Ann Biersteker
And it is a fact remarked by the Natives themselves that while the Dialect of Lamu and its congeners, which are so interestingly discussed in this Book, are affected by the Swahilis at large as affording a mine and a mould for the forms and expressions of most Swahili Poetry, and while the Zanzibar group to the South has furnished a lingua franca, and a terminology for Trade, – the Mombassian or Kimvita is the Dialect considered by all others the best fitted for accurate statement and grave discussion – the Swahili for Prose, par excellence.
The utendi is both religious and secular, entertaining and didactic, appealing to the senses and to reason, history and poetry – and it is mostly a bias entrenched in Western intellectual history and perpetuated through research which has prevented us from seeing these correlations.
Vierke (2011: 439)
All interesting literature is born in that moment when you are not sure if you are in one place with one culture.
Yoko Tawada, quoted in Grimes (2014: 5)
Swahili literary genres and conventions, as well as numerous and diverse specific Swahili literary works, have intrigued and inspired a wide range of writers on African history. While early writers on East African history considered only the chronicles of Swahili city‐states, more recently scholars have begun to write about other narrative genres as well as about Swahili narrative poetry (tendi or tenzi), sung poetry (nyimbo), and poetry composed in the mashairi genre. Historians have also turned to ethnographies, local histories, the more recent genre of autobiographical writing in Swahili, and the Swahili novel, although literary works may, of course, be problematic when they are read as documents. An understanding of both literature and history informs some of the most insightful works that address significant issues in African history as well as issues that are central to Swahili literary history. While a few recent scholars of Swahili literary history have studied older works from Kenya, most historians who have written about Swahili literature have drawn upon examples from postcolonial Tanzania and have discussed topics that are specific to Tanzanian history. Their works present models for future comparative scholarship to address a broader range of historical topics.
As many scholars have explained, the texts that have come to be known as the Swahili chronicles, prose narratives about specific Swahili city‐states, are problematic as sources for a variety of reasons (e.g., Pouwels 1993; see also Prins 1958).2 Their inaccuracies are obvious and they are, for the most part, genealogies of ruling families. In addition, the language and circumstances of their composition raise questions about the motives for their creation. Citing Allen (1982, 1993) and Nurse and Spear (1985), Wynne‐Jones argues that
These tales, rather than reflecting a historical narrative to be read literally, are more often now construed as thematic charters for the towns, establishing longevity for issues of importance to urban Swahili of the moment, such as the importance of the exotic in establishing elite status, and particularly a concern with familial association with the Islamic heartlands. (2010: 412)
She also suggests that
For the colonial officers who became the authors of these indigenous histories, the contents – emphasizing foreign origins and the deeds of glorious sultans – fitted well with their preconceptions about the narrators. As possessors of complex urban pasts with a web of links to the wider Islamic worlds, the Swahili claims to Arabo‐Persian heritage were more easily reconciled with colonial assumptions than if these urban people had claimed full‐blooded African descent. Likewise, for the Swahili, scholarly interest in their past offered the opportunity for a certain amount of social maneuvering, as the status afforded by Arab ancestry was desirable in the stratified racism of the colonial regime. (Wynne‐Jones 2010: 412)
The earliest chronicles are those of Kilwa. The two extant Kilwa chronicles are in Arabic and Portuguese, but Elias Saad (1979) has argued that the sources for both may be competing Swahili versions. The most accessible version of the Kilwa Chronicle is that included in Freeman‐Grenville (1962: 34–49). This version is also known as Kitab al‐Sulwa.3 Strong (1895) first published this version in Arabic and provided an English summary and analysis. De Barros (1945–1946: 1.323–328) published a Portuguese version of the chronicle and Theal (1898–1903) translated this version into English. More recent chronicles are those of Lamu, Pate, Mombasa, and Ngazija. Shaibu Faraji bin Hamed al‐Bakariy al‐Lamuy’s (1938) Lamu Chronicle was edited and translated by William Hichens. The translation ends with the statement “Written down by Saleh at the command of the Governor Abdallah bin Hamed,” but the final sentence in the Swahili version, “Maneno haya yote tumenakili” (All of these words we have copied), suggests that this manuscript was copied from an earlier text. Tolmacheva (1993) has edited the Pate Chronicle based on the extant versions and editions of it.
Omar and Frankl (1990) published the Mombasa Chronicle, and Said Bakari bin Sultani Ahmed’s (1977) version of the Ngazija Chronicle was edited and translated by Lyndon Harries. The Kitab al Zanuj (1957), a chronicle in Arabic, narrates the history of the northernmost Swahili communities. Eugeniusz Rzewuski (1991–1992) discusses narratives about the Tungi Sultanate in what is now northern Mozambique. Nurse’s “Historical Texts from the Swahili Coast” provides the basis for linking poetic and prose historical narratives by including examples of each with translations (Nurse 1994). He includes Bajuni/Kitikuu and Siu/Kisiyu narrative poems in the dialects as well as examples of the Bajuni/Kitikuu vave genre and prose historical narratives in Mwini/Chiimwini and Bajuni/Kitikuu. There are also suggestions that there were chronicles of other city‐states (see Prins 1958 and Hollis 1900). Despite their limitations, scholars have found the chronicles useful for the study of Islam in East Africa (Patterson 2009) and for the study of Swahili knowledge of geography (Tolmacheva 1995). Based on her research at Vumba Kuu, Wynne‐Jones (2010) argues that
The evidence of archaeology at Vumba Kuu does not simply “disprove” [the histories collected by Hollis]; rather, it gives an insight into the ongoing process of historical memory and the process of forgetting Vumba Kuu’s humble past while commemorating an ideal past that worked for the present. Through a focus on this dynamic process, and particularly the ways that it was bound up in material practices, the different periods of Vumba’s past are brought together into a continual process of becoming, or negotiating Swahili identity as constituted in different time periods. Thus, we may see a disjuncture between the histories as presented to, and understood by, Hollis, and the past as it was laid down in the archaeological record: the history of everyday life. The archaeological record allows a reassessment of the histories as artifacts; the claims of the Vumba elite are cast as aspirational, using history as a means of creating a certain identity to move into the twentieth century. (2010: 408–409)
In a footnote Wynne‐Jones raises intriguing questions:
Some aspects of Hollis’ transcription may have become a little confused with the history of Vumba. The origin dates given for the Nabahani dynasty at Pate and the Sultans at Vumba are both given as AD 1204 (600 AH); in the Vumba case the subsequent dynastic list does not contain enough names for it to carry through to the Sultans of known date in the seventeenth century. Rather, it seems that the Vumba date may have been conflated with that of Pate, either by Hollis himself in error, or by his informants who were aware of the better‐known histories of Nabahani dominance. (2010: 408–4094)
Perhaps Hollis did make a misleading or possibly telling error, but studies of the Swahili chronicles have not considered that these texts may well have circulated among the multilingual elites within East Africa. There have been no comparative studies of chronicles even though examples of such narratives about polities from northern Mozambique to southern Somalia have been studied. There has been little consideration of the transmission of texts between Swahili city‐states although we know, on the basis of texts confiscated by the Portuguese, that such exchanges occurred in the early eighteenth century (e.g., see Omar and Frankl 1994; Lynn 2005) and had probably also taken place earlier given what we know about contacts between these communities. On the basis of the work of Bang (2012) and others (e.g., Biersteker 1996), it is clear that texts, including poetic eulogies and prose and poetic wasiya (testaments), were widely and broadly exchanged in eastern Africa and beyond from the mid‐ to the late nineteenth century as well as during the twentieth century. There is considerable evidence of an extensive exchange of texts to promote Islamic learning (e.g., Farsy 1989; Abdulaziz 1996). It is also clear that by at least the early nineteenth century political arguments were exchanged between some of the Swahili city‐states (Abdulaziz 1977; Biersteker and Shariff 1993; Feidel and Shariff 1986). Similarities between the Swahili chronicles suggest the possibility of exchanges of chronicles between city‐states; alternatively, the relative universality of narratives of genealogy or origins and their use by elites to establish their legitimacy may explain aspects of the history of the Swahili chronicles. While chronicles, once produced after solicitation by outsiders, may have been exchanged between the elite of Swahili city‐states, there is no evidence of how they might have been used within the Swahili communities. Fictional or actual genealogies could have been used for various purposes within communities or by families or clans, but there is no evidence that chronicles or similar types of narratives were used more widely within Swahili‐speaking communities to establish legitimacy or anything else.
During German colonial rule in East Africa officials collected and solicited a wide range of texts from Swahili speakers. “Scribblemania”5 might well be used to describe the volume of this material and it could be said, as Assia Djebar did of writing about the conquest of Algeria, “their publication will form a pyramid to hide the initial violence from view” (1993: 45). But the Germans even solicited poems in Swahili that documented the violence of the conquest of what became German East Africa (see examples in Miehe et al. 2002).
Geider (2002) distinguishes between four prose genres in Swahili dating from this period: historiography, ethnography, biography, and travelogue. He links the four by referring to them as “habari texts” and observes that “habari texts rarely show a clear‐cut division into individual genres” (Geider 2002: 259). Geider argues that early writers of travelogues and ethnographies, such as that of Mtoro bin Mwinyi Bakari ([1903] 1981) “did not simply pursue the interests of the colonial initiators and editors but used their writings for their own ends as well” (Geider 2002: 262). He says of those who later published ethnographic “habari texts” in the newspaper Mambo Leo:
The writers of the habari texts in Mambo Leo all worked in a double‐bind situation: On one hand, they had a specific interest in describing single ethnic units and sub‐groups as well as places and eminent personalities of their local home areas. On the other hand, authors did not write in their own ethnic language but used Swahili instead, which already functioned as a lingua franca but was being developed into a standardized language by the colonial authorities, and promoted not least by Mambo Leo itself. Information was automatically intended for both readerships, the local one (if swahiliphone) and the readers in the entire Tanganyika territory and East African region who also simultaneously maintained and transcended their local particularities. (Geider 2002: 267)
Geider also discussed the East African Literature Bureau series which began in 1948, Masimulizi na Desturi ya Afrika ya Mashariki (Customs and Traditions in East Africa). According to Geider, these 50–80‐page monographs generally described “the origins, migrations and interrelationships of ethnic groups and sub‐groups, contact with the Arabs and the arrival and establishment of European rule” (2002: 268).6
Writers in Swahili have produced a wide range of histories since the late colonial period. Some of these have been edited and translated in publications that credit the authors more fully and that give greater attention to context. These editions include Mtoro bin Mwinyi Bakari’s The Customs of the Swahili People: The Desturi za Waswahili of Mtoro bin Mwinyi Bakari and Other Swahili Persons, edited and translated by J. W. T. Allen (Mtoro bin Mwinyi Bakari [1903] 1981). A second example is Mathias Mnyampala’s Historia, Mila na Desturi za Wagogo wa Tanzania, edited and translated by Gregory H. Maddox as The Gogo: History, Customs, and Traditions (Mnyampala 1995). Maddox also worked with Ernest Kongola to produce Practicing History in Central Tanzania: Writing Memory, and Performance (2006). Another example is Shetler (2003).
Kandoro’s Mwito wa Uhuru (1961) may be the most official early Tanganyika Africa National Union (TANU) history of the formation of the party, but as Hunter (2012: 372) notes there have been at least two additional Swahili published histories of TANU (Barongo 1966; Ulotu 1971; Hunter 2012: 372). Hunter’s study is of an unpublished work, “The History and Affairs of TANU in Region and Districts, 1954–1967,” a text that, Hunter argues, was most likely written by Lameck Bogohe, one of the founding members of TANU (2012: 369). In his preface to Mwito wa Uhuru, Julius Nyerere called upon TANU members to write histories of the party and seems to have envisioned a participatory history project:
Moja ya upungufu wetu katika TANU ni kwamba hatujaandika historia ya TANU. Kwa kweli hakuna mtu mmoja ambaye aweza kusema kwamba yeye anajua historia yote ya TANU. Kila mmoja wetu anajua sehemu tu ya mambo yaliyofanyika na kuifikisha TANU hapo ilipo.
Bwana Kandoro katushinda wote na pia katushinda kwa kuandika yale ambayo yeye anayakumbuka. Wakipatikana wengine kama yeye na kuandika yale ambayo wao wanayakumbuka, tutakuwa tumechukua hatua ya kwanza kukusanya na kuandika historia ya TANU(ii). (Nyerere 1961: ii; emphasis original)
One of our lacks in TANU is that we have not yet written a history of TANU. Truly there is no one person who is able to say that he/she knows the entire history of TANU. Each one of us knows just a part of what took place and what got TANU to where it is today.
Bwana Kandoro has defeated all of us and he has defeated us by writing that which he remembers. If others like him are found and they write what they remember, we will have taken the first step in gathering and writing the history of TANU. (author’s translation)
During the late colonial period Swahili writers produced a wide range of autobiographies and biographies (for a useful overview see Topan 1997). The most well known of these are Shaaban Robert’s autobiography and his biography of Siti binti Saad (Robert 1966, 1967). Topan observes that
Robert extols the character and industry of Siti in the biography, and, in this sense, the book follows the wasifu tradition of not being a critical evaluation of Siti’s life, but a didactic, admiring account of how an African woman, who had no formal education, achieved success. (1997: 300)
Historians who have studied Swahili texts have been attentive to the use of local sources as well as to the status of the authors of these texts. In social histories concerned with regions where literacy was restricted and limited, written texts are inherently problematic as they were accessible only to the elite. The volume of these ethnohistories and editions of them attests to the appeal of prose narratives to both academic and nonacademic historians, but there is ample evidence that Swahili writers have preferred the poetic genre to convey and transmit information about the past; they continue to use the poetic genre to comment on current events (Askew, 2016).
There is considerable evidence of the use of poetic texts both within and between Swahili communities. The tumbuizo (songs) of the legendary hero Fumo Liyongo are well known within many Swahili‐speaking communities and may be among the earliest examples of Swahili literature (Liyongo Working Groups 2004). In her comprehensive and insightful study of the Swahili poem “Utendi wa Haudaji” Vierke writes:
Rather than being part of theological discourses of the wanavyuoni, or Islamic scholars, tendi are a more easily accessible sort of “edification literature” composed for a wider public, and used in festive, profane contexts, which, given the all‐permeating nature of religion, are never really profane in a strict sense. (2011: 438–439)
Feidel and Shariff’s (1986) article about a poem by the Siu poet Kibabina illustrates the potential of the study of Swahili poetry for the study of other aspects of East African history. The poem, which was composed around 1865, memorializes recent and earlier resistance to Omani rule, chastises the Siu elite who have allied with Zanzibar, and by doing so encouraged further resistance.
Saavedra Casco’s Utenzi, War Poems, and the German Conquest of East Africa: Swahili Poetry as Historical Source (2007) is usefully read with Kala Shairi, the collection edited by Miehe et al. (2002). Research for these two works took place simultaneously, but the authors were not in touch with one another. Kala Shairi is a meticulously edited anthology that includes English translations of all of the extant poems in Swahili that were written about the German conquest. The collection includes poems that were solicited by the German authorities as well as Hemedi Abdullah al‐Buhry’s much more critical poem, which was hidden in a family collection and shared only within Swahili communities until shortly before independence, and Abdulkarim Jamaladini’s poem about the Maji movement. Saavedra Casco’s work also pays particular attention to the latter two poems and is based both on analysis of the poems and on research he conducted in Tanzania, particularly with family members of each of the poets.
In the mid‐1890s William Taylor, a Church Missionary Society (CMS) missionary in Mombasa, may have been the first to collect Swahili sung poetry (nyimbo),7 as well as the poems, including the political verse, of Muyaka bin Haji. More recently historians and ethnomusicologists have studied the performance genre taarab, in which nyimbo are sung with orchestral accompaniment. Notable studies of taarab include Laura Fair’s (2001) study of the songs, the performances of Siti binti Saad, and Kelly Askew’s (2002) study of taarab performance in Tanzania. Fair argues persuasively that
An examination of Siti binti Saad’s life history and her musical style provides concrete illustrations of some of the ways in which formerly servile members of island society worked to undermine the ideological and practical divisions that existed between slave and free‐person, Arab and African and to create a somewhat cohesive cultural identity as Zanzibaris. (2001: 170)
Askew considers how taarab in performance “constitutes a powerfully effective mode of dispute negotiation” (2002: 24) and demonstrates that
Competing representations of the nation are performed in everyday practice by musicians, cultural officers, local politicians, coastal wedding guests, high‐ranking politicians, poets, traffic police, Swahili language experts and a host of constituencies that jointly comprise the socio‐political entity of Tanzania. (2002: 293)
More recently Askew has written about political commentary in Tanzanian newspaper poetry. She compares poems published in newspapers about Kaiser Wilhelm II, King George V, and Julius Nyerere, and argues that the poems offer “poetic ethnographies of the Tanzanian state even as they offer partial biographies of a German emperor, a British king and an Africa president”(2014: 533). Askew provides elegant translations of works by the poet Abdilatif Abdalla, and introduces readers to the wealth of commentary on political and social issues provided by the thousands of poems published over the last 125 years in Swahili newspapers.
Kai Kresse is one of the few scholars who has considered Swahili intellectual practices. Consideration of literary genre and examination of specific poems by Ahmed Sheikh Nabhany and Ahmad Nassir Juma Bhalo are key to his arguments in Philosophising in Mombasa: Knowledge, Islam, and Intellectual Practice on the Swahili Coast (2007). In his article “Knowledge and Intellectual Practice in a Swahili Context: ‘Wisdom’ and the Social Dimensions of Knowledge,” Kresse (2009) compares the Ramadan lectures of Sheikh Abdilahi Nassir and an utenzi (narrative poem) by Ahmad Nassir Juma Bhalo.
To the best of my knowledge, James Brennan and Emily Callaci are the only historians who have written about prose fiction in Swahili. Brennan’s study of Shafi Adam Shafi’s Haini (2003) suggests the value of considering Swahili novels in the study of African history. Shafi is both a novelist and a journalist and was himself imprisoned in Zanzibar after the assassination of Abed Karume in 1972. Brennan observes:
Inevitable scenes of torture and abuse are parlayed by Adam Shafi’s main protagonist Hamza and other characters into a formidable internal confidence, a confidence born of both suffering and a gradual realization of authentic understanding of human motivations that propel Zanzibar’s complicated political history and combative identity politics. (2010: 6)
In her study of dancehall politics Emily Callaci (2011) draws upon popular fiction published in Tanganyikan newspapers, as well as upon news articles, opinion pieces, self‐help articles, advertisements, and letters to the editor. The geographer Garth Myers discusses Shafi’s earlier novel Kasri ya Mwinyi Fuad (1978), along with Said Ahmed Mohamed’s Asali Chungu (1989), as examples of texts that promote “dominant scripts of revolutionary Zanzibar” (Myers 2000: 436):
Kasri ya Mwinyi Fuad drives home the dominant script’s key themes: the (geo)graphic inequalities of pre‐revolutionary Zanzibar justified and caused the revolution; the oppressors were an alien, Arab elite with loose morals, and a racist hatred of Africans; and a self‐aware group of Africans united behind the righteous cause of their liberation. (Myers 2000: 437)
There are numerous other historical novels and plays in Swahili, including Shafi’s Kuli (2005), about the 1948 dockworkers strike in Zanzibar, and Ebrahim Hussein’s Kinjekitile (1970), about the Maji Maji movement, and Kwenye Ukingo wa Thim (1988), about the Wambui Otieno case and ethnicity, gender, class, and race in Kenya. William Mkufya’s 2004 novel Ua la Faraja (2004) is in some senses a history of the AIDS epidemic as it traces the spread of the disease and its effect on the lives of neighbors in an economically diverse community near Dar es Salaam.
With the exception of a few studies, most work by historians has been about the literature of German East Africa/Tanganyika/Tanzania. Kresse (2009) has written extensively on intellectual discourse around coastal Kenya and Prestholdt (2008) discusses the poetry of Muyaka bin Haji. As Prestholdt notes:
Muyaka was a poet who, because of his social liminality as a celebrated but chronically poor public figure, was obsessed with the social and material distinctions between wealth and poverty. His work constitutes the largest surviving body of poetry by a Swahili composer in the early nineteenth century, and his reflections on the themes of wealth, poverty, and materiality were important references in Mombasa public discourse from the 1830’s until at least the 1880s. (2008: 37)8
Despite the significance of Prestholdt’s and Kresse’s works, major Kenyan historical texts that were composed in Kiswahili have not been studied by historians. Examples of such texts include Harry Thuku’s essays in Tangazo,9 Gakaara wa Wanjau’s “Roho ya Kiume na Bidii kwa Mwafrika,”10 and Jomo Kenyatta’s (1969) shocking speech in Kisumu when he publicly humiliated Oginga Odinga at the opening of a hospital.11 In addition, no one has considered the intellectual connections between Tanzanian and Kenyan Swahili writers, or the generations of university‐educated Kenya writers who wrote politically charged fiction, drama, and poetry in Kiswahili – much less the Kenyan Swahili‐speaking government officials and educators who awarded Abdilatif the Jomo Kenyatta Prize for Literature and kept his Sauti ya Dhiki (1973) on the secondary school syllabus in Kenya while he lived in exile in Tanzania, and who similarly kept Alamin Mazrui’s Kilio cha Haki (1981) on the syllabus in Kenya while he was imprisoned. As a result, transnational, broader socialist/progressive discourse may not have received the attention that it merits.
Mohamed Kassim (2008) also reminds us of Swahili literature from Somalia, while Jan Blommaert, Johannes Fabian and Vincent A. de Rooij have made texts in Shaba Swahili/Kingwana available.12 There are also Swahili texts from Mozambique as well as publications in Swahili in Oman.13 Bonate (2010) found 782 nineteenth‐century documents in Arabic script in provincial archives in Mozambique. The documents were written in Swahili and other Bantu languages and, according to Bonate, “represented an official correspondence between local African rulers and the Portuguese administrators during the nineteenth century” (2010: 255). The letters concerned relationships between local rulers and Portuguese officials, but also discussed “the Nguni invasion,” the slave trade, and the nineteenth‐century wars following which the Portuguese established control over the region (Bonate 2010: 255). Bonate notes that “Several letters were written by female African Muslim rulers from the coastal regions under Swahili cultural and economic influences” (2010: 255).
Andrew Eisenberg has called for “a dynamic intellectual discourse on the Swahili coast as a cultural nexus of Africa and the Indian Ocean world” (2012: 575). I agree, but suggest that we should perhaps look even more widely and over longer time frames. Kassim’s (2008) study of Dada’s poetry in Chimwiini indicates that poems by a nineteenth‐century woman are being studied in Somali diaspora communities today. We know so little about the history of the circulation and exchange of Swahili texts and even less about the use of texts in education and for other purposes. We assume that most of the early tendi were based on Arabic models, but often we do not know what those models were. For centuries multilingual and multiliterate speakers of Swahili have drawn upon the rich history of Swahili literature and the vast array of international languages and literatures that they have encountered. Their literature challenges us to acknowledge this history and these encounters, to expand our horizons, and to embrace our shared language, its literature, and its most intriguing history.
Swahili literature has provided invaluable and diverse sources to historians and other scholars. Writers about Swahili and East African history have also engaged positively with both elite and subaltern writers of a wide variety of texts in Swahili. This is not to deny that there were examples of intellectual dishonesty (see the examples provided in Biersteker and Plane 1989) or to dismiss the impact of a lengthy and oppressive colonial history. It is simply to acknowledge that historians and others have read and heard the works of Swahili writers and performers and have promoted these works. As a result, an international intellectual community is emerging for whom Swahili is the primary language. The annual University of Bayreuth Swahili Colloquium is one example, the Tanzanian Studies Association a second. Clearly this work is related to efforts such as the Local Intellectuals strand of the journal Africa. Most essential to this community are scholarly and artistic works in Swahili that are accessible to East African audiences, artistic works such as the film produced by Kelly Askew, Poetry in Motion: 100 Years of Zanzibar’s Nadi Ikhwan Safaa (2015), and scholarly works such as Laura Fair’s Historia ya Jamii ya Zanzibar na Nyimbo za Siti binti Saad (2013) and Aldin Mutembei’s UKIMWI katika Fasihi ya Kiswahili, 1982–2006 (AIDS in Swahili Literature, 1982–2006) (2009). Fair’s work is a revision and expansion of her work on Siti binti Saad in Pastimes and Politics (2001). Appendices provide the lyrics to all of Siti binti Saad’s known songs and a chronological list of songs and composers. Mutembei’s methodologically groundbreaking and inspirationally sensitive and thoughtful work traces the history of Tanzanian thought about AIDS through a close study and comparison of over 100 poems about AIDS published in Tanzanian newspapers during this period. He considers poems by well‐known poets as well as those by ordinary newspaper contributors. One of the earliest names for AIDS in Swahili was “Juliana,” a woman’s name and also the name of a type of textile traded illegally from Uganda. Mutembei traces the various ways in which women were blamed for transmission of the disease as well as the ways in which discussion of the disease changed the norms of public discourse on sexuality in Swahili. His discussion of stigmatization is particularly sensitive and nuanced. UKIMWI katika Fasihi ya Kiswahili, 1982–2006 is a work focused on intellectual history that “explores gender in crucial intimate dimensions” (Mutembei 2009: 344) in precisely the ways recently called for by Nancy Rose Hunt (2014), especially in its consideration of poetry by women. Mutembei considers poems such as Magreti Clemens’s “Tujihadhari na Ukimwi” (Let’s Avoid HIV/AIDS), Emily H. L. Mkupete’s “Tupunguze Zinaa” (Let’s Reduce Adultery), and Bi. Salama Yusuph’s “Ukimwi Hauna Dawa” (HIV/AIDS Has No Cure) (Mutembei 2009: 132, 134, 135), which answer poems by men blaming women for the epidemic. He also uses these poems by women to discuss the impact of the epidemic on the Swahili language in terms of speaking openly about sexuality.