ABSTRACT
This chapter seeks to describe what Swahili oral traditions and chronicles are, and to explain their symbolic language. The main focus will be on the initial episode narrated in these traditions, fundamental to the understanding of the story. At first, the chronicles were handed down from generation to generation orally; but after the arrival of the colonial powers, the Swahili began to commit them to text. In the nineteenth century the chronicles acquired a new political meaning highlighted by this new way of conveying them, even though their social symbolism did not change. Thus, even if the identical meaning was intended at all points in time, the use of that meaning changed due to the different historical context. In pre-colonial times, Swahili chronicles had the function of ‘remembering’ the history of the city for the community and its members who shared the same past, thus forging and strengthening community identity from within. With the establishment of foreign polities, the chronicles were used to legitimate the Swahili social, economic and political model against a new order. Identity categories and ‘social ranks’ in coastal civilisation had been fluid and flexible, making it possible to ‘absorb’ oceanic migrations; social conditions, however, were fixed by the advent of colonialism. At the time Swahili society, threatened by foreigners, had to assert its own identity in contraposition with and in response to the outside. If the narration of the past has always reflected the elements characterising Swahili identity, in the twentieth century the chronicles acquired the physical role of lieux de mémoire. As Peter Burke (1989) points out, an element not to be underestimated in the study of a collective identity is the social memory, that is the image of the past held by a group and shared by all of its members. But, ‘collective memory is not that of an organic group whose faculty of recall would be similar to the personal memory of an individual; rather, collective memory is a means of producing meanings which belong to a political field’ (Jewsiewicki and Mudimbe 1993: 10). In this perspective the role of the chronicles is that of a place, known to all, around which the Swahili built their identity and which functioned to support political power and social position for particular groups threatened by foreigners and social changes.
