id	author	title	date	pages	extension	mime	words	sentence	flesch	summary	cache	txt
ajiss-350	Bolton, Caitlyn	Making Africa Legible: Kiswahili Arabic and Orthographiic Romanization in Colonial Zanzibar	2016.0	18	.pdf	application/pdf	7327	276	49	Ali Mazrui often told the larger stories of Africa, and in the case of Swahili his copious writings focus on its centrality in the political, religious, and eco- nomic spheres of the region spanning Kinshasa to Mombasa.2 Yet the story of the Romanization of Swahili orthography was a very personal one for him, as his father Shaykh Al-Amin b. Ali Mazrui was the chief voice opposing it in 1930s coastal Kenya.3 Drawing upon archival materials in English, Arabic, and Swahili from the Zanzibar National Archives, I tell here the local story of this orthographic shift in Zanzibar, the site chosen as the standard Swahili for the region: from the early missionaries’ first Swahili grammars and their at- tempts to “purify” Swahili of Arabic’s influence in their “conversion of Africa from the East,” to British colonial promotion of a standardized “literary” Swahili, to local Arab and Muslim opposition to Kiswahili Roman, and to the eventual colonial remorse as the orthographic shift facilitated an irreversible generational gap and social breakdown. Alongside Hausa, Wolof, and other African languages, the Romanization of Swahili orthography was part of a project to make Africa more legible to Europeans.	cache/ajiss-350.pdf	txt/ajiss-350.txt