In East Africa, reading is not done silently, but aloud to a public: a shared, sensorial experience. This project “gives voice” to Swahili pocket literature, a genre rarely included in scholarly discussions, classrooms, or bookshops. Its aim is to establish the TiaSauti@Lab (GiveVoice@Lab): an atelier to explore Swahili orature via digital content. The pilot initiative will be a vodcast series featuring conversations on contemporary Muslim cultural life through a rereading of 20th-century Swahili pamphlet literatures. Tia Sauti@Lab involves the cooperation of local radio broadcasters, publishers, poets, and reciters from East Africa with a broader, international online audience.

This project investigates how descendants of survivors of violent conflict anticipate and respond to future disaster – both potential new conflict and natural hazards. The long-term and intergenerational impact of violent conflict on vulnerability is well documented. This study explores intergenerational resilience and adaption instead. We do so by investigating anticipatory practices of descendants of war and genocide survivors who face potential, new disaster in Rwanda. The study addresses the timely need to deepen insights into intergenerational resilience in the realm of recurring disasters, and contributes to new understandings of entanglements between ‘natural’ and ‘manmade’ calamities and adaptation.

The guest researcher and applicant have been collaborating on various occasions building on the Zimbabwe Rural Household Dynamics Dataset to inform policy and academic discussions on land reform in Africa. This has resulted in numerous publications (see individual CVs), including three joint publications. One of these publications (in the Journal of Peasant Studies) provided a broader perspective to the land reform debate in Zimbabwe after the Fast Track Resettlement Process beginning in the early 2000s. The proposed visit is intended to build on this piece of work and extend the analysis with another decade, to cover the full generation of the first land reform beneficiaries as well as their descendants. The groundwork for this has been laid over the years and now needs to be pulled together.

From the 1930s onwards in East Africa, a massive print production of Swahili religious pocket literature started : this vernacular literature was more accessible than Arabic and became the prime medium to spread new knowledge in the Indian Ocean. The study on how the network of booklets together with their authors, publishers and readers reshaped traditions of learning will rectify simplistic notions of inert Islamic learning traditions. Research, open access databases and outreach reading clubs in the Netherlands will contribute to a fruitful dialogue with African Muslim cosmopolitan communities.

The present volume is a pioneering collection of poetry by the outstanding Kenyan poet, intellectual and imam Ustadh Mahmmoud Mau (born 1952) from Lamu island, once an Indian Ocean hub, now on the edge of the nation state. By means of poetry in Arabic script, the poet raises his voice against social ills and injustices troubling his community on Lamu. The book situates Mahmoud Mau’s oeuvre within transoceanic exchanges of thoughts so characteristic of the Swahili coast. It shows how Swahili Indian Ocean intellectual history inhabits an individual biography and writings. Moreover, it also portrays a unique African Muslim thinker and his poetry in the local language, which has so often been neglected as major site for critical discourse in Islamic Africa. The selected poetry is clustered around the following themes: jamii: societal topical issues, ilimu: the importance of education, huruma: social roles and responsabilities, matukio: biographical events and maombi: supplications. Prefaced by Rayya Timamy (Nairobi University), the volume includes contributions by Jasmin Mahazi, Kai Kresse and Kadara Swaleh, Annachiara Raia and Clarissa Vierke. The authors’ approaches highlight the relevance of local epistemologies as archives for understanding the relationship between reform Islam and local communities in contemporary Africa.