Rettová, Alena

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Alena Rettová

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Alamin Mazrui Swahili Beyond the Boundaries: Literature, Language, Identity, Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2007. (Ohio University Research in International Studies, Africa Series.) x, 206 pp. ISBN 978 0 89680 252 0. £15.95

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ALAMIN MAZRUI:Swahili Beyond the Boundaries: Literature, Language, Identity.(Ohio University Research in International Studies, Africa Series.) x,206 pp. Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2007. £15.95. ISBN 9780 89680 252 0.Alamin Mazrui’s Swahili Beyond the Boundaries: Literature, Language andIdentity, is a collection of texts previously published in academic journals oredited books. In addition to Chapters 1, 2 and 4, whose prior publications arementioned in the acknowledgements, a version of Chapter 3 has been publishedas ‘‘Transcending the boundaries of Islam: written Swahili literature in thetwentieth century’’ in Religious Perspectives in Modern Muslim and JewishLiteratures, edited by Glenda Abramson and Hilary Kilpatrick (London,2006). Bringing these diverse papers together in a monograph enables theauthor to revisit the issue of Swahili identity through the central concept ofhybridity.Mazrui elaborates his understanding of hybridity, as applied to Swahiliculture, in the introduction to the book, entitled ‘‘Hybridity reconfigured’’.Departing from the habitual view of the Swahili as a hybrid of Arab andAfrican heritage, Mazrui redefines hybridity as a quality inherent to all culturesin all times and attributes it with a new potential. To him, the concept ofhybridity challenges the ‘‘colonial norm’’ (p. 2) of fixed, immutable identities –essentialism. The book’s four chapters then focus on the different facets ofhybridity in Swahili culture.Chapter 1, ‘‘The intercultural heritage of Swahili literature’’, goes throughthe historical development of Swahili literature. Sadly, the text is replete withimprecisions and errors. For example, Mazrui mentions Takhmisa ya Liyongoas one of the ‘‘celebrated tenzi of this period of the early eighteenth century’’(p. 17). However, Takhmisa ya Liyongo is not an utenzi, although there is anutenzi (of a later date) about Fumo Liyongo. The author of Takhmisa, SayyidAbdallah bin Ali bin Nasir, lived around 1720–1820, so in the ‘‘early eighteenthcentury’’ he was just born. The other tenzi from this period listed by Mazrui,Utendi wa Katirifu (dated to the last quarter of the eighteenth century byKnappert, but probably from the early nineteenth century), Utendi wa MwanaKupona (composed in 1858), and Utendi wa al-Akida (composed in the late1870s), likewise do not fall into ‘‘the early eighteenth century’’.The exposé of Swahili poetry in this chapter is also very incomplete; itdiscusses only utenzi and shairi as poetic forms and omits some of the greatestSwahili compositions, such as Al-Inkishafi. In talking about the beginnings offree-verse poetry in Swahili (p. 36), Mazrui does not even mention its doyen,Euphrase Kezilahabi.Mazrui’s discussion of Swahili prose contains problematic statements. Thetitle of Katama Mkangi’s novel Walenisi does not mean ‘‘The Damned’’(p. 39): Mkangi’s neologism, formed from wale-ni-sisi, ‘‘those-are-us’’, refers toan idyllic, utopian society on another planet. Kezilahabi’s Gamba la Nyokacertainly does (explicitly!) interrogate the validity of ujamaa ideology (p. 40).While Said Ahmed Mohamed is a prominent representative of magical realism,the short story ‘‘Arusi ya Buldoza’’ is not one written in this style (p. 32); itwould be more appropriate to name in this context his novels Babu Alipofufukaand Dunia Yao. It also appears questionable to call Wamitila’s complexmagical realist novel Bina-Adamu! ‘‘socialist literature’’ (p. 39).608 REV I EWSChapter 2, ‘‘Aesthetics of Swahili verse: between the ‘old’ and the ‘new’’’,discusses the traditional prosody of Swahili poetry and the introduction andreception of free-verse poetry. The thrust of the chapter is ideological: Mazruisuggests that the resistance to innovations in the form of Swahili poetry isrelated to the fear of losing the distinct ‘‘Swahili identity’’. In chapter 3, ‘‘Religionand the boundaries of Swahili literature’’, Mazrui addresses the much-debatedquestion of whether traditional Swahili literature was religious or secular. Heconcludes that it was the double bias, towards the written word and the racial biasprivileging Arab over African (p. 88) that gave prominence to Islamic literature.Secular topics could be found in abundance in the domain of orality.In chapter 4, ‘‘Translation and the (re)configuration of the Swahili literaryspace’’, Mazrui draws attention to the curious fact that translations intoSwahili, from the earliest texts such as Hamziyya (from Arabic) to translationsof Shakespeare, have become part of Swahili literature and assumed an identityindependent of the original texts. A striking example is the translation ofOrwell’s Animal Farm. Mazrui shows how the text became relevant in EastAfrica because of the many ways in which Orwell’s allegory applied to thepolitical situation in Tanzania and Kenya.In my opinion, the book suffers from being a collection of texts publishedelsewhere over a span of twenty years. The question of identity and itsmanifestations in language and literature have already been approachedthrough the prism of hybridity in the monograph Mazrui co-authored withIbrahim Noor Shariff, The Swahili: Idiom and Identity of an African People(Trenton, New Jersey, 1993; see ‘‘Introduction: the relativity of identity’’).Chapter 1 is not systematic and exhaustive enough for a factographic historicaloverview of Swahili literature, and for a thematic or ideological discussion ofSwahili literature, it abides too closely by the facts and does not develop anytheoretical approaches or new insights into literary works. Chapter 2 wouldprofit from an update with respect to the 1992 journal article on which it isbased: it should mention the recent developments and innovations in Swahilifree-verse poetry, such as the introduction of visual poetry by Kithaka waMberia. The most original contribution of Swahili Beyond the Boundaries is theanalysis of translation (chapter 4, in part also chapter 3, containing a history ofthe translation of the Quran into Swahili). The numerous mistakes andomissions on the factographic side, and also a large number of typographicalerrors, severely diminish the book’s impact.Alena RettováGENERALMARTIN CLAYTON and BENNETT ZON (eds):Music and Orientalism in the British Empire, 1780s–1940s: Portrayalof the East.(Music in 19th-Century Britain.) xvii, 347 pp. Aldershot: Ashgate,2007. £60. ISBN 978 0 7546 5604 3.There are elements of a patchwork quilt in this large volume. This, of course, isthe nature of edited volumes, but makes for occasional frustrations. At the lastREV I EWS 609

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