Why I Specialized In Swahili Literature

L to R: Mwalimu Jecha, my Swahili teacher, Muhammed Said Abdullah, and the scholar-in-training

I first encountered African literature when I was an undergraduate at Merrill College at UC Santa Cruz, which offered a core course in Third World studies. We were introduced to a smorgasbord of writings from Africa, Latin America, and Asia. The African novel on the curriculum was—unsurprisingly for 1968—Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe. I liked it well enough, but it didn't rock my world.

My second encounter with African literature was far more extensive and unguided. As a Peace Corps Volunteer in the French-speaking Central African Republic, I set myself the task of reading whatever African novels I could get my hands on to improve my French. As I grew enamored of African culture and was able to contextualize the novels through my own experience, I became excited about the idea that, once I returned to graduate school in literature (a foregone conclusion for such a writer manqué as myself), I could specialize in African literature. I eventually did this through advanced studies at the University of Paris and a master's program in Comparative Literature at Indiana University.

Although I immeasurably deepened my knowledge of the francophone literatures of Africa and the Caribbean, I was unfavorably struck by the fact that all of my professors were French, not infrequently part of the colonial and postcolonial structures that had introduced them to the part of Africa whose literature they taught. None of them had bothered to learn any of the local languages, even if they had lived in Senegal or Madagascar for some time. Why take on the local patois when internationally recognized poets, novelists, and dramatists wrote in such beautiful French and were influenced by the same literary canon fed to their metropolitan counterparts?

I would not make such a mistake, I determined with an endearing mix of arrogance and naivety. It was simply a matter of choosing the right African language and Swahili was the obvious candidate. It had the oldest tradition of written literature of sub-Saharan Africa, stretching back four centuries to manuscripts written in Arabic script and focusing on religious themes, battles, and Islamic heroes. I made my choice back in 1978 when all my training and presumptions told me that literature was written. Well, Swahili had aa written literature, and it was extensive! Even better, German and British colonialism in East Africa had imposed the Roman alphabet on the written script and had introduced Western genres as markers of modernity. The first recognizably Western novel was a Sherlock Holmes knock-off written by a Zanzibari newspaper editor, Muhammed Said Abdullah, published in 1960.

And so it came to pass. Ten years later, I was in Tanzania researching my dissertation on East Africa's most celebrated, mostly untranslated, Swahili playwright, Ebrahim Hussein. My painfully acquired classroom Swahili blossomed in the humid coastal climes of Dar es Salaam, and I eventually befriended the Man himself. Suspicious of my motives at first, he only spoke English to me in our early encounters. Still, later, once a genuine friendship had developed, he switched over to Swahili, a landmark moment.

During my year as a Research Associate in the Department of Kiswahili, I became friendly with the rising writers and critics of the day, translated the novel Rosa Mistika, a literary touchstone of the Arusha generation, into English, and facilitated the academic exchange of professors between the University of Dar and the University of Wisconsin, where I was pursuing my doctorate.

Soon afterwards, I made my little mark as a scholar of Swahili literature with published articles on the persistence of oral forms in early Swahili writing and the analogous introduction of Western materialism that the new realism of the contemporary Swahili novel brought in its train (euphoniously titled, "Balzac in Zanzibar"). I was, to my knowledge, the only American literary critic writing authoritatively on Swahili literature.

And then the rubber hit the road. I came on the job market in the late eighties. By then, there were plenty of African Ph.D. candidates vying for the same academic positions as I, or, if they weren't Black, they were at least women or nonwhite or anything else that contributed to the diversity that literature departments (or their students) were clamoring for. I was out and, having no more use for a language that was so far removed from any American cultural milieu, I let my Swahili dry up and blow away.

Was it all for naught? If you look up Ebrahim Hussein in Wikipedia, you'll see some references to my work there. In studying and getting to know the man himself, I came to understand the tragedy of a keen mind and talented writer constricted by loyalty to a mother tongue that had no resonance in the West. What I didn't understand then was that I, too, had bound myself to a conception of literature — words on a page — that was too narrow, too shallow, too dependent on that same hierarchy of genres that extolled the slender achievements of the literary Harlem Renaissance to the detriment of the richness of African American folklore, music, and dance.

— Robert Philipson

Read about the professorial foray that prompted this autobiographical essay in Year One of the (Literary) Harlem Renaissance

SHOGA FILMS is a non-profit production and education company. Please consider making a donation to help fund our efforts