General Information

Swahili Forum invites scholars and writers to submit papers on all aspects of Swahili language, culture and society aswell as book reviews pertaining to these topics. Papers and reviews will be published in Swahili, English, French and German.

The history of Swahili Forum reaches back to 1983 when international Swahili scholars started to build up a tighter network and communicate about ongoing research. A first initiative was the establishment of the newsletter Swahili Language and Society: Notes and News (SLS: NN), first issued in 1984, edited by Joan Maw, Lourenco Noronha and (from 1989 onwards) Karl Thomanek, at the Institut für Afrikanistik of the University of Vienna, Austria. The newsletter informed about researchers, projects, new publications, the teaching of Kiswahili worldwide, and occasionally published smaller articles and reviews. For larger articles on ongoing research in Swahili linguistics, sociolinguistics, pragmatics and literary studies Marcel van Spaandonck and Jan Blommaert initiated the monograph series Working Papers on Kiswahili (WPK), which was published from 1987 onwards at the Seminar of Swahili and the Language Problems of Developing Nations at the University of Ghent, Belgium. By 1993 both WPK and SLS: NN ceased to appear with a final No.10 of the latter, edited by Jan Blommaert at the International Pragmatics Association, Antwerp, Belgium. The obvious need of the international group of Swahilists for continuation was then met by Swahili Forum. This journal was inaugurated in 1994 as an annual thematic number of the quarterly Afrikanistische Arbeitspapiere (AAP), issued at the Institut für Afrikanistik of the University of Cologne, Germany. Special editors of the Swahili Forum were Rose Marie Beck, Thomas Geider, Werner Graebner, Ingo Heine (for the 1997 issue) and since 2000 Lutz Diegner. Swahili Forum greatly profited from the Swahili Colloquium, which Gudrun Miehe first organized in 1987 at the University of Frankfurt am Main, Germany, and later continued to hold in cooperation with Said A.M. Khamis at the University of Bayreuth, Germany. Many of its participants contributed their papers to Swahili Forum, which also attracted further authors from East Africa and beyond. The Forum appeared in nine print issues between 1994 and 2002. With the change of the quarterly AAP to the journal Annual Publication in African Linguistics (APAL), published since 2003 by Rüdiger Köppe Verlag, Cologne, the editors of Swahili Forum had to decide whether the Swahilist's journal had to cease to appear or could find a new home. This was readily found within the section Afrikanische Philologie at the Institute for Anthropology and African Studies at the University of Mainz, Germany. Considering the high printing costs and the growing usage of the World Wide Web the editors decided to issue Swahili Forum from 2003 onwards as an online publication. The journal went into the web in June 2004 and intends to provide CD-ROM copies for those institutions and scholars who do not have ready access to the internet and still depend on printed pages. Editors are now Rose Marie Beck, Lutz Diegner, Thomas Geider and Uta Reuster-Jahn, Clarissa Vierke (since Vol. 12/ 2005).

SWAHILI FORUM

• is an ideal forum for authors who like to see their contributions published within short time
• is produced with minimal bureaucracy and not for profit
• appears annually

Our website was constructed with financial support from the Sulzmann Foundation Mainz.