The Bantu language Swahili (or Kiswahili in the language) is the lingua franca of East Africa, spoken by up to 100 million first- and second-language speakers, especially in Tanzania and ...read more
In 1992 I carried out fieldwork in Central Kenya, collecting Gikuyu oral narratives and discussing their historical relations to gender-identity and morality with the performers. Eventually this resulted in my ...read more
Between 1996 and 2002 I was involved in a postdoctoral project on Angola, studying the life histories of refugees living in Namibia as they recounted how political legitimacy had been ...read more
A striking feature of Ptolemaic rule in Egypt (305–30 BC) is the apparent extent of state controland intervention in industry and trade. A multitude of state-imposed rules and regulations can ...read more
The project aims to explore further the notion of Linguistic Citizenship as a means of understanding and promoting more participation and capturing the experiences, interests and concerns of the disadvantaged ...read more
Nearly all countries know a number of memoir-writings, mostly political leaders explaining their role in public life. It is also quite commonplace for authors engaged in writing literary works to ...read more
The Khoisan of Southern Africa have faced violent dispossession and assimilation alongside several others into the racial group ‘coloured’ during colonialism and apartheid. Many today no longer consider the Khoisan ...read more
My research deals with the relation between the languages Kikongo and Lingala and the way the opposition between them has been activated throughout the history of the Congolese capital (1950s-present ...read more
The modern term “epyllion” commonly refers to a narrative poem in hexameters, which is shorter than a full epic. Literary overviews tend to focus on Hellenistic Greek epyllia, considered pioneers ...read more