Language and Colonial Power: The Appropriation of Swahili in the Former Belgian Congo 1880-1938

by Johannes Fabian

Overview

In this study, inquiry will be directed to the past, and it will, for many reasons, have to reach into a past which is rather remote from present-day Shaba Swahili. The author's principal concern remains with a contemporary situation, namely the role of Swahili in the context of work, industrial, artisanal, and artistic. When it was first formulated, the aim of my project was to describe what might be called the workers' culture of Shaba, through analyses of communicative (sociolinguistic) and cognitive (ethnosemantic) aspects of language use. 

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780520076259
Publisher:	University of California Press
Publication date:	08/16/1991
Edition description:	First Edition
Pages:	212
Product dimensions:	5.90(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.70(d)

About the Author

Johannes Fabian is Professor of Cultural Anthropology at the University of Amsterdam and author of Time and the Other and Power and Performance.

Table of Contents

	Foreword	vii
	Acknowledgements	viii
	A note on names and orthography	ix
	Introduction	1
1	Prelude: expeditions and campaigns	13
	Polyglotta Africana	15
	Swahili guides for the road	19
	On the road: language and travel	24
	End of the road	33
2	Questions and queries	42
	A question of law and rights: language and the Colonial Charter	44
	A question of facts: language in an early government survey	49
	Responses from businessmen and administrators	53
	Responses from missionaries and educators	58
	A question of power: warnings from Katanga	63
	Some general conclusions	65
3	Settling in: colonization and language	70
	Missions, education and the oeuvre civilisatrice	71
	Missionary linguistics	75
	Religious and secular colonization: common ground	78
	Language guides and teaching aids	84
	Colonial language training in Belgium	88
4	Labor and language in Katanga	92
	Labor in Katanga: a complicated story	92
	Swahili as a symbol of 'reorientation': consolidation of Belgian rule in Katanga	100
	Swahili as a work-language: some structural determinants	106
5	Talking tough and bad: pidginization in Katanga	112
	Missionaries teaching colonists	112
	Colonists teaching colonists: a guide for farmers in Katanga	114
	The most common words in Katanga: a curious early manual	124
	Conclusion: no missing link	133
6	The end: illusions of colonial power	135
	Swahili and symbolic power	136
	Codified Swahili in the eastern Congo: an inventory 1918-38	142
	'Improved Swahili': Union Miniere and A. Verbeken	148
	A voice not heard: A. Melignon and the 'rehabilitation' of Swahili in Katanga	157
	Notes	163
	Bibliography	188
	Index	201