants are carefully represented so that his method of orthography is in fact superior to the Roman alphabet without phonetic diacritics The first thing that young children in an Islamic culture are taught is the Arabic script. After this they are taught to read (not yet to understand, that will come later) the first chapter of the Koran. The major part of their primary education will be reading and memorizing this book, which for a Muslim is the literal word of God.

            This Holy Book is written (and now printed) in the Arabic script. Consequently, for all Muslims, the Arabic script is closely associated with the most revered thing on earth: the book that contains God’s own words. No wonder that Islamic peoples such as the Persians and the Pakistanis use the Arabic script to write their language even though it is quite unsuitable for Indo-European languages. They feel that it is the best script in the world. The nations which no longer use the Arabic script for their language, Turkey, Indonesia and Malaysia, have abolished it because they are now “secular” states, Westernized nations. Even in those countries there are large collections of manuscripts in Arabic script, waiting to be studied, edited and published.

            We cannot here go into any details of codicology, the science of manuscripts, which examines the paper, the ink, the writing and other details which can inform us regarding the time, the country and the culture of the writers of a given manuscript. Islamic scribes end the writing of manuscript with a “colophon”, usually in a curiously triangular shape in which they put their name, home-town, and the date. Not all writers are so accurate, unfortunately. Sometimes the owner will put his name in the colophon, but, of course, neither he nor the scribe, i.e. the copyist, is necessarily the author of the work. The poet (if it is a poem we are studying) sometimes names himself in the last few verses of his work, often with a pen name rather his patronymic; these pen names were known to all contemporary insiders, but later historians usually have great difficulty identifying the author, and dating him. Many uncertainties remain in Swahili literature.

            Since every person has his own unmistakable hand, and since some scholars made a living (or more often a small occasional fee) by copying manuscripts for collectors, several scribes hands are well known to the students of codicology. In Swahili, the best known scribes are Mw. Yahya Ali, Mw. Muhammad Sikujua and Muhammad Abu Bakari Kijumwa.[xvii]

            Writing is considered an art in Islamic culture, indeed it is the most Islamic of all arts. A calligrapher, a person with a fine hand-writing, is still held in high esteem by his fellow Muslims. He will be asked, for instance, to write out passage from the Koran, one-page chapters, which people wear on their persons, folded up, wrapped in a piece of cloth with a string round the neck. Many people believe that these hand-written passages have the power to protect their wearers against many of life’s dangers, diseases and disasters.[xviii] This may serve as an illustration of the faith people have in the Koran as the word of God, and the power of every hand-written copy of this divine text. No wonder that the art of writing is surrounded with a mysterious aura of spiritual sanctity, and the man (less often the woman) who can write is likewise revered.

            Many of these scribes are also scribes in the Biblical sense, i.e. they are interpreters of the Holy Book, and thus experts in Islamic law, juriconsults, whose social prestige is often measurable in terms of political power. The result was that Islamic scholars rose to the highest offices in the state, they became imamu (‘rector’ of a mosque)[xix], kadhi (judge), or even vizier (Swahili waziri[xx],  minister). The art of calligraphy was practiced by sultans and princes, as well as by the poorest students, who thus shared the same aesthetic ideals. Unlike Chinese, Arabic script is based entirely on abstract signs, each of which must form an aesthetically satisfying unit by itself. In Koranic and ornamental writing every consonant is accompanied by its vowel sign (see below) to make a complete syllable and fill the space between the lines. Since each of the twenty-eight characters of the Arabic script represents a consonant, the three (five in Swahili) vowel signs give each character syllabic value. In Swahili, the vowel signs are a necessary part of the script, since the language is syllabic; in Arabic poetry too, the vowels have to be written.

            Arabic letters have symbolic values as a result of their spiritual usage. For instance, the first letter of the Arabic alphabet, called alif, is also the sign for the number one, a simple vertical stroke, the first letter of the word ahad, ‘one’, which in the Koran refers to God, who is the One next to Whom there is none. The word Allahu, ‘God’ also begins with that letter. Among the prophets, the letter alif symbolizes Adam, whose name also begins with alif, and who was the first prophet and the first human being The letter mim, the m of the Arabic alphabet is the 25^th letter. It symbolizes Muhammad, who was the 25^th prophet (after Isa (Jesus), who was the 24^th. One the numerical scale, the mim has the value 40, because Muhammad was 40 when God first revealed the Koran to him. In this way every letter has its own special set of meanings and values, some of which are known to God alone.[xxi] The text of the Koran is thus much more than a series of phonetic signs, much more than a collection of histories and exhortations. Every page is like a length of cloth, into which God has woven the destinies of men, the horizontal lines alternating with the vertical lines to form patterns of beauty like the alternating strings of days and nights in our lives. The text of the Koran is immutable, it has always existed and will always exist as the mother of Man’s destiny. It has meanings behind meanings which even the sages can only guess at.

The paper

            The Swahili word for paper, karatasi, is of Greek origin and initially meant ‘papyrus’. True paper was introduced in the world of Islam during the early Abbasid period, i.e. after 750 AD, by Chinese prisoners who taught their Muslim masters to make it from rags of linen. The use of paper was established in the Arab world before 800 AD., i.e. the time of Harun al-Rashid, the great Caliph, since he had ordered it to be used in all the offices of his government in Baghdad. There, paper soon completely replaced papyrus as well as parchment, especially since writings on paper could not as easily be scratched out, as was done with writing on parchment. Even the Egyptians no longer used papyrus, indeed Egyptian paper soon became highly valued for its softness, its smoothness, and its whiteness; yellow, red, pink, green and blue paper was also produced there.

            In East Africa the paper was mixed in a pulp-vat (kasiria) with starch (nashaa), laid out on a deckle (kalibu) and then hung on the walls to dry. We do not know for sure that paper is still made by the Swahili; so far as is known, most of their paper now comes from India, at least it did in the nineteenth century. Ruling was obtained by means of a net made of string which was pressed down on the paper giving it lines to write on (misitari) as well as vertical lines for margins and to make the half lines of poetry. For the utenzi form a special ‘net’ was used with five vertical strings to ‘hold’ the kipandes, that is, the four pieces of the stanza (ubeti)[xxii] so that the page showed great regularity and beauty. For a long poem or a long chronicle the sheets could be glued or bound together to make a book, or they could be attached in long sequences, one at the bottom of the other, to form a scroll. The oldest shairi poems, however, were written on long sheets, from right to left, so that four lines fit across the page. In this way the final rhyme of the stanza, which has to be identical throughout the poem, could be shown at the left side down the page, for both the utenzi and the shairi. Instead of calling for his pen, the poem might ask for his assistant or apprentice:

            Mbuya lete karatasi ya Misiri

            Iwe safi na nyeupe ahiyari

            ‘My friend, bring Egyptian paper,

            let it be the best: pure white.’

            Unfortunately, unlike in the dry lands of the Middle East, where written documents on paper have been preserved from the early Middle Ages (from the ninth century in Egypt), in the tropical regions paper perishes quickly as it has many enemies: humidity, white ants, cockroaches, moths and worms, so that only four Swahili MSS of the eighteenth century have survived, and only one of the seventeenth.[xxiii]

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The Yacoubian Building (Book Review)

The Yacoubian Building is a rich and multi-layered examination of the intersections of sex, race, class, and state violence in modern Egypt. The building's complex and morally ambiguous tenants rise, fall and scrabble to their feet again from various circumstances. On the one hand, this novel is a brilliantly executed tapestry of interconnected stories--Taha's lost love Busayna gets used by another character, Malak to trick a third character Zaki el-Dessouki, into giving up his lavish apartment. One common thread through the characters and their stories is, the cynicism with which people, particularly men, use others, to achieve happiness. On the other hand, The Yacoubian Building is a revealed archive of Egypt's layered pasts--the linguistic and cultural legacies of French and British colonialism, the contested figure of Gamal Abdel Nasser as hero or heretic, the multiple registers of Arabic language, and the rising influence of Islamist organizations on Egyptian society. Aswany, as a secular intellectual, is obviously quite skeptical of how far the newfound piety in Egypt really penetrates, but his faith is nevertheless strong in the "everyday goodness" of Egyptians. It is this flexibility that allows people like the closeted gay newspaper editor Hatim to flout certain social conventions within well-defined limits. The elasticity of this commonsense piety is what Aswany seems to admire, in contrast to the more austere piety of the Islamists. Nevertheless Aswany refuses to caricature Islamists. On the contrary, he gives the reader a very moving and convincing portrait of how a young Egyptian becomes radicalized, and the instrumental role of state violence in that process. This fictional portrayal shows, far better than most policy reports I have read, the step-by-step process by which the lower-class Taha is denied access to the traditional routes to respectability and begins to be pulled into the ambit of the Islamists at his university. Aswany shows how Islamist rhetoric works on the young man, pulling at his desire for Busayna. We can symphathize with how Taha becomes an activist, and we understand his desire for revenge, not as a brainwashed youth marching into Paradise, but as someone who has experienced very real torture at the hands of state security forces. It is this factor of torture that proples him into the violent act that ends the novel. There are numerous clues that he, (like his first love Busayna and others) is a victim of cynical manipulation by those who were supposed to be his closest compatriots. Finally The Yacoubian Building is a heartbreaking commentary on the venality of everyday life, and a look into the heartbreaking choices that people must make in these conditions. Aswany's book is a critique of power and the raw urge to dominate and use others that lies at the core of violence. When Hatim tosses racist slurs at his lover Abduh, when Hagg manipulates his mistress into an abortion, we see that the Islamists are not the cause but a symptom of a society profoundly sickened by corruption and greed. Women and men wear masks over their feelings, performing a lie, just as the state wears a mask of piety and order cloaking its brutal forms of repression, hypocricy and violence. Aswany ends the novel on a note of optimism--the wedding of Zaki and Busayna, the old aristocrat and his young lover. In spite of evil, Aswany seems to be saying, love, fragile but persistent, can bloom out of degradation and humiliation.

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A Talk and a Reading from Abdul Rahzak Gurnah

In two fascinating talks over this past week, the Program of African Studies at Northwestern University was treated to the prose and reflection of Abdul Rahzak Gurnah, one of the foremost writers in the United Kingdom as well as a Zanzibari exile who writes about East African history, migration, and postcolonial identities in Zanzibar and the UK. In his talks, Gurnah emphasized how two of his major books--Paradise and Admiring Silencewere written after traveling. Traveling, according to Gurnah, unlocks a kind of knowledge different from other kinds of knowledge. In Paradise, which Gurnah wrote the ending to first and then finally finished ten years (and one other novel) later, he wanted to understand what had been lost on the Swahili coast through colonialism, and how his parents' generation might have experienced it. This becomes especially pertinent to Gurnah as a Zanzibari because of the kinds of connections the Zanzibar Revolution celebrated (inter-African). The Revolutionary discourse consigned Zanzibar’s ‘Indian Ocean’ history (its ‘outside’ history) to forgetfulness and shame.

Gurnah, on the other hand, wants neither to celebrate the Omani presence in Zanzibar nor to set it aside, but to see it through the historical framework in which it emerged: the Indian Ocean. What was it like to be young at the end of the nineteenth/beginning of the twentieth century in East Africa? It was to be part of an Indian Ocean world. Gurnah's novel Paradise is a vivid work of historical imagination which is remarkable not only for its intimate portrait of coastal culture but for the silences it acknowledges--the characters on the caravan trail in the interior, speak openly about the barbarism of those they encounter. The main character is a slave of a coastal merchant, and Gurnah writes about slavery on the coast with great subtlety--showing its various hierarchies and subtle gradations of subservience.

Gurnah's characters are not helpless but often powerless. Their way of moving through the world is a different style than open resistance. It is a kind of stoicism, a gracious accepting, a recognition that your way of living is itself a kind of integrity, even in passivity.

Scholars of Kiswahili debate whether a novel like Paradise is properly an English or a Swahili novel, and this is high praise in its own way, because it shows the degree to which Gurnah is able to use English with the rhythm of Swahili, to transform English into something suiting the picture he is trying to paint. The art of storytelling...and reading a Gurnah novel, you are in the hands of a master.

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Book Review: Muntu by Jaheinz Jahn

I can’t say enough about this book. Over 50 years old, it is still worth revisiting for the force for which it makes its defense of African thought, philosophy and religion. Janheinz Jahn, a German scholar, originally wrote Muntu in 1958, around the time of intellectual ferment of luminaries like Fanon, Cesaire, and Senghor. The American edition first appeared in 1961 and was named book of the year by at least one major publishing organization. Jahn lays out the characteristics of African thought as illuminated through New World African religions like Santeria and Voudoun.

Unlike so much of today’s timid postmodernist theorization. Jahn is unafraid of the broad comparison and the book is infused with both an urgency born of passion for the subject matter, in addition to Jahn’s considerable erudition. He is equally at home discussing the implications of nommo, or the magic of the spoken word, as he is the function and symbols within Voudoun, or the difference between New World African religion and its parent in Africa. He also devotes a section to tracing the strands of African thought in the works of the so-called Negritude poets.

I will let William J. Austin, who has reviewed Jahn's work here, have the word on explaining the basic philosophical principles of African thought and aesthetics, according to Jahn:

The text is neatly divided into the major categories of African culture and religion, two forces which, as Jahn points out, flow in and out of one another like a river and its tributaries. Although Jahn makes mention of the cultures formed in northern Africa via the commingling of African and Arabic/Islamic impulses, his focus here is on “Black Africa,” or that larger portion of the continent below the Sahara. This section of Africa, however various in its individual cultural expressions, was surprisingly united in an overall religious structure that informed the ritual of worship, as well as the more pedestrian day to day activities. This over-arching structure contains four major forces: Muntu, Kintu, Hantu, and Kuntu. Muntu, or “human being,” finds its earliest known expression in the culture of the Bantu tribe. As a “force” it is plural, reflecting the myriad variations of humanity. Muntu, however, is not a self-activating force, but rather ‘sleeps,” dormant, while awaiting its activation via a more active sub-force known as Nommo. Nommo, quite simply, is language. The priests and elders of a tribe are most invested with Nommo, and maintain the power to enliven natural objects, and even man-made ones, through a ritualistic process of naming. But all human beings participate in Nommo to some degree. In fact, it is not until a parent names a child, that the child may be considered human, may be said to participate in Muntu. What we have, then, in the concepts of Muntu and Nommo, is not unlike the structuralist/post-structuralist emphasis on language as the begetter of personhood, of humanity. The linkage is certainly there, but it also obtains between Nommo and the Biblical declaration that “In the beginning was the word.”

In any event, Jahn’s detailed analysis makes clear the amazing similarities that reach across seemingly isolated cultures. Like Muntu, Kintu is plural, and represents the force or “spirit” in all non-human objects, animate and inanimate, including animals. Hantu is place and time, and Kuntu, perhaps the most complex concept of the four, represents modality, i.e., quality, style, rhythm and beauty. All four forces are united linguistically by the suffix and concept of NTU, or the essential compatibility and coherence of all things, human and non-human. The many in the one, the one in the many — this is familiar philosophical ground, and more evidence that Nommo does indeed unite all cultures, races, creeds, in their differences.

The one fault with the book is its almost complete lack of discussion about the impact of Islam and the Arabs on African culture and religion. No doubt there are other books that do this admirably, but it would have been quite interesting for Jahn to extend his thesis to some of the cultures of East Africa such as Somalia, the Swahili Coast or Zanzibar. Or even Ethiopia…the point being that these cultures have a much more ancient tradition of contact with Abrahamic religions, ergo we might expect to see a different kind of integration within an overall philosophy of Muntu then that which occured in the Americas under Jahn's rubric of neo-African culture.

How does Neo-African culture apply to African Islamic cultures of the East Coast, where extensive cultural mixing also took place? No doubt a variety of practices exist today which reincarnate the ancient beliefs in new forms, for example the practice of praying to Sufi saints and venerating their burial sites as holy places.

What is perhaps most interesting about Jahn’s thesis, as Austin pointed out, is that he brings out the true monotheism at the core of most African religion, explaining that this ONE God who is RULER OVER ALL is so distant from humanity that humans needs a variety of intermediaries in order to tap into the power of GOD's Being.

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Pan-African Reading For All Conference feat. Ngugi

Over at Knowledge Matters, a blog run by Tanzanian journalist Emmanuel Onyango, there is an announcement about the Pan-African Reading For All Conference in Dar-es-Salaam. Please click on the title link for more information about the conference:

A well known African novelist, a Kenyan born Professor Ngugi wa Thion’go is expected to be among the key speakers at the sixth annual Pan-African Reading for All Conference scheduled to take place later in Dar es Salaam. According to the Chairman of the conference preparatory committee, Professor Mugyabuso Mulokozi, Professor Ngugi would also be accompanied by Kenyan popular scholar in the USA Professor Ally Mazrui, President of the Pearson Foundation Nieker Mark and Patricia Edward, President of International Reading Association. Tanzanian President Jakaya Mrisho Kikwete would be the Chief guest of the conference that is expected to attract more than 200 local and International participants. The event has been championed by Children’s book project for Tanzania Develop Literature Society, Reading for All Pan-African voice of literacy and other stakeholders.

Anyone going to be in Dar for this conference? (Incidentally its around the same time as IPAD East Africa, which is also in Dar).

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