Kiswahili Culture

Culture in Swahiliphone Countries

It is presumptuous to speak of one Kiswahili culture because most of the speakers of the language use it as a lingua franca or a national/official language. Kiswahili happens to be one of the languages people use. The true Swahili people would be those from the eastern coast numbering no more than 2 million souls. Therefore, it would seem appropriate rather to talk in terms of cultures in Swahiliphone countries. Here is a list giving some sites on such cultures.

As far as the culture is concerned, each individual country should be looked individually. However, UNESCO has a well-documented project on Swahili Culture in both French and English. It deals with the origin, the development and the actual state of the Swahili culture. This site has beautiful photographs from the Kenya National Museum. They show the vestiges of Swahili architecture of the last three centuries. There are two versions, one in English and one in French. To have a good historical perspective in the interaction between African and Middle-Eastern and Asian sailors, this site should be checked out !

There also several sites dealing exclusively with the study of both culture and the language. this list includes the following:

For the Berlitz approach in learning Kiswahili, you can find material on this site.
This is offered by the Adventurous Traveler Bookstore.
Professor John Mugane from Stanford has a site on the verb. He uses a movie about Nairobi to explain the functioning of the verb in Kiswahili. He explains it as follows: "The final Quicktime movie is nine minutes long and takes up 6 MB after optimization for the web. It is a series of still images accompanied by narration, like a film strip, created by scanning actual photographs, cropping them with Adobe Photoshop, and adding audio and titles with Adobe Premiere. The final project was rendered at 3 fps."
This site gives general information on Kiswahili: the language, the history, the present state of the language, important phrases, dictionaries, glossaries.