Papers by Nathalie Arnold Koenings
Boydell and Brewer eBooks, Apr 9, 2024
Mystical Power and Politics on the Swahili Coast: Uchawi in Pemba, Jun 25, 2024
Northeast African Studies, 2016
Elke E. Stockreiter's new book Islamic Law, Gender, and Social Change in Post-Abolition Zanzibar ... more Elke E. Stockreiter's new book Islamic Law, Gender, and Social Change in Post-Abolition Zanzibar provides a fascinating historical look at Islamic courts, kadhis (Islamic judge, Ar. qadi) and litigants in colonial Zanzibar. In the first major study to make use of Arabic-language court records from Zanzibar Town, Stockreiter illuminates the changing but important role of kadhi courts in the colonial period. The book significantly augments our understanding of the status and agency of women, ex-slaves, and their descendants, all of whom brought forward claims, while illuminating the position of kadhis vis-à-vis their communities and the colonial state. One of the most important contributions of the book is the use of Islamic court records to carefully reexamine certain scholarly assumptions about Muslim women and patriarchy on the Swahili Coast. Stockreiter notes that kadhis frequently supported women's rights in Islamic law and argues that their judgments did not favor either gender. Another major contribution is the consideration of how former slaves and their descendants used the courts, and the role of kadhis in maintaining patron-client relationships in the post-abolition era. Stockreiter bases her analysis on a random sample of civil kadhi court cases from 1900 to 1966 (after 1908 kadhis did not hear criminal cases), and certificates of marriage and divorce dating from the 1920s to 1960. The book is divided into three parts. In the five chapters that comprise Part I, Stockreiter considers changes to the judiciary and the kadhi courts in the colonial period. Importantly, she argues that despite changes in procedure and a limiting of their jurisdiction, the kadhi courts were able to preserve independence with reference to family law (to the present, Islamic family law in Zanzibar remains uncodified). Chapters 1 and 2 look at the impact of colonial policy on the kadhi courts, while chapters 3 and 4 address litigants in the courts, with a close focus on women, former slaves, and their descendants, all regular petitioners. In Chapter 5, Stockreiter examines the "social embeddedness" of the kadhis by looking at their relationships with ordinary people and the colonial state and argues that their legal interpretations were informed by their social environments (p. 98). This is a compelling point, and readers may find themselves wanting to know more about individual kadhis. It is in the three chapters of Part II that Stockreiter most thoroughly delves into the court records. Together, these chapters use the documents to understand different kinds of social relationships-between wives and husbands, between kin groups, and between masters and slaves and their descendants. Chapters 6 and
Ästhetiken X.0, 2023
This chapter offers a series of reflections on Swahili mikoba ya ukilihand-woven bags understood ... more This chapter offers a series of reflections on Swahili mikoba ya ukilihand-woven bags understood in Zanzibar as 'traditional' and deeply 'local'-and their participation in social life as well as in visions of the person and of legacy. It begins by introducing Maua, a woman who finds belonging in her marital village by weaving beautiful mikoba that everybody wants. Acknowledging the challenges of conducting traditional ethnographic research in pandemic times, it considers the potential contribution of scholarship concerned with 'new materialisms' and the materiality of language in particular to the work of imagining from a distance, when a longed-for object is unreachable. Seeking an understanding of mikoba as visible objects, but also highlighting the weight materially borne by the powerful word 'mikoba' itself, this chapter proposes that mikoba crystallize ideas about knowledge, personhood, and learning, as well as about inheritance and re(-)memberingthat is, about connections between the past and future.
Research in African Literatures, 2002
... The song was never mentioned, but a few phrases of its melody and a discreet response had sig... more ... The song was never mentioned, but a few phrases of its melody and a discreet response had signaled our awareness of an oppositional political discourse, and on that ... Power and Performance: Ethnographic Explorations through Proverbial Wisdom and Theater in Shaba, Zaire ...
Focused on Pemba Island in Zanzibar, this paper examines how talk about food – in abundance and p... more Focused on Pemba Island in Zanzibar, this paper examines how talk about food – in abundance and plenty as well as drought, and hardship – can yield important insights into people’s experiences of the past and present. While food, in a very basic way, is central to human survival, people’s experiences of acquiring, preparing, sharing, and consuming food are central aspects of human social and cultural life. When talking about food, human beings deploy culturally specific knowledge that locates them in history and in society. Food discourse deploys culturally inflected visions of wellness and social harmony, as well as of hardship and fragmentation. This paper explores food discourse in Pemba as oral history that sheds light on how people experienced the 1920s and 1930s, World War II and rationing, the Zanzibar Revolution and the famine of 1972, as well as how changes in food preparation figure in people’s assessments of their own well-being, and experiences of contemporary times. The...
I first met Nassor Hilal Kharusi when, looking for an editor for a translation I was doing from E... more I first met Nassor Hilal Kharusi when, looking for an editor for a translation I was doing from English into Swahili, I was introduced to him via email by his niece, a friend of mine in the USA. I was translating a very elegant short story, and I wanted to put the Swahili version into the care of someone who would not only note errors and ask questions but who would be a writer too, strict about sound and flow and prepared to make suggestions. My friend had simply said, "My uncle is a person who likes words and language." But I soon realized that I was in the company of an important literary figure. What has followed since then between usas I imagine it does for Nassor's many Zanzibari and non-Zanzibari interlocutorsis a provocative literary exchange, ranging from the nature of language itself to the forms of Swahili poetry, the power of fiction, the dangers of translation, and the complex © N.H. Kharusi interrelation between 'the old' and 'the new' in Zanzibari life. Although Nassor is also a writer of fiction and non-fiction, I am most familiar with his poems. Nassor's verse, often focused on the nature and power of emotion, reflects his attentiveness towards the people of his city, the dramas of life and love both as they unfold in private and can be sensed in public, and a fascination with the natural world as a source of knowledge and meaning. Born in 1978, Nassor has spent all his life in Zanzibar City. He was raised in Malindi, near the Zanzibar port, and now lives and manages a shop near Kisiwandui in a busy shopping area that is also home to several mosques and a well-known madrasa. After writing verse privately for many years, Nassor published his first collection of poems, Diwani ya Barsheba: Safari ('The diwani of Barsheba: a journey'), with Kara Printing in 2014. In 2016, several poems appeared in the volume Kurasa mpya: fungamano la malenga ('New pages: an assembly of poets', Zaima Publishing), from which the poem Mambo yamegeuka ('How things have changed'), appearing in translation in this issue, is drawn. In 2017 his second collection, Hisia
This paper considers some of the questions posed by literary translations both from and into Swah... more This paper considers some of the questions posed by literary translations both from and into Swahili. While the questions a translator might address as she proceeds with each translation may be the same, their differing answers often highlight the translator’s different position towards, and history with, each target language, as well as her aesthetic and political commitments in each. The projects discussed are Mlenge Fanuel Mgendi’s comic short story Starehe gharama (Comfort is Expensive) about a young schoolboy’s misadventure on a daladala bus in Dar es Salaam and Tope Folarin’s Caine Prize shortlisted story Genesis (Mwanzo), in which two Nigerian boys living in the American Midwest witness their mother’s struggle with her new surroundings
Best ebook you should read is Islamic Law Gender And Social Change In Post Abolition Zanzibar. Yo... more Best ebook you should read is Islamic Law Gender And Social Change In Post Abolition Zanzibar. You can Free download it to your computer in simple steps. TRICKSYARD.COM in simple step and you can Free PDF it now.
Swahili Forum 24, 2018
Focused on Pemba Island in Zanzibar, this paper examines how talk about food-in abundance and ple... more Focused on Pemba Island in Zanzibar, this paper examines how talk about food-in abundance and plenty as well as drought, and hardship-can yield important insights into people's experiences of the past and present. While food, in a very basic way, is central to human survival, people's experiences of acquiring, preparing, sharing, and consuming food are central aspects of human social and cultural life. When talking about food, human beings deploy culturally specific knowledge that locates them in history and in society. Food discourse deploys culturally inflected visions of wellness and social harmony, as well as of hardship and fragmentation. This paper explores food discourse in Pemba as oral history that sheds light on how people experienced the 1920s and 1930s, World War II and rationing, the Zanzibar Revolution and the famine of 1972, as well as how changes in food preparation figure in people's assessments of their own well-being, and experiences of contemporary times. The paper also argues that the Pemban concept of shibe, or 'satiety', may provide a culturally viable framework for thinking about as well as implementing social and environmental wellbeing on a larger scale. Food discourse as history and theory Focused on elders' discourse about food in Pemba, Zanzibar, this paper argues that meditating on talk about food provides richly textured access to popular historiography, culturally freighted concepts of wellness and community, and ideas about how the world should be. Human relations to food are universally urgent and intimate, but, as an object of fantasy and desire, and when a centerpiece of social discourse, food is also text, and thus full of meaning. Everywhere, certain foods are thought more desirable than others, appropriate to certain seasons, classes, ages, genders, and regions. Food motivates action; consuming it puts us into contact with others and with social forces close or far away. Like smell, taste can trigger memory. Thinking of it can provoke or organize discussions of the past and wishes for the future. Joining with our bodies through eating and digestion, food in a very real sense determines how we feel, appear, and, often, how we fare. This can be urgently so when hunger is a mortal risk. But always, through what we eat or don't eat, what's available and what we can afford, we know who, where, how and when we are; there, we sometimes recognize ourselves, or fail to. Pemba Hosting over one-third of the population of Zanzibar, and having historically played a key role in Zanzibar's economy and political history, Pemba and its communities have nevertheless not been
Swahili Forum 25 (Swahili Literature in Global Exchange), 2018
A short essay, and translation of Zanzibari poet Nassor Hilal Kharusi's poem 'Mambo Yamegeuka' ('... more A short essay, and translation of Zanzibari poet Nassor Hilal Kharusi's poem 'Mambo Yamegeuka' ('The World's Different Now).
Asymptote Journal, 2019
A translated short story about a young schoolboy boy suffering indignities on a daladala bus in ... more A translated short story about a young schoolboy boy suffering indignities on a daladala bus in Dar es Salaam.
Asymptote, 2019
A translated expert of Adam Shafi's 2013 memoir Mbali na Nyumbani (Longhorn, Nairobi).
Social Memory, Silenced Voices, and Political Struggle: Revolution in Zanzibar, 2018
This chapter appears in Social Memory, Silenced Voices, and Political Struggle: Revolution in Zan... more This chapter appears in Social Memory, Silenced Voices, and Political Struggle: Revolution in Zanzibar, a volume edited by William C. Bissell and Marie-Aude Fouere, and published in 2018 by Mkuki na Nyota Publishers in Dar es Salaam, in collaboration with IFRA.
Research in African Literatures, 2003
Translation of Mwenda Mbatiah's short story, "Watumwa wa Uchochole." Mwenda Mbatiah is a novelis... more Translation of Mwenda Mbatiah's short story, "Watumwa wa Uchochole." Mwenda Mbatiah is a novelist, critic, and scholar of Swahili language and literature. His novels include Msururu wa usaliti (2008), Vipanya vya maabara (2007), Wimbo mpya (2004), and Upotevu (1999), and he edited and contributed to the short-story collection Kurudi nyumbani na hadithi nyingine (2007).
Asymptote, 2015
A translation of the opening chapter of Mohammed Said Abdulla's 1976 novel MWANA WA YUNGI HULEWA.... more A translation of the opening chapter of Mohammed Said Abdulla's 1976 novel MWANA WA YUNGI HULEWA. In Asymptote.
Mohammed Said Abdalla (Bwana Msa) is considered to be among the "fathers" of the Swahili novel. Born in 1918, he was raised in the cosmopolitan capital of Zanzibar, at that time under British rule. He attended both Koranic and British schools, later working as a journalist and editor. At the same time, his fiction—featuring inimitably Zanzibari characters and a detective so similar to the author that people referred to Abdulla by his fictional hero's name, and written in a simultaneously highly literary and deeply local, maritime Swahili—brought him increasing popularity. Before his death in 1991, he published eight 'Bwana Msa' novels, all of which pose questions still relevant in East Africa today: What happens when people we thought we knew become strangers to us? How do the poor and the wealthy coexist? And what makes violence possible? For Abdulla's hero Bwana Msa, the only answer to these impossible questions is a relentless 'observation of human goings-on' which aims in the end to kindly but firmly find justice, even for the dead.
Drafts by Nathalie Arnold Koenings
Talk about food in Pemba is a way of organizing history, as well as of assessing changes in perso... more Talk about food in Pemba is a way of organizing history, as well as of assessing changes in personal agency and community wellbeing. Elders’ talk, in particular, illuminates how many people in Pemba materially experienced the 20th century – a time about which not much has been written. Talk about food, through discussions about how it should be prepared, is also a site of theorizing about the importance of time in revealing the true and best nature of things. The concept of ‘ku-iva’, or ‘cooking through,’ that emerges is a key element of elders’ assessments of social health as well as powerful comment on 20th century politics and environmental change. Central to this discourse is the figure of the chungu, the clay cooking pot – and its recent defeat by the dishi, aluminum cooking pot – talk about which provides a way of understanding many elder Pembans’ views on modernity and change.
Presented at Swahili Colloquium, Bayreuth University, May 2017
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Papers by Nathalie Arnold Koenings
Mohammed Said Abdalla (Bwana Msa) is considered to be among the "fathers" of the Swahili novel. Born in 1918, he was raised in the cosmopolitan capital of Zanzibar, at that time under British rule. He attended both Koranic and British schools, later working as a journalist and editor. At the same time, his fiction—featuring inimitably Zanzibari characters and a detective so similar to the author that people referred to Abdulla by his fictional hero's name, and written in a simultaneously highly literary and deeply local, maritime Swahili—brought him increasing popularity. Before his death in 1991, he published eight 'Bwana Msa' novels, all of which pose questions still relevant in East Africa today: What happens when people we thought we knew become strangers to us? How do the poor and the wealthy coexist? And what makes violence possible? For Abdulla's hero Bwana Msa, the only answer to these impossible questions is a relentless 'observation of human goings-on' which aims in the end to kindly but firmly find justice, even for the dead.
Drafts by Nathalie Arnold Koenings
Presented at Swahili Colloquium, Bayreuth University, May 2017
Mohammed Said Abdalla (Bwana Msa) is considered to be among the "fathers" of the Swahili novel. Born in 1918, he was raised in the cosmopolitan capital of Zanzibar, at that time under British rule. He attended both Koranic and British schools, later working as a journalist and editor. At the same time, his fiction—featuring inimitably Zanzibari characters and a detective so similar to the author that people referred to Abdulla by his fictional hero's name, and written in a simultaneously highly literary and deeply local, maritime Swahili—brought him increasing popularity. Before his death in 1991, he published eight 'Bwana Msa' novels, all of which pose questions still relevant in East Africa today: What happens when people we thought we knew become strangers to us? How do the poor and the wealthy coexist? And what makes violence possible? For Abdulla's hero Bwana Msa, the only answer to these impossible questions is a relentless 'observation of human goings-on' which aims in the end to kindly but firmly find justice, even for the dead.
Presented at Swahili Colloquium, Bayreuth University, May 2017
Across East Africa, the island of Pemba has long been known as a site of tremendous occult power. Popular late 19th and early 20th century historiography attests to the importance on Pemba of elders in possession of incredible skills and knowledge, often put to use in protection of local communities from intrusion by state, or outside, powers. Examining wizardly power from within Pemba rather than from outside of it, this presentation discusses one of southern Pemba’s most famous twentieth-century wizards, Sheha Abeid Subi of Mkanyageni, whose public exploits, rooted in contests about language and its meaning, are the focus of stories still told to children to this day. Taken together, these deceptively simple ‘Subi stories’ articulate a position on the nature of legitimate authority, which is characterized by the right to figurative language made real.