| Swahili culture ((sw)Uswahilini) | |
 | |
| Wedding jewelry Comorians | |
| Information | |
| Region | Southern Somalia, Kenyan coastline, Coastline and South-East of Tanzania, Zanzibar, Comoros |
|---|---|
| Vernacular | swahili |
| Religion | Islam |
| Location | |
 7 ° 6 ′ 0 ″ S 40 ° 42 ′ 0 ″ E | |
This article is intended to help you understand the swahili culture (Uswahilini in swahili) peculiar to the coasts ofEast Africa.
Understand
Ethnonymy
The term "Swahili" would come from the word Arabسواحل which is the plural of ساحل and means "coasts, borders".
Birth of the ethnonym "Swahili"
Swahili culture, or at least its beginnings, is very old, an ancient Greek story from the first half of the Ier century: The Eritrean Sea Journey already mentioned it. However, the Greek navigators of Egypt, more interested in trade than social relations, gave no particular names to the inhabitants who, according to them, practiced intermarriages and spoke languages close to each other.
The Arabs used the term زنج zanj (“Nègre”) to qualify the inhabitants. He is the Moroccan explorer Ibn Battuta who, in a rihla recounting his journey from 1331 to 1332 along the East African coasts, was the first to use the term "Land of the Saouâhil" to designate the part of the coast between Mogadishu and Mombasa while also using the word zanj to qualify its inhabitants.
The Portuguese, obscuring the linguistic criterion as a criterion of belonging, used the word of moros to name Muslims and that of kafirs for non-Muslims while the territory was called Zanguebar.
It was not until the beginning of the XIXe century that appear the first attestations testifying that the local populations call themselves Waswahili, that is to say "Those of the coast" (the prefix wa designating in Bantu languages and, therefore, in swahili the class of human beings). It was the British colonizers who then created the ethnonym of Swahili people, now simply "Swahili" in French, to designate all the peoples of the coastal regions ofEast Africa and the archipelagos of Zanzibar and Comoros from Mogadishu, north, Cape Correntes, in the south, speaking one of the dialects, widely understandable among themselves, which gave rise to the unified Swahili (kiswahili in Swahili).
Story
Bibliography
- Françoise Le Guennec-Coppens and Patricia Caplan, The Swahili between Africa and Arabia (civilizations), Paris, Karthala, , 214 p.(ISBN 978-2-8653-7325-3 )(OCLC25841940)
- Françoise Le Guennec-Coppens and David Parkin, Authority and power among the Swahili (men and society), Paris, Karthala, , 262 p.(ISBN 978-2-8653-7869-2 )(OCLC924573129)
- Pascal Bacuez, From Zanzibar to Kilwa: conflicting relations in Swahili country (men and society), Louvain, Peeters, , 259 p.(ISBN 978-2-8772-3573-0 )(OCLC46449184)
- Henry Tourneux, Zanzibar nights: Swahili tales (fiction, folklore), Paris, Éditions Karthala, , 161 p.(ISBN 978-2-8653-7064-1 )(OCLC10860876) - Four Swahili tales translated into French.
- Pascal Bacuez, Swahili tales of Kilwa = Hadithi za kiswahili kutoka Kilwa: Bilingual tales (folklore), Paris, L'Harmattan, , 142 p.(ISBN 978-2-7384-9748-2 )(OCLC45505612) - Texts in French and Swahili.
