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TRANSCRIPT
Rebecca Campbell
Research Paper
December 2, 2011
‘Slaves have no words of their own1’: Attempts at using modern Swahili linguistic features to
inform on the presence of pre-colonial social structures
Introduction and Background
Dialects of Swahili, a Sabaki language, are spoken by farmers, fisherman, and people in
towns on the coastal strip and islands of East Africa ranging from Barawa to Mozambique. In
their book The Swahili, Nurse and Spear (1985) trace the African and Arabian influences on
Swahili and reconstruct the history and language of Swahili speakers. For example, they explain
that there are a large variety of dialects of the Swahili language because early speakers were
sailors and traveled vast distances from the 9 to 12th centuries (Nurse and Spear, 1985). “Bantu
languages” is the term sometimes used to refer to a traditional sub-branch of the languages in
some Niger–Congo regions. Swahili is the Bantu language that has the most speakers, and two
decades ago there were 80 million speakers of the language spreading across eight countries
(Nurse and Spear, 1985).
Swahili town-states developed rapidly between 1100 and 1500 A.D. However,
periodically they suffered economic attacks from the Portuguese (for example, during the latter’s
attempt to monopolize the gold trade). Though Orma and Somali invasions caused many
Swahili settlements to be abandoned during the 1500 to 1600’s, neither the Orma, Somali nor
1 This is a Swahili proverb (Glassman, 1995) meaning that slaves are not independent or act on their own selves
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Portuguese were successful in ruling the coast. Later, between the 1700 and 1800’s, these
Swahili towns prospered again and it was then that greater numbers of Arabic words entered the
language. However, scholars know little of Swahili social organization, values, or beliefs during
pre-colonial times (Nurse and Spear, 1985).
Carol Eastman (1994) outlines the continued, post-colonial development of words
signifying servitude in Swahili in her article “Service, Slavery (‘UTUMWA’) and Swahili Social
Reality.” Eastman’s background on the Swahili people is quite informative and she sets up her
article well. Eastman explains that Swahili culture is neither totally African nor entirely Arabian.
In fact, there has been a lengthy debate on who exactly “the Swahili” are. Researchers generally
consider that the Swahili-speaking people on the East African Coast ranging from the Lamu
archipelago to Zanzibar and the Comorian islands share cultural attributes that are considered to
be ethnic.
As will be demonstrated, this research seeks to add to the historiography by providing
evidence to support or refute the three main theses in the debate of pre-colonial African slavery.
Specifically, this work uses original and secondary data to address the debate on the antiquity,
transformation, and absorption of slavery in African history. The two research questions driving
this enquiry are centered on finding out the following:
1. What can language tell us about the current and past presence of structures in a society
or culture?
2. What can Swahili reveal about the past and present saliency and nature of servile
institutions in Swahili speaking regions as relative to the three central debates in the African
historiography regarding slavery (antiquity, absorption, and transformation theories)?
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This research seeks to fill the gap in the corpus of the literature by examining how
particular words and language structures illuminate our understanding of people’s social
experiences. Specifically, this research focuses on ascertaining the saliency and prevalence of
words relating to institutions of slavery or servitude in the Swahili language, including all the
dialects spoken in various regions such as Kenya and Tanzania, in order to add to the literature
about pre-colonial Swahili experiences.
Literature Review
Regarding language studies in Africa, linguistics does provide models on language that
can be used in conjunction with other historical evidence to reconstruct the past. Scholars have
analyzed current lexicon as a basis for conclusions about earlier geographical locations of
speakers of Bantu, Khoisan, and Afrikaans speakers (Nurse and Spear, 1985). For instance,
researchers “isolate groups of related language and use them to posit the existence of earlier
language communities,” this data is then cross-checked “to parallel lines of archaeological and
historical data of historical peoples and cultures” (Nurse and Spear, p15). For example, prior
research has used linguistic data from today to make conclusions about servitude in the past.
Specifically, Perbi (2004) argued that modern proverbs provide insight into pre-colonial slavery
in Ghana. Perbi, on page 118, posited that the Akan proverb “wo nkoa suro wo anim asem a,
wonni nim mma wo (if your slaves/servants fear to speak to you, they will not gain victories for
you)” relates to the historically customary rule of slave treatment which strongly encouraged the
owners of slaves to make themselves available to their slaves.
Research has not fully examined how memories of social oppression are preserved
through idioms in Swahili. This is of particular interest since scholars (Rodney, 1966) posit that
language embodies people’s experiences and even their history. Historians have argued that if
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there is no word, or perhaps only a few words, for an idea then chances are it never existed, an
argument I will revisit in this work. Vansina (1985) counters this with the argument that these
ideas may be preserved figuratively. However, this research will investigate more literal
instances of these words meaning servitude. Researchers operate under the assumption that
loanwords do not become loaned or travel without the objects or ideas they denote (Dalby,
1970).
In the text Archaeology, Language, and the African Past, Roger Blench (2006) discusses
issues relating to Swahili such as Swahili and language shift, morphology, and Portuguese and
other loanwords. Specifically, Blench illustrates how morphological reconstruction can be used
to rebuild protolanguage trees using lexicostatistics across languages. Blench (2006) claims that
this can provide pointers on how people thought in these regions. This type of analysis coincides
with broader linguistic theories, such as the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, which states that a
language’s structure influences the way its speakers perceive and conceptualize the world.
Further, Schoenbrun utilized linguistic evidence to study ideas around honor, scorn and hierarchy
and concluded that violence and marginalization within East African societies occurred before
contact with people during the coastal trade (Merdad and Doyle, 2007). On the other hand, one
might question to what extent violence and marginalization equals slavery.
Cooper (1997, p218) contends that “for all the variants of Swahili that exist there is no
slave version, comparable to the Creole languages of the descendants of slaves in the
Caribbean.” However, “slaves were closest to being pure economic objects in the sugar islands
of the Caribbean” (p2) whereas historians show that slavery was different in pre-colonial Africa
(Miers and Kopytoff, 1977; Perbi, 2004). Thus, Cooper’s point is revealed to be only specious
when one considers that because he is comparing two systems of servitude that are quite
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different conclusions about the similarity of their effects on language are questionable. Further,
Cooper (p218) also argued that “virtually all slaves learned Swahili” so the language itself could
be considered the African version of the language of subjugation.
A large issue to consider regarding the validity of my research is a point raised by Cooper
(226); he states “masters generally avoided the harsh words for slaves…and used… [words
meaning] ‘children’ or…‘my people.’” In the same regard, according to Miers and Kopytoff
(1977, p187), addressing someone using lok which means is a great insult. Even before slavery
was abolished, the term was still usually not used out of concern for the feelings of a slave. In its
place the term of address used to refer to slaves was ta (meaning son) or wa (meaning daughter).
Cooper and Miers and Kopytoff’s points lead to the questioning of how well linguistic features
can illuminate our understanding of the reality of servile institutions. On the other hand, one
could also argue that a culture which uses words that could be considered polite to refer to slaves
may also construct the personhood of a slave differently than a culture which uses more harsh
language.
Vansina (1999, p469) argues that “linguistic sources contribute much to the recovery of
aspects of the past, which would otherwise remain out of reach.” Eastman (p87) utilizes
“sociolinguistic approach(es) to complement the historical record in order to examine the use of
the word utumwa itself as it has changed to reveal distinct class and gender connotations
especially in northern Swahili communities.” This tells us about changes in the last centuries but
not about pre-colonial times. Thus, in addressing the first research question, scholars use such
linguistic features as language shift to provide information on how identity and how social
structures in society are related and change through time and across spaces. It is important to
note that investigating this with a focus on pre-colonial times is difficult and necessitates
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utilization of records of the language that existed in pre-colonial times, though oral histories may
provide this data. Later in this paper, I will explain how this study yields valid information
regarding the idea that linguistic data can be used to make conclusions about past and present
social structures.
Methodology: Measures and Participants
To gather data to answer my research questions I firstly consulted two Swahili
dictionaries that have been well received by scholars (Vansina, 1999). The Kamusi Project: The
Internet Living Swahili Dictionary (Martin, Biersteker, and Bertoncini-Zubkova, 2005) is the
first text which is an online, lengthy Swahili-English dictionary cross-checked by many scholars.
Schoenbrun’s (1997) The Historical Reconstruction of Great Lakes Cultural Vocabulary:
Etymologies and Distributions presents word forms and their features such as vowels, tones, and
prefixes as well as their geographical distribution and variants of meaning. The best part of his
text is that he also delivers an etymology of each word and provides the time at which each word
first appeared as a new, distinct word or a loanword. Both of these texts were analyzed to
determine the etymology of words denoting servitude but according to Schoenbrun, these are
unknown. The Kamusi dictionary, though it provides etymology for many other words, simply
omitted that information for these words denoting servitude, most likely due to a lack of
conclusion on this.
For my enquiry, I was interested in finding the etymology of words meaning servitude in
hopes of finding out when these words entered the language. I sought to do this to answer my
second research question to attempt to make a connection between the beginning of the use of
the words and the beginning of the servile institution. For example, if the words had pre-colonial
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etymologies, this would lend support for the antiquity of slavery in Africa thesis. Because this
was not the case, I cannot show evidence that supports or refutes this theory.
However, as is paramount in the study of history, I planned on cross-checking my data
with interviews. I conducted twelve interviews with Swahili speaking persons, the majority of
whom spoke the language for most of their life. These interviews were structured and consisted
of questions, as shown below, aimed at measuring the saliency of words denoting servitude in
Swahili.
Interview Questions
1. What languages do you speak?
2. How long have you spoken them?
3. What is your age?
4. What is your gender?
5. Where are you from originally?
6. How long have you lived there?
7. What do you know about slavery in America?
8. What do you know about slavery in Africa?
9. Do you know of words or phrases in Swahili that refer(s) a slave or slavery?
10. Can you tell me the meaning of each of the words you listed in #9?
11. Do you know any other Swahili speakers I could talk to?
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I obtained a list of interview participants through various means. While I posted calls for
recruitment on the Kamusi.org discussion board, the Swahili Facebook page, and the Kenya
Facebook page, I did not obtain any participants that way. By consulting with my professor, I
secured an interview with a participant who led me to four other people willing to speak with me.
Additionally, I sent out requests for Swahili speaking persons to volunteer to be interviewed
through the Anthropology and USF-Talk listservs. E-mails were also sent to my network of
colleagues and students. I interviewed one of my students who, like most of the participants,
spoke many languages and was able to put me in touch with her parents, whom I also
interviewed. A person off the USF-Talk listserv put me in contact with a participant from whom
I gained yet another participant. A colleague directed me to an associate who was the only
speaker having only a few years of experience speaking Swahili that I talked to. Lastly, I had
been in earlier contact with an academic I met online through academia.edu because of a mutual
interest in Swahili who comprised my twelfth interview. Below is a chart depicting some
characteristics of the interviewees.
Pseudonym 2 or Participant # Languages Spoken and Experience
Age/ Gender From
Hamidi
Swahili (native), English (35 years), Luhya (native), Kinyarwanda (4 years), Basic French (4 years) 40/Male Kenya
2English (native), French (11 years), Swahili (4 years), Spanish (4 years) 23/Female
United States
Abla
Hindi (15 years), Gujarati (16 years), English (15 years), French (5 years), Swahili (14 years) 18/Female Tanzania
ObaSwahili (native), English (native), Setswana (intermediate, ages 2-9), Chiyao (ages 17-22) 29/Male Tanzania
5Gujarati (native), Hindi (native), English (35 years), Spanish (10 years), Swahili (native) 49/Female Kenya
2 Pseudonyms were used for participants who had quotes appearing in the analysis.
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Fikirini
German (native) English (32 years), Swahili (20 years), very basic knowledge of French, Spanish, Hausa, Bambara, Xhosa 42/Male Germany
7English (native), Swahili (native), Nyamwezi and other regional languages for (~20 years) 39/Male Tanzania
8Gujarati (native), Hindi (native), English (20 years), Swahili (25 years) 52/Male India
9Kikuyu (native), Swahili (33 years), English (33 years) 40/Female Kenya
10 Swahili (native), English (native) 30/Female Tanzania
11Swahili (native), Taveta (native), English (34 years) 39/Female Kenya
12English (33 years), Swahili (35 years), Kikuyu (native) 42/Male Kenya
Analysis
Data gathered from the interviews could support the transformationist perspective, a
thesis supported by Miers and Kopytoff (1977) as well as Lovejoy (1983). Though they believe
transatlantic slave trade transformed what was there previously, they have not clearly defined
exactly what pre-colonial social structures were there.
Consider the follow excerpt from an interview conducted with a 40-year-old male native
of Kenya. I will call him Hamidi. I asked him the question: “What do you know about slavery
in Africa?” Hamidi responded:
“I know a lot; there is a theory that Africans used to sell their fellow Africa and I don’t
subscribe to that kind of theory. Africans are very good people, very good-hearted people. I
think they were taken advantage of. If you come [to my country], because you are new,
[someone might offer their children as guides by saying]“my children, you can escort him, you
can show him the way” and maybe they would end up being slaves. I can’t think of an African
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father sending his children to become slaves. [In concern for their children’s welfare, parents
might believe that] Maybe life would be better with someone else and you can go with them
because there was so much trust, and you could trust a stranger, it is not like that here.”
This excerpt supports the transformationist perspective. Perhaps people with values such
as these where a parent is willing to send their child off with someone else because they believe
their child will have a better life with them or offering their children as guides were taken
advantage of by Europeans looking to obtain slaves. In this way, it could be posited that
possibly the transatlantic slave trade transformed these norms and values into a servile
institution. The problem with the data I have is that we do not know the time when these norms
and values started. It could have been after the transatlantic slave trade started that people began
these norms and values.
Further, the interviews cannot be used to support the antiquity thesis because the dates of
the beginning of words denoting slavery are not made clear. On the other hand, they did yield
data not found in the two dictionaries. For example, as mentioned earlier, Schoenbrun (1997)
and the Kamusi dictionary (Martin, Biersteker, and Bertoncini-Zubkova, 2005) do not provide
etymologies for words denoting slave. Eastman (1994) discusses many variations born from
utumwa but focuses on the 18-20th centuries, so we cannot use these conclusions to inform on
pre-colonial matters either. Eastman also does not provide the origins of utumwa in terms of
etymology.
Consider the following excerpt for which a participant explains where utumwa is derived
from. I asked Hamidi, “Do you know of words or phrases in Swahili that refer(s) a slave or
slavery?” and “Can you tell me the meaning of each of the words you listed in #9?” He
responded:
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“Yes Mtumwa/utumwa.” “The word comes from Kutuma meaning ‘send.’ These were
people who were sent by their masters to do all the work be it in the household or in the field.”
I hypothesize that it is possible that the result of utumwa from send could also come from
parents sending their children off with visitors as guides. This claim would need to be further
investigated in other work.
On the other hand, another instance which speaks to the antiquity of slavery thesis in
Africa was provided by a 29 year old male from Tanzania whom I will call Oba. This excerpt
provides evidence which could be used to disprove the antiquity of slavery in African
hypothesis. This is the middle of Oba’s response when I asked him the question: “What do you
know about slavery in Africa?”
“We don’t have caste systems, though we have genocide in Rwanda…we don’t have those
who will always be born as rich people; we have tribalism where one tribe feels superior to
another. If they had slaves they were brought from an inferior group—slavery was introduced
from outside, we would have had lineage of slave but nothing has been told about being born
from family of slave.”
Thus, the participant point out that it is very likely that if slavery has started in Africa,
there might be an indication of that in the oral tradition. Vansina’s (1985) work supports this
conclusion since he contends that social structure can be preserved in language through literal or
figurative oral traditions and lack of idioms reflecting certain social structures may indicate that
these structures did not exist.
Discussion
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These data lend themselves to providing insight into pre-colonial slavery by possibly
supporting for the transformationist perspective and disputing the antiquity of slavery thesis in
the ways I mentioned above. A survey with more participants might tell us more about the recent
changing saliency of slavery if participants were quite varied in age though that would not speak
to pre-colonial slavery.
After conducting twelve interviews, I realize now that there are additional questions I
could have asked my participants. However, I only found this out after speaking with numerous
Swahili speakers. For example, I argue that asking a participant their level of education to learn
how their knowledge was produced could bring insight on related enquiries. This question is
important to ask because it could have told me about the production of knowledge as multiple
interviewees told me that oral tradition is an important part of their knowledge production. Also,
I could have asked them about what information regarding slavery was passed down through
their oral tradition.
This sample is not representative of the broader population of Swahili speakers, though I
if I sought to say something about Swahili speakers in America who are educated, I would have
more appropriate data. A weakness of this work is that it seeks to analyze Swahili without
enough regard to the diversity of its speakers, something a future study could ameliorate.
Eastman (1994, p87) argues that “notions of slavery… [have] evolved distinctly in northern
versus southern coastal Swahili towns.” Nurse and Spear (1985) concur as their book
consistently shows the differentiation in linguistic development between such regions as Kenya
and Tanzania. For example, this is seen when the authors discuss the development of the word
meaning “we will eat,” which is denoted by chutakula in Bajuni (a dialect of Swahili spoken in
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North Kenya), ruchakulya in Vumba (a dialect of Swahili spoken in North Tanzania), and
tutakula the version used in Standard Swahili (Nurse and Spear, p13).
An example of how these interviews yielded valuable confirmations of prior work such
as the salience of slavery differs in different regions, discussed in the above paragraph, is shown
in the following example when I asked participants to cross-check the words denoting slavery
offered by other participants. An 18-year-old woman born in Tanzania, whom I will call Abla,
told me that a word denoting slave was: “Kibarua meaning worker.” When I spoke with Hamidi
he said that Kibarua is really more like a “temporary worker and [it] is not about slavery.”
Another instance of this is seen when Fikirini (this name is a pseudonym), a 42-year-old
male from Germany, offered the words: “kijakazi [meaning] female slave.” Hamidi agrees that
this word is used but it is done so primarily by “people along the coast.” Whereas Fikirini
offered “suria [denoting] concubine,” Hamidi said he had only heard of this used as “a disease.”
Fikirini also presented “mateka” as a slave prisoner of war but Hamidi disagreed saying that
“this is more of a prisoner, to be held hostage—used in a war situation but is not slavery.”
Lastly, though most participants offered forms of utumwa, many offered words not recognized
by others.
A strength of this work is its holistic, triangulative approach which utilized several
methodologies for cross-checking. Further work centering on this topic would be well served to
utilize a similar approach but probably also to add survey and more secondary data analysis
methods. Focus groups may have been better to cross-check participants though that was not
feasible for this project, further research may utilize that method. This project makes a very
good pilot study of which valuable research could be gained.
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One might question the interview measure and ask if a drawback of this research is that
because I do not speak Swahili, I must rely on my participants’ mastery of English; although all
of the people I spoke with had mastered it. However, I am confident that both worthwhile data
and conclusions can be obtained through this work. The goal for these interviews was met as
they provided insight not found in the dictionary and also served as cross-checking, triangulative
measures to ensure valid results.
Additionally, there were many pleasures in this research. First, I was really honored and
I respected the pride with which many interviewees spoke of their history and language. Many
were very willing to share great details of the questions I asked. I was impressed by how much
they knew on the topics discussed.
For example, an interesting point was raised by Fikirini. His point is relative to a larger
discourse which attempts to universalize slavery. When I asked: “What do you know about
slavery in America?” He asked me:
“I guess it did not take long when the first Native Americans were enslaved after the
Spanish arrived. Was there also slavery among Americans of pre-Columbian times? That’s what
I don’t know. As the Native Americans died a lot, Las Casas recommended to ship Africans to
the American plantations.”
What is interesting is the extent of the debate on the antiquity of African slavery but the
virtual absence of such a debate in American history. In this way, this research relates to the
broader interest of this seminar class. It is also relative to the central debates of African
historiography because it adds to the body of literature on issues of servitude in Africa.
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Conclusion
While it is clear that the project is a good pilot study, the interview measure would need
to be augmented in the ways I discussed above. However, with the caveats mentioned earlier, I
have shown that my work is relative to the African historiography because it provides insight on
two of the three main theses concerning slavery in Africa, namely, the transformationist and
antiquity theories. This work also provided additional insight into the development of the word
utumwa. Following the line of this project, further work could yield even more data relative to
my research questions but also other important matters pressing today’s African historians such
as the use of oral tradition in knowledge construction and more.
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References
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Glassman, Jonathon. “No words of their own.” Slavery and Abolition. 16(1):1995.
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431-443.
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