tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4315622077472504022012-02-17T20:39:11.311+03:00history, ethnography, ethnobiology, linguistics...Martin Walshhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12861269342303762201noreply@blogger.comBlogger491100tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-431562207747250402.post-64908575654837034602012-02-06T01:48:00.002+03:002012-02-15T18:51:52.345+03:00

by Helle Goldman In January 2003, while we were in Zanzibar to camera-trap carnivores in Jozani-Chwaka Bay National Park, my husband Jon Winther-Hansen observed a Zanzibar Sykes’ monkey (Cercopithecus mitis albogularis, a.k.a. Blue monkey or White-throated guenon) eating a sloughed-off snake skin. Partly hidden by the lush foliage of the Indian almond tree (Terminalia catappa) in which it was

Martin Walshhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12861269342303762201noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-431562207747250402.post-8900491655515754822012-01-23T22:41:00.002+03:002012-01-24T00:04:07.339+03:00

Posing on the Pongwe whale Just over a week ago (on Sunday 15th January) I went to stay at Pongwe on the east coast of Zanzibar (Unguja island) for the second time in three months. The tide wasn't in until the late afternoon, and not long after I'd had a quick swim -- or rather a float in the shallows -- I was told that there was a dolphin in the water just along from the beach bar that I'd

Martin Walshhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12861269342303762201noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-431562207747250402.post-50834942426266772962011-12-26T22:54:00.026+03:002011-12-27T00:52:22.011+03:00

Kenyans breathed a collective sigh of relief on Friday when it was announced that a 29 year-old woman who had bled to death in Kenyatta National Hospital the morning before was not the victim of an Ebola-like virus, as had initially been feared (for the Nation's version of these events, click here). As readers of Richard Preston's bio-thriller The Hot Zone (1994) were informed in full

Martin Walshhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12861269342303762201noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-431562207747250402.post-75662245437785872432011-12-04T15:47:00.001+03:002011-12-04T22:57:35.099+03:00

I've lost count of the number of times I've flown between Dar es Salaam and Zanzibar. But until last month I'd never tried to take photographs of the journey. In the mid-90s, when I flew regularly on light aircraft, I didn't have a good enough camera; and in recent years I've usually been a passenger on larger aeroplanes with misty windowpanes. So in early November I was thrilled to find myself

Martin Walshhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12861269342303762201noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-431562207747250402.post-46073999623189011452011-09-10T17:34:00.001+03:002011-09-10T17:40:37.603+03:00

I was going to resume writing this blog with one of my trademark posts about a quirky and largely inconsequential subject. But I couldn't ignore the news. Our phones began ringing before dawn with reports of the disaster that had befallen Zanzibar. The ferry to Pemba, MV Spice Islander, sank off Nungwi last night with hundreds of people aboard. The details are still sketchy: many people have been

Martin Walshhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12861269342303762201noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-431562207747250402.post-64727107012510172492011-05-29T22:04:00.004+03:002011-05-30T11:03:46.321+03:00

Mitchell's reed frog (© Jonathan R. Walz 2002) I was inspired to write this note about frogs and field guides after seeing the image of a frog posted online by my good friend Jonathan Walz, Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Rollins College in Florida. This striking photo was taken in 2002 in Amani Nature Reserve in the East Usambara Mountains of Tanzania, and gives a nice sense of the

Martin Walshhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12861269342303762201noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-431562207747250402.post-54486209899530324542011-05-22T02:24:00.005+03:002011-05-22T14:01:31.504+03:00

Bukusu novices  Writing last week about 'Periodic flowering and circumcision cycles', I was reminded of a trip to the slopes of Mount Elgon in July 1992, to belatedly negotiate bridewealth payments. One day we saw a group of boys singing and dancing in the open, and I was told that they were novices preparing for circumcision, which takes place in August every second year. My notes on

Martin Walshhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12861269342303762201noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-431562207747250402.post-57570341260159961542011-05-17T01:42:00.003+03:002011-05-18T14:57:52.746+03:00

Last week saw a flurry of news stories about the mass emergence of 13-year periodical cicadas in Georgia and other southeastern states of the U.S. These cicadas all belong to Brood XIX, aka the Great Southern Brood, which last appeared in 1998, and is due now to return in 2024. There are three broods of 13-year cicadas and 12 broods of 17-year cicadas in the States, most of them mixtures of

Martin Walshhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12861269342303762201noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-431562207747250402.post-53797825742033160482011-04-11T00:36:00.003+03:002011-04-11T19:36:24.464+03:00

Who says a leopard can't change it's spots? Shown below are five black and white photos of leopard skins (taken and edited by my colleagues Helle Goldman and Jon Winther-Hansen), each showing a comparable section of the midbody.* Can you spot any obvious differences between their coat patterns and configuration of rosettes? Can you group them into different categories? We've shuffled the

Martin Walshhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12861269342303762201noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-431562207747250402.post-90380469687193157852011-03-14T23:34:00.000+03:002011-03-14T23:34:15.773+03:00

Last week I returned to the University of Edinburgh for the second time in two years to give a seminar in the Centre of African Studies. In February 2010 I was 'Explaining Popobawa'; this time I was talking about 'Images and Counter-Images of the Zanzibar Revolution', at the end of a day-long workshop on 'Representations of a Continent: Public and private visual images in data collection in

Martin Walshhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12861269342303762201noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-431562207747250402.post-2217476645130366122011-02-27T22:36:00.010+03:002011-03-12T00:07:41.218+03:00

Greg Forth at work I had a stimulating lunch last week with Gregory Forth, Professor of Anthropology in the University of Alberta in Canada. Greg's regional specialisation is Southeast Asia, and the Indonesian archipelago in particular, where he's undertaken long-term ethnographic research on the islands of Sumba and Flores. He's written extensively about indigenous religion and ritual, and

Martin Walshhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12861269342303762201noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-431562207747250402.post-87523085184366411362011-02-13T20:11:00.001+03:002011-02-13T20:18:53.511+03:00

Postcard from the Humphrey Winterton Collection I've just added a visual postscript - the postcard picture of a pet rhino - to last September's post on the 'Imaginary Animals of Zanzibar'. I came across this while looking for photographs to illustrate a seminar on 'Images and counter-images of the Zanzibar Revolution' that I'm giving in Edinburgh next month. In preparation for this I've also

Martin Walshhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12861269342303762201noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-431562207747250402.post-1248663483117992372011-02-04T15:10:00.006+03:002011-02-05T13:56:02.927+03:00

Bajau child at sea (source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bajau) One of the enduring mysteries of Indian Ocean history is how and why speakers of a Bornean language came to settle on the island of Madagascar. The Dutch explorer Frederik de Houtman (1603) drew attention to the similarities between Malay and Malagasy more than two centuries before Wilhelm von Humboldt (1836-39) proposed the

Martin Walshhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12861269342303762201noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-431562207747250402.post-7043233393427050322011-01-21T00:10:00.003+03:002011-01-22T16:28:03.204+03:00

Languishing in a hospital bed recently, my feverish mind swirled with memories of earlier hospitalisations - my own and others' - many of them in East Africa. The institution I came to know best, as both patient and visitor, was Mombasa Hospital, memorably situated on the sea front next to Fort Jesus. If I close my eyes I can still feel the strong breeze blowing off the Indian Ocean into an

Martin Walshhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12861269342303762201noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-431562207747250402.post-89741600408395668122010-12-23T18:13:00.001+03:002010-12-23T18:17:37.138+03:00

In the good old days of descriptive ethnography children's games and pastimes were treated as a serious matter. The now-defunct handbook Notes and Queries on Anthropology declared games of all kinds to be "worthy of special study", and advised fieldworkers to join in and learn to play them, as well as recording them as fully as possible (1929: 321; 1951: 334). When I began fieldwork in Usangu

Martin Walshhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12861269342303762201noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-431562207747250402.post-32924344087317339462010-12-12T17:51:00.004+03:002010-12-12T17:58:28.401+03:00

When I was a boy I loved role-playing "Cowboys and Indians". I always wanted to be a "Red Indian" (Native American), and was especially fond of mock-fighting with a bow and arrows. In one overgrown English garden I fashioned my own flightless arrows from the straight stems of Goldenrod (Solidago sp.), and have looked at this plant wistfully ever since. In many parts of East Africa archery is much

Martin Walshhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12861269342303762201noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-431562207747250402.post-35518487454465238012010-12-06T02:01:00.007+03:002010-12-06T17:14:40.507+03:00

Taita bag, sketch by James Walsh (1989) One of the things that fascinates me about public institutions and other large organisations is the way in which otherwise subordinate departments, offices and teams can develop their own collective identity and ways of working that subvert official procedures and create spaces for autonomous (but not necessarily subversive) action. I saw this when

Martin Walshhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12861269342303762201noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-431562207747250402.post-30664995545559504252010-11-27T19:43:00.000+03:002010-11-27T19:43:33.060+03:00

Watching an old James Bond film last night, conversation in our bilingual household naturally turned to hairy chests. You mean "garden love", said Mama J, "bustani ya mapenzi" (lit. 'garden of love'). I'd never heard this expression before, let alone any special term or euphemism for chest hair in Swahili, so made a beeline for the nearest search engine. I missed the ending of Thunderball, but

Martin Walshhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12861269342303762201noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-431562207747250402.post-28841993661775806262010-11-21T15:14:00.006+03:002010-11-26T15:34:10.605+03:00

Woolworths R.I.P. As we all know now, Prince William proposed to Kate Middleton in October during a private holiday at Lewa Wildlife Conservancy in the northern foothills of Mount Kenya. Intense media speculation about the exact location and circumstances of the marriage proposal has been accompanied by interviews with Ian Craig, founding Executive Director and now Strategic Advisor of the

Martin Walshhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12861269342303762201noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-431562207747250402.post-86911365023839663412010-11-14T18:32:00.001+03:002010-11-14T18:34:32.430+03:00

At my desk in Utengule: shoebox in the foreground Last weekend my daughter asked me if I had any empty shoe boxes: she needed one to fill with odds and sods for an annual charity appeal. There is of course a pile of old shoe boxes in one corner of my study, waiting for the day when I abandon computers and manufactured filing systems in favour of the cheap and cheerful homemade solutions of

Martin Walshhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12861269342303762201noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-431562207747250402.post-22384023927733653162010-10-31T23:02:00.004+03:002010-11-01T00:18:17.083+03:00

One of the blog posts I enjoyed last week was my colleague Duncan Green's review of Small Acts of Resistance: How Courage, Tenacity, and Ingenuity Can Change the World, a popular book by Steve Crawshaw and John Jackson about popular protests that in some cases have had far-reaching impacts. This reminded me of an incident that took place in the Tanzanian town of Iringa in early 2003, when an

Martin Walshhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12861269342303762201noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-431562207747250402.post-55899421958103211112010-10-18T02:24:00.003+03:002010-11-26T13:08:53.072+03:00

Twenty-five years ago I went to a World Food Day celebration at Kaloleni in the palm-covered hills to the north of Mombasa. The meeting was presided over by the Kaloleni Divisonal Officer and attended mainly by government agricultural staff and the members of women's groups from the surrounding area. The centrepiece was a display of local foods which everyone was invited to inspect and then

Martin Walshhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12861269342303762201noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-431562207747250402.post-41528169638130881972010-10-10T16:11:00.009+03:002011-06-29T13:59:52.664+03:00

Ali Sultan Issa in 1970 (from Burgess 2009) I've lost count of the number of times I travelled on the overnight train between Mombasa and Nairobi in the second half of the 1980s and the early '90s.When I could afford it, and tickets were available, I booked first class, which meant sharing with just one other passenger, or, if I was lucky, having a compartment all to myself. I met some

Martin Walshhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12861269342303762201noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-431562207747250402.post-11154319999150348972010-10-03T00:59:00.014+03:002010-10-04T01:14:22.822+03:00

Ernest Hemingway, Serengeti Plain, January 1934 (JFK Library) For many years I've wanted to write something about 'bad Swahili', the mangled snippets of the language that appear with depresssing frequency in the works of otherwise literate European and American writers striving to add local spice to their fictional and factional accounts of life in East Africa. My principal inspiration was

Martin Walshhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12861269342303762201noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-431562207747250402.post-84560829853072814572010-09-25T21:09:00.007+03:002011-02-13T12:48:05.214+03:00

On 14 June 2007, the Hon. Ame Pandu Ame, MP for Nungwi constituency in Zanzibar, asked the following question in the Tanzanian parliament: Given that Zanzibar is part of Tanzania, and that some animals have now disappeared from the islands, such as Ader's Duiker (Paa-Nunga), Impala (Swala), Zebra (Pundamilia), and Ostrich (Mbuni):- Does the government not see that there is a need to take

Martin Walshhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12861269342303762201noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-431562207747250402.post-53073126592495298802010-09-12T20:31:00.007+03:002010-09-12T22:53:39.381+03:00

Last week I received my copy of a paper written with archaeologist Stephanie Wynne-Jones and just published in the journal History in Africa. It's about the changing role of slavery in the stories that local people tell about the past in Shimoni, in south-east Kenya. Here's the beginning of our paper, preferably read while listening to Roger Whittaker's "melodramatic warblings" (Trillo 2002:

Martin Walshhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12861269342303762201noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-431562207747250402.post-65347219175582533512010-09-02T20:51:00.011+03:002010-12-16T23:29:40.297+03:00

Despite its inaccessibility (it remains untranslated and copies are hard to obtain), Vinigi Grottanelli’s Pescatori dell’Oceano indiano (1955) is generally agreed to be one of the best studies of a rural Swahili-speaking community. It’s our principal ethnographic source on the Bajuni (aka Gunya, aka Tikuu), whose traditional territory comprised a long string of coastal settlements and islands

Martin Walshhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12861269342303762201noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-431562207747250402.post-48380601938073651022010-08-24T03:07:00.007+03:002010-08-24T13:26:30.615+03:00

In the past two days I’ve been busy sorting through two decades’ worth of letters and postcards written home to my parents in Southport. They cover the period from 1976, when I went up to Cambridge, through to the late 1990s when I was working in Iringa and internet access changed all of our writing habits. I’ve rarely had the time, energy, or desire to write a narrative diary, so letters and

Martin Walshhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12861269342303762201noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-431562207747250402.post-89681371952936731662010-08-15T22:55:00.024+03:002010-08-20T21:48:46.323+03:00

The shortest (and least serious) article that I've ever written was about the longest insects in the world. I wrote it to see how easy it would be to get something published in the East Africa Natural History Society Bulletin. 'A Stick Insect in Same' was published in September 1991, and here's the text in full: In early September 1990, while staying in Same (between the North and South Pare

Martin Walshhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12861269342303762201noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-431562207747250402.post-32655848719105034842010-08-08T23:37:00.006+03:002010-08-12T11:04:38.904+03:00

My home town, Southport, is a sleepy seaside resort on the north-west coast of England with too many golf courses and a sea front ruined by moronic planners. Among the town's many attractions are a number of tacky shops selling seashells and other tourist tat by the seashore, or rather where the seashore was when Queen Victoria was on the throne. Apart from buying the odd stick of rock and

Martin Walshhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12861269342303762201noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-431562207747250402.post-34936791800384740812010-08-01T02:40:00.007+03:002010-08-04T18:03:42.730+03:00

Last week I met Robin Palmer, who maintains Oxfam’s ‘Land Rights in Africa’ webpage and is the author of a stimulating think-piece on land grabs: ‘A New Scramble for Africa?’ (2010). This, and another paper that he forwarded (Zoomers 2010), set me thinking about the different kinds of land alienation that I’ve come across in East Africa. The case that troubles me most is the expansion of

Martin Walshhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12861269342303762201noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-431562207747250402.post-28398549560077984792010-07-25T01:35:00.011+03:002010-07-27T20:18:30.068+03:00

I first met Father Phil when he came to give Midnight Mass in Utengule-Usangu in 1980. He arrived in the village on his pikipiki (motorbike) in the late afternoon of Christmas Eve, and I immediately went off to find him. Some months earlier I’d been told to look out for this geologist-turned-botanist and White Father, and this was my first chance to meet him. It was also the first time another

Martin Walshhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12861269342303762201noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-431562207747250402.post-57235995521536457802010-07-17T20:03:00.012+03:002010-07-18T00:25:03.415+03:00

One of the most puzzling reports that I heard when I lived in Utengule-Usangu in the early 1980s was that a meteorite had fallen to earth somewhere to the east of the village. This event was supposed to have taken place in the early hours (around 2.30-3.00 in the morning) of Thursday 12th November 1981. The first I knew about it was later that day when I joined my usual kikao or drinking group

Martin Walshhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12861269342303762201noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-431562207747250402.post-8741788656659438842010-07-11T01:14:00.010+03:002010-07-25T16:44:16.580+03:00

In October 1986, hunting for books in Nairobi, I wandered into a store on Kimathi Street that had clearly seen better days. There, on its dusty and understocked shelves, my eyes alighted on a rare work that I’d seen references to but hadn’t previously been able to get my hands on: William Frank’s Habari na Desturi za Waribe (“History and Customs of the Ribe people of the Coast Province of Kenya

Martin Walshhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12861269342303762201noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-431562207747250402.post-54044932287039177162010-07-04T00:25:00.010+03:002010-07-04T11:52:26.892+03:00

The Zanzibar Revolution is very poorly documented, and its unexpected instigator, the self-styled Field Marshal John Okello, remains its most enigmatic figure. What little we know about his life before the night of 11-12th January 1964 is largely derived from his own unreliable account, written after he had been barred from Zanzibar less than two months later.* Okello’s later life has been the

Martin Walshhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12861269342303762201noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-431562207747250402.post-60547993754980498782010-06-26T20:19:00.013+03:002010-06-27T14:19:10.144+03:00

One of the places I now wish I’d visited when I lived on Pemba island in 1994-96 is Kojani. It's one of the least accessible villages, located on an islet off the eastern coast of the main island. At the last count Kojani was home to more than nine thousand people. New arrivals are liable to be met by throngs of excited children wading into the water to ogle at them. The menfolk of the village

Martin Walshhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12861269342303762201noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-431562207747250402.post-39473305347861063242010-06-19T13:13:00.004+03:002010-06-19T15:36:06.026+03:00

A few years ago I wrote a note for the journal Azania on the rare use of a nasalised dental click in Digo, the Mijikenda language that’s spoken on both sides of Kenya-Tanzania border. This click occurs in a couple of interjections-cum-ideophones, n|a ‘go away, get lost!’, and n|akule ‘miniscule, minute’, where n| represents a dental click with voiced velar nasal accompaniment (to approximate

Martin Walshhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12861269342303762201noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-431562207747250402.post-74481812628379877652010-06-13T00:42:00.012+03:002010-06-13T02:33:52.842+03:00

“About October the dark clouds begin to gather in the east, lingering about the crests of the ridges before breaking in spectacular thunderstorms. While it is still raining the hot sun comes out, the earth steams and rainbows appear over the lakes and dams. At this moment, the people say, “The hyaena is giving birth to twins.” Overnight scarlet lilies appear like balls of fire among the

Martin Walshhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12861269342303762201noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-431562207747250402.post-20856041112217858602010-06-06T16:34:00.006+03:002010-06-07T02:34:11.346+03:00

One of my favourite examples of linguistic innovation in Tanzania was the rapid transformation in 1996 of a politician’s name into a term of ridicule in Swahili. Ramadhani Kihiyo became CCM MP for Temeke constituency in Dar es Salaam in the first multi-party general elections in October 1995. But his election was challenged, and in the subsequent petition hearing it emerged that he had lied about

Martin Walshhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12861269342303762201noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-431562207747250402.post-36345335297637350792010-05-30T12:52:00.012+03:002010-05-31T10:59:31.785+03:00

Mumiani and chinjachinja were once the very stuff of urban legend in East Africa, and they haven’t entirely remained in the graves that historians implicitly consign them to. Although Luise White in Speaking with Vampires (2000) claims these two terms for blood-takers to have been synonymous in everday use, etymology and distribution suggest that this hasn’t always been the case. Mumiani is a

Martin Walshhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12861269342303762201noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-431562207747250402.post-20409498286374791622010-05-24T01:32:00.018+03:002010-07-29T19:06:37.904+03:00

Last year (2009) Nature Kenya / the East Africa Natural History Society (EANHS) published its Checklist of the Birds of Dakatcha Woodland, an Important Bird Area (IBA) in the hinterland of Malindi on the Kenya coast. The woodland is home to a number of globally threatened and near-threatened bird species and is itself threatened by illegal commercial agricultural development. One of the birds

Martin Walshhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12861269342303762201noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-431562207747250402.post-47050563681984186062009-07-03T17:16:00.024+03:002011-02-20T11:39:14.333+03:00

I started this occasional blog by posting short articles that I'd already written and (in all but one case) published. 'Occasional' became an understatement when I started scanning and posting papers and other miscellaneous writings to the document-sharing website Scribd. I've now uploaded more than 170 files to Scribd, including my doctoral dissertation (1984) about Usangu and a collection of

Martin Walshhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12861269342303762201noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-431562207747250402.post-63579933505020503542009-04-04T12:51:00.009+03:002011-02-20T11:36:58.375+03:00

by Martin Walsh[This is the corrected text of an article that appeared in March 1992 in the East Africa Natural History Society Bulletin, 22 (1): 2-9. A pdf version (with minor diacritical marks that can't be shown here) can be downloaded from the site of the Ethno-ornithology Research and Study Group.]The following notes set out to solve a simple linguistic puzzle: why do the Mijikenda of the

Martin Walshhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12861269342303762201noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-431562207747250402.post-68406082473396107382009-04-04T01:15:00.007+03:002011-02-20T11:32:15.111+03:00

by Martin Walsh [This is a corrected version of an article originally published in 1998 in Mvita: Bulletin of the Regional Centre for the Study of Archaeology in Eastern and Southern Africa, 7: 1-4. For some time it was available on the National Museums of Kenya website, together with a French translation by Edouard Bugingo (‘Jeter les Cadavres: Sites Communs où sont Déposés les Cadavres au

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by Martin Walsh, translated by Edouard Bugingo [This is a translation of 'Throwing away the dead: communal sites for the disposal of corpses in pre-colonial south-west Tanzania', originally published in Mvita: Bulletin of the Regional Centre for the Study of Archaeology in Eastern and Southern Africa, 7: 1-4 (1998). It was posted on the National Museums of Kenya website together with the text of

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by Martin Walsh[This paper was presented to a symposium on the ‘Cultures of Southwestern Tanzania’ at the XI International Congress of the Anthropological and Ethnological Sciences in Vancouver, on 25 August 1983. Some of its arguments were developed further in my Ph.D. dissertation, The Misinterpretation of Chiefly Power in Usangu, South-west Tanzania (University of Cambridge, 1984).]Preamble In

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Swahili text by Pera Ridhiwani, introduced by Martin Walsh[Pera Ridhiwani (1917-97) was a poet, teacher and scholar, a friend and colleague of Shaaban Robert and other twentieth century writers and politicians from Tanga and the Mrima coast. Ridhiwani did not achieve fame himself as a poet, but late in life enjoyed a wide reputation as a scholar, conducting his own research as well as helping

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by Martin Walsh [This is the text of an article orginally published in October 1995 in Mvita: Newsletter of the Regional Centre for the Study of Archaeology in Eastern and Southern Africa (Mombasa), 6: 15-18. I wrote this at short notice during a visit home to Mombasa in September 1995, and still have unpublished notes on the ethnotaxonomy of bats and bat-hunting on Pemba. The historical

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by Martin Walsh and Helle Goldman[text (with updated references) of an article originally published in 2003 in Nature East Africa, 33 (1/2): 14-16. An abridged version, 'The Zanzibar Leopard – Dead or Alive?', was published in 2004 in Tanzanian Affairs, 77: 20-23]The Zanzibar Leopard, Panthera pardus adersi, is an elusive and possibly extinct subspecies endemic to Unguja (Zanzibar) Island. It

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