The Swahili language Posted on EA Circle by: "Abdulaziz Y. Lodhi" Abdulaziz Y. Lodhi Date: Mon Dec 20, 2010 5:00 am ((PST))

Extracted from Abdulaziz. Y. Lodhi: Oriental Influences in Swahili – astudy in language and culture contacts. 2000, Gothenbutg University,Sweden.

Chapter 2. The Swahili language and literature, Section 2.1 pp. 25-28

The Swahili LanguageSwahili is the traditional mother tongue of many coastal peoples inEast Africa from Mogadishu in the north in Somalia, southwards throughKenya and Tanzania to the northern shores of Mozambique, including allthe islands (the Bajuni group in southern Somalia, the LamuArchipelago in northern Kenya, the autonomous state of Zanzibar/Ungujaand Pemba group, Mafia Island in Tanzania, and the Kerimba group inMozambique). Fourteen dialects and several subdialects of Swahili areidentified on the coast, and one inland dialect (Kingwana) in EasternCongo, Burundi and Rwanda. Four closely related dialects of Comorianare spoken on the different islands of the Comoro group (Nurse andHinnebusch 1993).    Swahili belongs to the Sabaki cluster of the North-Eastern branchof the Bantu sub-group of the Niger-Congo language family (Nurse andSpear 1985, Nurse and Hinnebusch 1993). It is now generally acceptedby both linguists and historians (Mazrui and Shariff 1994, Allen 1993,Middleton 1992) that Swahili developed as an urban language during themiddle of the first millenium AD and its position was strengthened bythe early introduction of Islam along the coast. The Swahilicivilization developed as an Afro-Muslim, mercantile culture with astring of agricultural and fishing communities, enriching its materialculture and its ‘biological stock’ with contributions from all aroundthe Indian Ocean, the Persian Gulf and the southern parts of the RedSea. This is conspicuously evidenced in various degrees by the deeplyrooted Islamic faith of the Sunni Shafiite school, literature, music,architecture, dress, cuisine, customs and traditions along the coastsof East Africa (Lodhi 1980b, 1982b, Lodhi and Westerlund 1994 and 1999).    Swahili appears to have been primarily a spoken language untilwell into this millenium since Arabic was the liturgical and literarylanguage of the Muslim societies of the Indian Ocean. The earliestsurviving Swahili document, which is in the Arabic script, is the 480couplets long poem Hamziyah dated AD 1652, by Sheikh Aidarus binUthaima of Pate in Kenya, about the life of the Prophet Muhammad(Knappert 1979:22 and 102).    During the second half of the 18th century, Swahili slowly butsurely penetrated into the interior of Eastern Africa to the greatlakes, especially with the expansion of the caravan trade and traffic

in slaves, with increased demand for ivory in the West and the demandfor agricultural and domestic slaves due to the growth of plantationsalong the coast (Whiteley 1969). The growth of urban areas, ports andtrade, plantation agriculture and the feudal lifestyle connected withit, all required increased and cheap labour.    In the 19th century, Arab, Swahili and local Bantu tradersintroduced and used Swahili further into Central Africa and in theCongo region. European Colonization, Christian missionary activity andincreased Commerce (the 3 Cs advocated by the missionary explorer Dr.David Livingstone) further spread Swahili beyond the lakes as thelingua franca of east-central Africa, and numerous pidgin formsdeveloped in different parts of this vast region. After World War I,the British felt the need for a standard variant of the language to beused in administration and education in their East Africanterritories. Standardization of the written language was effectivelycarried out with the replacement of the traditional classical Arabicand Swahili-Arabic scripts by the Roman alphabet as the initial step.This was a process started in the 1850s by the first (German)missionary Ludwig Krapf in the service of the Church MissionarySociety (CMS), who reduced the Kimvita dialect of Mombasa to a Romanorthographic system. By the turn of the century, more than a dozengrammars and dictionaries had been produced and the Bible translatedinto Swahili, one version of it being both in the Roman and Arabicscript facing one another.    Following World War I, political mobilization gained momentumwith the spread of education and further growth of urban areas.Swahili became the vehicle of mass communication in Zanzibar,Tanganyika and Kenya where it was ultimately given the legal status ofthe National Language, competing with English as the second languageand the language of higher learning, business and internationalcommunication. The leaders of all political parties were instrumentalin bringing about this development (Whiteley 1969, Mbaabu 1985).    The standardization of Swahili was carried out by the Britishcolonial Inter-Territorial Language Committee, later renamed the EastAfrican Swahili Committee, which ceased to exist in 1964 when it wastransformed into the Institute of Kiswahili Research/IKR (Taasisi yaUchunguzi wa Kiswahili/TUKI) at the University College of Daressalaam,University of East Africa. The dissolution of the East AfricanCommunity in the early 1970s created separate universities for thethree member states of Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda. TUKI thus became aTanzanian institution at the University of Daressalaam. Similaracademic insititutions have since developed in Zanzibar City, Nairobiand Kampala. However, the work of coordinating the development ofSwahili as a language of mass communication was taken over in MainlandTanzania by the National Swahili Council (Baraza la Kiswahili laTaifa/BAKITA) which has sister organizations in Zanzibar (BAKIZA),Kenya (BAKIKE) and Uganda (BAKIU). There are similar Swahili LanguageCommittees in the republics of Comoro, Congo/Kinshasa, Burundi and

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Rwanda.    The basis of Standard Swahili (Kiswahili Sanifu) is the dialectof Kiunguja of Zanzibar City and western Unguja/Zanzibar island withfeatures both from the Dar es salaam area on the mainland opposite, andMombasa on the southern coast of Kenya. But the ideological, social,economic and cultural differences between Kenya and Tanzania havedetermined a somewhat different development in the two countries evenin the case of neologisms. A similar situation has developed in theSwahili dialect Kingwana, or ‘Congo Swahili’, which has borrowed muchfrom French but little from Arabic and English (Polomé 1967:27-27,166-176 and Whiteley 1973:5, 72-76). In the current Kenyan usage onefinds banki (bank), ledi (lead) and matatu (city/town bus) vis à visthe Tanzanian forms benki, risasi and daladala respectively.    With the spread of Swahili, many urban centres up-country havedeveloped several inland social dialects among non-native speakers ofSwahili in their inter-ethnic environment in and around the urbancentres. The Swahili used here by the non-native speakers is tovarious degrees mixed with the local languages. This phenomenon is notborrowing since primary speakers of Swahili are not actively involvedhere, and almost no grammatical or lexical loans are added to thebasic language of the native speakers of Swahili; the phenomenon isstrictly that of code mixing, or code/language switching, which in thewords of Rodolfo Jacobson (1998:51) is simply “conveying a broadermessage through bilingual intercourse.”    Code or language mixing/switching and code alternation withregard to Swahili is found in all parts of Eastern Africa, but to alesser extent in Tanzania where Swahili has been the medium ofinstruction in the primary schools since 1960 and where the centre ofthe political culture, Dar es salaam, was during the colonial period,and still is, in native Swahililand greatly influenced by itsproximity to Zanzibar, the centre of political culture in thepre-colonial era. Language planning and development in Tanzania hasenjoyed full participation of the state and party apparatus, regionaland local authorities, and the native speakers, both experts andlaymen, a situation not fully developed in Kenya where too Swahili isthe national language, but where the political centre Nairobi lies inthe heart of Kikuyuland, several hundred kilometers from the coast,and where during the colonial period English, the language of asizeable European settler population, was present as a formidablerival to the spread of Swahili. This has probably been the majorobstacle to efficient nationalization of Swahili in Kenya. Discussingat length the question of the ‘nationalization’ of Swahili in Kenya,Harries (1984:122) concludes: “The standard of competence (in Swahili)is only as high as the limited contact with first speakers of thelanguage allows.”    On the other hand, the role and status of East African languagesother than Swahili (and English) is not either properly investigatedor defined. Mkude (1979:11) justly states “While accepting that local

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languages are part of our cultural heritage, we have also to admit,very painfully, that there is simply no comfortable place for them inour vision of society.” Msanjila (1990:46-54) addresses this issue atsome length taking as his point of departure the ‘centre-periphery’hypothesis of socio-politico-economic development framework advancedby Khubchandani (1983:99).    The present situation of Swahili in East Africa may best bedescribed in the words of Khamis: “Swahili has since Independence madesignificant strides towards its being fully national and officiallanguage, but certainly a much more unfaltering language policy isneeded to ensure its rightful development towards the realization ofthat goal. No such policy seems to be forthcoming, and regarding whathas already been attained (that greatly contradicts with the presentattitude, especially the contradiction between English and Swahili inTanzania), one would hope that a proper language policy, and the onethat will be favourable to Swahili, will be taken in the near future.Only when such an action has been taken, can we expect a brighterfuture for Swahili; not only in East Africa, but perhaps the wholeworld” (Khamis 1993:278-9).-----------------------------------------------

1. For a synopsis of Swahili grammar, see International Encyclopediaof Linguistics 2:99-106.2. For a history of Bible translations in Swahili see Knappert (1990)and Lindfors (1999); for  the Swahili translations of the Koran seeLacunza-Balda (1997), and for Swahili translations of English fictionsee Olsson (1998).3. The Kenya Association of the Blinds uses the term wasioona (lit.those who do not see) for the blinds, whereas the TanzanianAssociation of the Blinds uses wapofu (class 2 noun denoting humans inplural), and its sister association in Zanzibar initially correctlyused the term vipofu (class 8 plural noun which has the nuance ofbeing disabled), but now uses the term wasioona (those who cannot see).4. This present study is not concerned with the phenomenon of mixingof any Eastern African language or colonial/metropolitan language withSwahili by second or third language speakers of Swahili, or mixing ofanother langauge by first speakers of Swahili; the stated concern isonly with genuine or defacto borrowing by primary/first/nativespeakers of Swahili.5. See Lodhi (1992) for language maintenance in the case of Swahili inZanzibar in particular.

Postscript: Linguistic Imperialism of the English Language.Recently, politicians in Tanzania have adopted a language policydetrimental to the development and spread of Swahili by advocatingEnglish as the medium of instruction in the primary schools, anddiscouraging the use of Swahili in the secondary schools. Through the

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influence of the British Council, the Zanzibar educational authoritieshave now officially adopted English as the medium of instruction atthe primary level from January 2011. About 500 teachers have beentrained in Zanzibar this year to teach various subjects using theEnglish medium from Standard 5 in the primary school.To my knowledge, there are at least 4 different studies, oneTanzanian, one Norwegian and two Swedish, which conclude that Englishis strongly favoured as a medium of instruction both at the primaryand secondary levels by the newly rich urban minorities in general,mostly male adults with a good command of English, whereas Swahili isfavoured by the vast majority, mostly rural, both male and femaleadults and youth. The argument forwarded by the anglophiles in supportof English is ‘globalization’ and ‘tourism’ which in reality involvesonly a small fraction of the population! Most East Africans will neverlearn enough English to be able to properly use it as their workinglanguage – they would not even be employed in economic activitieswhich would demand the use of English. Their working language in mostcases would remain Swahili or some major local language!

English should be taught as a compulsory school subject, as a secondlanguage in Tanzania and other Anglophone countries, like in mostcountries in the world. Economic, social and political progress hasbeen achieved in all developed countries using their own respectivelanguages, not English whether as a foreign language or their secondlanguage! Mwalimu Nyerere emphasized this during the language debatein Tanzania in 1984.

More than 90% of the Chinese, Indians, Indonesians etc in the dynamicdeveloping economies don’t use English but their ownnational/local/ethnic languages as their mediums of instruction andworking languages, and so do all the countries of the world (except ofcourse for the English-speaking UK, USA, Canada, Australia, NewZealand  etc which have English as theirnational/official/majority/primary language).

“English is not the language of angels!” (Statement made by AbdulazizY. Lodhi during a discussion with representatives of the BritishCouncil at the International Conference on the History and Culture ofZanzibar, December 1992, Peoples’ Palace, Zanzibar.)

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Swahili LiteraturePosted on EA Circle by: "Abdulaziz Y. Lodhi" Abdulaziz Y. LodhiDate: Mon Dec 20, 2010 5:00 am ((PST))

Extracted from Abdulaziz. Y. Lodhi: Oriental Influences in Swahili – astudy in language and culture contacts. 2000, Gothenbutg University,Sweden.

Chapter 2. The Swahili language and literature, Section 2.2 pp. 28-31

Swahili LiteratureModern Swahili literature, both prose, poetry and drama, is written inStandard Swahili based on the Kiunguja dialect of Zanzibar which hasthe largest number of native speakers. Classical literature in Swahiliwas written in the northern dialects of Lamu (Kiamu), Pate  (Kipate)and Mombasa (Kimvita) in Kenya (Allen 1961, Harries 1962, Knappert1971 and 1967, Lodhi et al. 1974, Lodhi and Ahrenberg 1985, Mulokoziand Sengo 1995). In his review article on Abdulaziz (1974) andKnappert (1979), James Allen (1982) discusses at length the questionof East African history and Swahili literature.    Most of the literary works of the period before 1890, when EastAfrica was finally colonised by the European powers, is poetry inbound and balanced verse (mashairi ya vina). This form is dominanteven today. The Swahili metric forms are based on the number ofsyllables (mizani) in a stanza (ubeti/baiti) which may have 2, 3, 4,or 5 rhyming lines (mistari/vipande), with a caesura (kituo/mkato)usually in the long measure of 16 syllables per line. Many old poems,generally known as tendi/tenzi, are quite long, some epics havingseveral thousand stanzas, such as Utenzi wa Rasi l’ghuli of Mgeni binFaqihi (1979) which has 4584 quartrains; another famous work is Chuocha Herkali (The Epic of Heraklios) which has 1728 quatrains. Thesepoems are religious, didactic, narrative, historical and secular. Themodern long poems deal with themes such as the German occupation ofthe Tanganyika coast, World War II, the Zanzibar Revolution and theLiberation of Mozambique.    Ngonjera are educational poems of rhyming verses, used asdramatic poetry, sometimes called ‘the poetry of the ArushaDeclaration’ as it was used much in political campaigns during the1960s and 70s. To sing ngonjera is to teach through poetry as SheikhMathiasi E. Mnyampala describes it in his poem Ngonjera ni kitu gani?(Mnyampala 1970:1).    Mashairi are topical poems in response to current events and arepublished in the Swahili dailies of Tanzania and Kenya. The Tanzanianmorning paper UHURU as a rule has at least one full page of suchpoems, often composed as letters to the Editor. These poems may stillbe written in the Swahili-Arabic script if their contents are Islamic,and they may be circulated privately by the poet or her/his relatives

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and friends, though seldom published in the Swahili-Arabic script.Mashairi usually have stanzas of 4 lines of 12-16 syllables with thefourth line, or part of it, reappearing as the refrain (Lodhi et al.1974:1-10, Knappert 1979:51-59).

    The oldest surviving prose documents in Swahili are acorrespondence dated 1710-1711 in Kilwa, southern Tanzania, sent tothe Portuguese governor in Goa in India, and preserved today in theState Archives in Panjim in Goa. The Kilwa letters are in the Kimvitadialect, infused much with Arabisms, as was the literary norm of theperiod. Almost all the chronicles found along the East Africanlittoral are in the Kiamu or Kimvita dialects. Today, the plain andpoor lyrics of much pop music and TV shows, mostly written bynon-native speakers of Swahili, are a major threat to (traditional)Swahili poetry which is increasingly becoming an academic subjectinstead of maintaining its cultural and artistic importance and itsfunctions in entertainment and education of the young. Zhukov (1997)also stresses the importance of classical works in Swahili for abetter understanding of the literary history of Swahili and the EastAfrican coast.    Almost all prose in Swahili of the last 120 years is in theKiunguja dialect of Zanzibar. Western literature has had muchinfluence on the development of Swahili prose beginning with thetranslation of the Bible into Swahili and the production of textbooksfor use in the mission and government schools (Knappert 1990, Olsson1998, Lindfors 1999). During the post-Independence period, the lateMwalimu Julius K. Nyerere, the first President of Tanzania for aquarter of a century, was instrumental in the process of the rise ofSwahili as a national language, as an educational language, as apolitical language and also as a literary language, through his manypolitical publications and Swahili translations of Shakespeare (Lodhi1974).

    The production of short stories, novels and plays in Swahili israther low, and several writers in East Africa prefer to write inEnglish, primarily because they do not master Swahili that well.However, during the 1970s, in the spirit of socialism, a number ofhistorical and political plays were produced by Ebrahim Hussein andPenina Mhando Mlama, both of the University of Daressalaam.    The most widely read fiction prose works in Swahili, and whichare in the standard variant, are those of Shaaban Robert, e.g. his twoutopias Kufikirika and Kusadikika (written in 1946-7 and 1948respectively and first published by Thomas Nelson in 1951), and thefirst modern novel Utubora Mkulima (1968), published posthumously,which all have traces of the didactic and narrative elements ofSwahili poetry (Gibbe 1980:2). In the prose of the modern period, i.e.after 1960, one finds themes such as the confrontation between the oldand the new, traditional culture versus Western culture, colonial

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oppression and the struggle against it, etc. The post-Independencesituation with corruption and alienated bureaucracy, etc. is describedwell especially by E. Kezilahabi (of Ukerewe island, Lake Victoria) inhis novels, and Mohamed Said Abdulla (Zanzibar) has produced severaldetective novels with his Zanzibari counterparts of Sherlock Holmesand Dr. Watson (Ohly 1981). The other Swahili writers from Zanzibar,Mohamed Suleiman Mohamed, Adam Shafi Adam and Said Ahmed Mohamed(Khamis), need particular mention as narrators of conditions inZanzibar dealing with political mobilization, feudalism, liberation,moral decay of the city, trade union activities and the urbanproletariat; in very rich language they document part of the historyof East Africa of the crucial years just before and after Independence(Lodhi 1982c:91-2, 1984b:105-8). The recent works of S. A. M. Khamisand M. S. Mohamed are psychological novels dealing with relationswithin the family, the plight of the woman, etc.

    The Bible needs particular mention in any description of modernSwahili literature since the history of modern Swahili proseliterature starts with the translation of the Bible into Swahili. Upto 1950, approximately 400 titles of prose were produced in Swahili,almost all of them translated or written by Europeans, including atranslation of the Koran. None of these publications were morepervasive and had more effect than the Bible. The few non-Europeanwritings in Swahili of this period exhibit striking parallels to thebiblical narrative style, e.g. Samuel Sehoza’s Mwaka katika Minyororo(‘A Year in Chains’, 1921) which has been suggested by Rollins(1985:9) as the progenitor of the Swahili novel.

    Native Swahili speakers have lost much control over thedevelopment of their mother tongue and they have been politicallymarginalised, particularly in Kenya.  Their language has gained thestatus and prestige that other languages in East Africa with largernumbers of first speakers would like to enjoy for their own language.The very people who, like the colonialists before them, had oncewanted to dismiss Swahili as ‘a dialect of Arabic’ or ‘a bastardlanguage’, today take pride in learning and using it and call it theirNational Language. They claim Swahili does not belong to any ethnicgroup, and it belongs to all, a misconception upon which the dramaticand unexpected development and spread of modern Swahili is based.-------------------------------------

6. This opinion was expressed by Ngugi Wa Thiongo, who himself has nowgone over to writing in his mother tongue Kikuyu, and is having hisworks translated first in Swahili then in English. Personalcommunication with Ngugi about 10 years ago and also on 20.4.1999, inUppsala.7.  For deeper discussions on this see Mazrui and Shariff (1993),Allen (1993:240-262), and for Zanzibar see Lodhi (1992b).

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POSTSCRIPT: Today, the authorities in Kenya invest much more in thedevelopment and spread of Swahili than is the case in Tanzania. MoreSwahili books are being produced in Kenya than in Tanzania. A majordevelopment in this field is the founding of the Research Institutefor Swahili Studies in Eastern Africa (RISSEA) and the Swahili Museumin Mombasa which closely cooperate with the National Museums of Kenya,Fort Jesus and also the recently founded Phwani University at Kilifinorthe of Mombasa, which has a thriving Swahili Department. Swahili isalso a popular discipline at the universities of Nairobi & Eldoret.During November 17-20, RISSEA oganised its first internationalconference celebrating also a century of heritage work in Kenya, andthis week it has organised the first Swahili Cultural Festival inMombasa with a poetry competetion on Friday 17 December. Mr. KhalidKitito of Mombasa will recite a couple of my Swahili poems at thiscompetetion while I am faraway in Uppsala/Sweden. At the RISSEAconference I presented a paper on 'Varieties of the (precolonial)Writing Systems in East Africa' and 'Swahili and Arabic Manuscripts inthe Archives of the University of Daressalaam' which is expected to bepublished next year in the proceedings of that conference.

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Swahili time telling, calendars, Mwaka Kogwa/Nawroz etc Posted on EA Circle by: "Abdulaziz Lodhi" Date: Mon Dec 20, 2010 5:05 am ((PST))

On point of information to the list members:

What we call Swahili Time is in fact Solar Time, known in Europe alsoas Biblical Time - it is the original system of time telling with thenew 24 hrs day starting with sunset, night-time preceding daylight.(Remember, in the Beginning there was Darkness, then God shed Light oneverything! In Islamic cosmology/cosmogony, Nuru/Light is Godhimself!) In the mosque, the change of date is marked in the evening,not in the morning.

This system of time telling is age old and was practiced already 8000yrs ago in Assyria/Babylon (in modern Iraq where the very firstcalendar was also founded, and it is more than 7500 years old!) andwas spread around the world. It was changed only very recently afterthe more internationally practical GMT system was developed andadopted universally.

The British replaced Solar time in their 'empire' and gradually SouthAsians started using it in East Africa. Until mid-60s solar time wasused by Wahindis in Zanzibar. In Ethiopia it is called 'EthiopianTime'. In most countries of sub-Saharan Africa it was used until the40s when most cultures/languages stopped using solar time. East Africaand Ethiopia are the only region in the world, I think, where solartime is expressed in the local languages.

The international solar calendar we use today is originally fromPharaonic Egypt, developed by Ptolemy almost 5000 years ago, having 12months of 30 days each and a 13th month of 5 days, or 6 days duringthe leap year. Therefore Ethiopia has '13 months of sunshine' asclaimed in tourist propaganda. During the Greek/Hellenic period inEgypt and the Mediterranean, Ptolemy's calendar was adjusted & calledthe Greek/Alexandrian Calendar with the new year starting on theSpring Equinox (todays 21/22 March).

After the Greeks came the Romansand changed the calendar giving it the name the Julian Calendar afterthe emperor Julius Caesar. The Julian Calendar later also became theofficial Christian calendar, a mixture with some Jewish holidays andGreek remnants such as March being the first month and Februery thelast month with 37 days!

In the original Roman calendar October, November and December were the

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8th, 9th and 10th month respectively as can be seen from their names,but in the Julian they became the 10th, 11th and 12th respectively.

In 1580s the Pope Gregor, who was also a mathematician, reformed theJulian calendar and we got our modern Gregorian Calendar of today. InRussia, what we call the Bolshevic/October Revolution, infact tookplace in November according to the Russian Orthodox calendar usedthen. Pope Gregor took days from the long month of February andincluded them here and there, also inventing the 'knuckle' system ofcounting the number of days in each month of the calendar, and givingFebruary 29 days during the leap year. Pope Gregor even added someyears to his reformed calendar, that's why the Julian calendar is 8yrs and about 2 weeks behind the Gregorian calendar - it is the year2002 in Ethiopia and they will celebrate New Year about 2 weeks afterus. (I don't have my papers here at home to give you the exact figuresand dates.)  The Ethiopian, Coptic, Armenian, and the Greek andRussian Orthodox churches all follow the Julian calendar, that's why

As far as I know, there is no culture which has ever counted a weekhaving more than 7 days, though after the French Revolution somepeople advocated decimalising the week by making it 10 days long -that would have killed most people in France to start with!

 In all the civilizations in antiquity, the week started on Saturday.Friday was the end of the week and the holy day of the Jahiliya time(period of tribal religions). When Judaism came, the Jews madeSaturday its holy day to pray for the new coming week, the sabbath orseventh day of the week. Christianity in turn made Sunday its holy daythe Sabbath. Those following the Jahiliya tribal religions (called'pagan' by the Jews) continued having Friday as their holy day, andwith the advent of Islam Friday became the holy day of Muslims.

In Judaeo-Christian Europe, Saturday and Sunday thus gradually becamethe standard week-end but in the calendars but the week always startedwith Sunday which was marked red. In 1970 Unesco decided to changethat and we got the week starting Monday.

In Swahili, the week starts on Saturday - Jumamosi, the first day ofthe week. The Swahili week is the original as it was in old Persia andIndia, and it is so even today in the Indian calendars. In Gujaratiflr examples we say "Shani, Ravi, Som, Bhom etc = Saturday, Sunday,Monday, Tuesday etc.

Whereas in Arabic we start the week with Sunday as the first day;Wednesday for example will thus be Youm ul arba = the 4th day andAlkhamis the 5th day. Now in Swahili, because of the intrusion ofArabic, we have both Jumatano/Wednesday and Alhamisi/Thursday - two5th days in the week! But a Swahili/Bantu speaker does not perceive

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Alhamisi as a 5th day of the week, but an Arabic speaker does.

There are 2 more points of interest in the Swahili calendar:

1. The Arabic/Muslim/Islamic 9th lunar month Ramadhan is in fact the12th month in the Swahili lunar calendar, making the Sikikuu ya Idi/Idel fitr the New Year, though the Islamic New Year is the first ofMuharram which is the 4th month in the Swahili calendar. (I'll mail apaper on this later tomorrow from my office.)

2. The old Indo-Iranian and Indo-European new year Nawroz (New Day),the spring equinox marking the day becoming longer than the night, iscalled Mwaka or Mwaka Kogwa, or Nairuzi (also a male first name). Thiscelebration must have come with the Shirazi arrivals in AD 950 andlater rejuvinated in 1840s with the arrival in Zanzibar of PrincessShehrazadeh, one of the queens of Seyyid Said bin Sultan, the firstOmani ruler of Znz. Through a collision of the traditional Swahililunar calendar and the Persian solar calendar, the Mwaka/Nairuziholiday moves backwards in the Gregorian calendar, 11 days every yearfor 3 years and then 12 days during the leap year. (Professor AbdulSherif has written about the Shirazi and  Maalim Iddi Farhan haswritten about the dates of Nairuzi.)

I apologize for typographical errors - it's half past midnight!Wasalaam!

Author: Prof Maalim Abdulaziz Lodhi

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