HOW THE GREY PARROT DIDN'T GET ITS NAME

by Martin Walsh

I’ve got an article in press for Kenya Past and Present about the search for words of Austronesian origin in Swahili. It’s a follow-on and much-revised update of a presentation I gave at a meeting in SOAS, the School of Oriental and African Studies in the University of London, a couple of years ago. Here’s just one section from the new piece. After writing it, I developed a bit of an obsession with parrots. Expect to hear more about this in future posts.

Illustration of a Grey parrot

Endangered parrots and dodgy etymologies

What then do we know about words of Austronesian origin in Swahili? What have we learned so far? First, it is evident that many existing proposals are wrong or doubtful, including some of my own.  The literature is littered with etymologies that are either demonstrably false or questionable in other ways. A notable example of the first category is Otto Dempwolff’s parrot. Here is Krumm on the origin of the Swahili word kasuku, ‘parrot’:

“Kasuku is a Malayan word which spread to India. According to Prof. Dempwolff, Hamburg, kasuku has the meaning: my darling, my sweetheart. It must be mentioned that west from Lake Tanganyika (in the Congo state) a river has the name “kasuku.” In that district parrots are frequent.” (1940, p. 125; also 1932, p. 77)

Leaving aside the evident mismatch between Malay kasihku, ‘my love’, and Swahili kasuku, it so happens that the Swahili name has a perfectly good Bantu etymology. In his dictionary entry for kasuku, Sacleux correctly identified it with the Grey parrot, Psittacus erithacus, and noted that the same name is also found in the Nyamwezi language in the west of Tanzania, and in a related shape in other languages to the north, into modern Uganda.

The Ganda name for the Grey parrot is enkusu: similar names are found in many languages to the west and can be traced back in time to proto-Bantu, as the linguist Edgar Polomé observed in 1987. At some point the syllables in the word root -kusu were switched around – a process linguists call metathesis – perhaps at the same time that it acquired the diminutive prefix ka-, to give kasuku, literally ‘little Grey parrot’. This may originally have been a reference to the fledglings that people took from their nests inside trees. Swahili has never had this ka- diminutive (it uses ki- instead), but has borrowed the name kasuku in its entirety, treating it as though it has no prefix, with an invariant plural.

Grey parrot close-up

When and where did this happen? Grey parrots are denizens of the central African rainforest: the nearest population to the East African coast is found in the west of Kenya, in Kakamega Forest. Because of their intelligence and ability to learn words in human speech, they are also highly desirable as pets, and captive birds are bred and sold throughout the world. Grey parrots are now considered to be endangered in the wild and the trade in them has been banned.

Writing in his book on The Uganda Protectorate (1902), the British explorer and colonial administrator Harry Johnston described how the trade from that area began:

“The young birds are captured by the natives from the nesting places (holes in trees) and are easily tamed. Yet as far as I can ascertain the Baganda never commenced this practice until taught to do so by the Swahili porters from the coast, who of course were incited thereto by the Europeans and Indians [...].” (Volume I, p. 401)

He later makes clear that it was the local people themselves who began taming the young parrots: “The natives nowadays catch and tame the young of the grey parrot for sale to European or Swahili caravans” (Volume II, p. 715). The earliest reference I have found so far to this trade dates to 1874. It may explain why the caravan porters also took away a version of the parrot’s name with a diminutive prefix; they were, after all, being sold juvenile birds. Where exactly they picked up this name is open to question. It may have been from one of the Bantu languages in the Great Lakes region, perhaps in the area to the west of Lake Tanganyika, where there was already a local demand for the scarlet tail feathers of adult parrots to be used in ceremonial headwear.

A Grey parrot in Dar es Salaam

The word kasuku had already reached Mombasa by the end of the 19th century: I have seen references dating to 1891, and so the trade must have begun some time earlier. Once the name became established on the coast, it then travelled back into the East African interior, as a loanword from Swahili, referring to caged parrots and, colloquially, to talkative people. This must have happened quite early, because Johnston found that the Swahili form was widespread south and east of the Great Lakes.

Returning now to Krumm’s original passage, I assume he was alluding to the existence of similar names for parrots in different Indian languages. The direction of borrowing, however, went the other way: Old Javanese adopted śuka, ‘parrot’ from Sanskrit. The resemblance of Indian terms to the Swahili name is almost certainly coincidental – unless they have been influenced by the latter as it has accompanied birds traded from East Africa. As an etymological hypothesis, Dempwolff’s parrot – or at least Krumm’s version of it – has no legs to stand on, and is as dead as a dodo.

Many of the Austronesian etymologies that have been proposed in the literature fare little better, either because there are better alternatives or because they can be shown to be implausible on linguistic and other grounds – though it isn’t always easy to choose between competing etymological hypotheses.

Acknowledgements
Many thanks to Tom Hoogervorst for help with the Malay, and Asha Fakhi Khamis for her linguistic observations and more.

References

Johnston, Harry H. 1902. The Uganda Protectorate. Volume II. London: Hutchinson & Co.

Krumm, Bernhard 1932. Wörter und Wortformen orientalischen Ursprungs im Suaheli. Hamburg: Friederichsen, De Gruyter & Co.

Krumm, Bernhard 1940. Words of Oriental Origin in Swahili (2nd edition). London: The Sheldon Press.

Polomé, Edgar C. 1987. Swahili words of Indian origin. Sprache und Geschichte in Afrika 8: 325-334.

Sacleux, Charles 1939. Dictionnaire Swahili-Français (Travaux et Mémoires de l’Institut d’Ethnologie 36 & 37). Paris: Institut d’Ethnologie, Université de Paris.

Walsh, Martin T. 2017. Evidence for early Malay and Malagasy loanwords in Swahili. Presentation to Baraza III: Swahili Conference at SOAS, School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, 14 October.

Walsh, Martin T. In press. Cockatoos and crocodiles: searching for words of Austronesian origin in Swahili. Kenya Past and Present.

THE SHAMELESS AND FEISTY WOMEN OF CHANGAMWE

by Martin Walsh

The relevant passage in W. E. Taylor's African Aphorisms (1891: 93)

In an earlier note on A click in Swahili I drew attention to the Reverend W. E. Taylor's description of an interjection/ideophone in the Mvita (Mombasa) dialect that contains a dental click (1891: 93). Taylor struggled to render this unusual sound in print, and offered three different transcriptions for it in his African Aphorisms, as can be seen from the entry that is reproduced here. Judging by the eccentric composite -- "Mng'wpc" -- that appeared in Burt's Swahili Grammar and Vocabulary (1910: 13, fn. 1), Taylor was never able to settle on a satisfactory solution. This wasn't really his fault, given that there was little agreement on how to write down clicks and the languages using them at this time.

Abdulaziz 1979

When I posted my note in June 2010 I wasn't aware of any other references to Taylor's Mvita click-bearing interjection, though I did know of the occurrence of a nasalised dental click in similar contexts in different dialects of Digo, spoken to the south of Mombasa island (Walsh 2006). Last night, however, leafing through the edited verses of Mombasa's most illustrious bard, Muyaka bin Haji al-Ghassaniy (c.1776-c.1840), I stumbled across what seems to be an earlier example of its use. Most of Muyaka's poetry is thought to have been written between roughly around 1810 and his death. We owe the survival of his corpus to the extraordinary collaboration between the Mombasa scholar Mwalimu Sikujua bin Abdallah al-Batawi (who collected and wrote down Muyaka's Swahili poems in Arabic script) and the same Rev. Taylor (who transliterated them in Roman script and added linguistic and other notes). The originals are in the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in London: I owe my own access to Muyaka's poetry to Mohamed Hassan Abdulaziz's study (1979), which I never tire of dipping into.

The poem in which the Mvita interjection appears is in his compilation of the many 'Miscellanous Verses of Muyaka' (1979: 156-335). Abdulaziz's brief gloss on the whole poem is that 'Muyaka here makes fun of certain Wachangamwe women folk (one of the Three Tribes of Mombasa) who are pictured as having maltreated a certain Bacheni' (1979: 287). The Wachangamwe were the inhabitants of Changamwe and thereabouts on the mainland to the west of Mombasa island; in the 19th century they spoke their own variety of the Mvita dialect (Lambert 1958), and were evidently looked down upon by their more cultured island cousins. The identity of Bachemi or Ba Cheni (Baba Cheni, 'Cheni's father'?) seems to have been forgotten: all we have to go on is the poem itself. It is reproduced below, complete with the inconsistencies of spelling in Abdulaziz's edition -- note though that the italicisation of dental /t/ and /d/ is Taylor's. In the book Taylor's transliteration and Abdulaziz's English version are on facing pages (1979: 286-287): here each Swahili verse is followed immediately by its translation. Perhaps understandably, Abdulaziz didn't attempt to translate the poem's title:

BA CHENI, MNGWA

Habari ya Wachangamwe niwambiapo mwateka,
Watoshile kamwe kamwe si wake katika rika
Wake washinda waume siombe wakihizika;
Ba Cheni walimshika wakamfanya mng'wa!

Digo mother and child, 1985

When I tell you about the Wachangamwe you first laugh.
They exceed the bounds of acceptable behaviour!
Women can be worse than men when they go astray,
They got hold of Bacheni and bit his lip "Mngwa".

Ni watenzi Wachangamwe hutenda vikitendeka,
Wajipatishile sime zatinda kama kitoka
Ni kweli wake si wamwe, siombe wakipotoka,
Ba Cheni walimshika wakimtinda mng'wa!

The Wachangamwe are people of action, what they do they do well!
Their short swords stuck in their belts, cut clean like hatchets
It's a fact that women are mischievous, beware of them when they get out of hand.
They got hold of Bacheni and cut his lip "Mng'wa."

Ukitakapo hakika kamwulize Mwanasha;
Ati aliyekipika, taa asijaiwasha;
Achondoka kutandika awele kubishabisha.
Habariye isikwisha na kumtenda mn'gwa!

If you want to know the truth go and ask Mwanasha
Who was supposed to have been cooking even before she had lit the lamps.
But when she went to make the beds she was already nagging?
And the whole thing ended with her biting "Mng'wa."

Alipoakimrudi na maneno kumwambia,
Alikitunga mkadi ili kwenda kutembea;
Akema kumradidi una kijana walea,
Awele kumruk'ia na kumkata muomo mng'wa!

When he tried to tell her off and give her a good talking-to
She was stringing the mkadi flower, preparing to go out;
When he went on at her, saying you have a baby that you're (supposed to be) nursing,
She jumped at him and bit off his lip "Mng'wa".

I don't know whether the variant spellings of mng'wa are in Taylor's transliteration or errors introduced during the preparation of Abdulaziz's book. He glosses it as an 'onomatopoeic expression for cutting' (1979: 286, fn. 4), but to me this looks like an over-interpretation influenced by the lines in which it occurs, two of which refer explicitly to cutting. Instead I suggest that it should be read as an approximate rendering of the same interjection-with-a-click-consonant that Taylor tried to describe in African Aphorisms and that he defined as 'an expressive protest against impertinence' (1891: 93). In Muyaka's poem we might think of it as roughly equivalent in meaning to our own 'Hah! So there! Like it or lump it!' Without seeing the relevant archival material it's difficult to know why Taylor himself didn't draw the connection (or why Abdulaziz didn't pick up on it), but it may be that Mwalimu Sikujua's Arabic transcription of the Swahili interjection masked its distinctive enunciation, and that Taylor hadn't yet heard it being spoken. In any event, I've tried my hand at a more idiomatic translation of Muyaka's poem that incorporates this suggested new reading. I'm not an expert in 19th century Swahili poetry or the language in which Muyaka composed his verse: the Mvita that he spoke in Mombasa and the northern dialect forms that he blended in for poetic effect and credibility. But I've drawn on Abdulaziz's text and notes (it's not clear which of these might have come from Taylor), and like him, happily declare the tentativeness of my efforts. So, take it or leave it!

Screw pine, mkadi

You'll laugh when I tell you about the Changamwe
They're just too much and their wives don't act as wives should
The women have the upper hand, Oh beware their shamelessness
They seized Ba Cheni and treated him so!

The Changamwe are doers, and do what they set out to
They wear short swords that cleave like sharp axes
It's true that their wives aren't well-behaved, Oh beware when they misbehave
They seized Ba Cheni and slashed him so!

If you want the truth, ask Mwanasha,
Who was supposed to be cooking, but hadn't lit the lamp,
And carried on quarrelling when she went to make the bed
Which all ended up with her treating him so!

When he came back at her and told her off
She threaded a fragrant flower,* ready to go out
And when he complained that she had a child to look after
She turned on him and cut his lip so!

* A reference to the scented white flower of the Screw pine, Pandanus kirkii (Swahili mkadi)

Endnote
Despite the superficial similarity, I don't think that there's any link between this Mvita interjection and another expressive nugget that occurs in imprecations in 19th century Swahili poetry, the use of Mngwa- or ngwa- to prefix subjunctive verb forms (Biersteker and Shariff 1995: fn. 254). This has been convincingly explained as a euphemistic contraction of the phrase 'Mungu a-', 'May God...' (Sacleux 1939: 683). Otherwise Sacleux seems to have missed Taylor's interjection and click.

References

Abdulaziz, Mohamed H. 1979. Muyaka: 19th Century Swahili Popular Poetry. Nairobi: Kenya Literature Bureau.

Biersteker, Ann and Ibrahimu Noor Shariff (eds.) 1995. Mashairi ya Vita vya Kuduhu: War Poetry in Kiswahili Exchanged at the Time of the Battle of Kuduhu. East Lansing: Michigan State University Press.

Burt, F. 1910. Swahili Grammar and Vocabulary. London: Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge.

Lambert, H. E. 1958. Chi-Jomvu and Ki-Ngare: Sub-dialects of the Mombasa Area (Studies in Swahili Dialect III). Kampala: East African Swahili Committee, Kampala College.

Sacleux, Charles 1939. Dictionnaire Swahili-Français. Paris: Institut d'Ethnologie.

Taylor, W. E. 1891. African Aphorisms; or, Saws from Swahili-land. London: Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge.

Walsh, Martin T. 2006. A Click in Digo and its Historical Interpretation. Azania 41: 158-166.

HISTORIES OF A COPPER PENDANT

  by Martin Walsh

My Giriama copper pendant

There's a copper pendant hanging on my wall, one of the few examples of crafts(wo)manship that I've kept from Mombasa. I love its weight (c.75 g) and slinkiness: in my hands it feels like a miniature piece of chainmail. I can't remember now exactly when and where I bought it; maybe in the handicraft shop of Tototo Home Industries on Msanifu Kombo Street; or perhaps Labeka, the well-stocked craft shop on Moi Avenue whose owner was a member of Tototo's board. I worked with Tototo in 1985-88, studying the women's group programme that this Mombasa-based NGO ran with the support of World Education in Boston. The women's groups, scattered throughout what was then Kenya's Coast Province, supplied some of the local handicrafts that were sold in both shops (McCormack et al. 1986: 50-55; Walsh 1989: 375-376), including pendants made by Giriama women.

Kamba girl's apron (from Lindblom 1920)

I wrote a little about these pendants in my study of the Tototo-assisted women's groups and their enterprises (Walsh 1986; abridged in McCormack et al. 1986). They were generally referred to in Giriama (aka Giryama) as ndale, a name that one woman told me properly referred to the copper wire that they were manufactured with. The Reverends Krapf and Rebmann defined ndale as brass (or copper) beads (1887: 299), and noted the expression mudzele wa ndale as the name for a Kamba women's leather apron decorated with the same, and in Rabai the border of beads around a woman's dress (1887: 268). W. E. Taylor (1891: 16) likewise recorded ndale as a Giriama name for brass beads; while making it clear that the generic term for brass, ng'andu, could also refer to copper (ng'andu t'une, 'red brass', 1891: 20, 28). In her Giryama-English Dictionary Florence Deed also defines ndale as 'brass beads' (1964: 71), and has an entry for ngudhi, a 'neck ornament of ndale stitched on leather' (1964: 74).

These names are interesting because they provide clues to the history of these crafts and this particular kind of ornamentation. The Giriama term ndale is clearly related to Kamba nthale, glossed in a modern dictionary as 'brass or iron ornaments affixed to the clothes of women' (Mwau 2006:195), and in an older work as 'little brass or iron cylinders sometimes used in making old women's aprons and as ornaments on the straps of the nthũngĩ', a kind of small woven bag (A.I.M. 1939: 159, 161). According to Charles Hobley only the brass beads on a married woman's apron or kimengo were called nthale: iron beads had their own name (1910: 72). Gerhard Lindblom called these brass beads nzale (1920: 374), a local variant (or mistake) for nthale. He also illustrates a young women's neck collar called nguthi (1920: 377), a name clearly related to the Giriama ngudhi. In this case though the collar is made of iron chains, not beads or cylinders sewn onto leather. The Kamba are inland neighbours and have long been traders among the Giriama and other Mijikenda, and it may be that these items of adornment and their names were taken from them. Or they might have been introduced by the historical Segeju, a group of people closely related to the Kamba, who had a significant impact on Mijikenda society and language in the middle of the last millennium. Linguistic evidence suggests that the Segeju were adept at metal-working and transferred a number of related practices to the Mijikenda and the Giriama in particular (Walsh 2013: 35).

'Gohu elder's amulet', Cantor Art Center, Stanford University
(Accession No. 2012.114)

The ndale pendant in my possession is made of copper beads (twisted from wire) and copper chain threaded together with twine; there are also a few odd brass beads strung together with the copper ones. There's a pendant in the collection of the Cantor Art Center at Stanford University that is very similar in form, but is stitched on leather and includes a central panel of three cowrie shells. The online catalogue describes it as a 'Gohu elder's amulet', the gohu being one of the 'secret societies' that senior Giriama elders could be initiated into. Collected in 1978, it looks a lot older than this, or at least grimy and worn, so much so that it's not clear whether it was made of brass or copper beads and chain. In The Wrath of Koma, Maurice Kambishera Mumba's novel about tradition and tragedy in late colonial Kaumaland, the fictional Jibana 'medicineman' (mganga) Mokoli Mwiru uses a powerful talisman called 'Chiwele', inherited from his grandfather, to access the world of spirits and divine the spiritual affliction and possible courses of action open to his Kauma patient, Old Chembe (Mumba 1987: 6-13, 21-24, 112-113, 143). Chiwele, used here as a personal name, is described as 'a leathery object coated with small cowrie shells, which was dangling from his neck at the end of a short chain' (1987: 6). The cognate term kiwele, plural viwele, was used by modern Giriama producers as the generic name for the women's copper and brass pendants that they made (see below) and that many women first acquired when they were married. This perhaps represents the wider application of a term that was once more restricted in use, and referred originally to the chains hanging down from the amulets. Elsewhere in his novel Mumba refers to ndale as a kind of 'traditional necklace' worn by women (1987: 32, 146), and this indeed seems to be the more widely used name.      

Bomani in 1985

I could probably ferret more information out of the literature, and Mijikenda colleagues and scholars more familiar with their culture could no doubt tell me much more (please do!). I wasn't aware of any of this when I was first working for Tototo. I did, however, learn something about the contemporary making and marketing of Giriama ndale pendants when I was undertaking the third of my women's group case studies in a village some 20 km north of Malindi. Bomani Women's Group had its origins in an adult education class (ngombaru) that started in 1973; Tototo began working with the group in 1978, at the very beginning of its women's group programme. When I arrived to study the group in late 1985 it was best known for its bakery project: for a time this had been the showpiece of Tototo's programme. But the first enterprise that Tototo had fostered in Bomani involved the production and sale of ndale. Here's what I wrote about it in my 1986 report:

  More lucrative [than a group farm] while it lasted was the handicraft trade initiated by Tototo. This was based upon the production of traditional Giriama ndale necklaces for the tourist market. The women bought lengths of ndale copper wire from specialist producers and fashioned these into viwele, heavy pendants, and virangi, with brass and coloured beads added. 1½ feet of wire, bought for 1 sh, was enough to make 2 or 3 viwele, the commonest product, sold to Tototo for 10 sh each, while virangi fetched 20 sh. Women report being able to make up to 100 or 150 viwele in a week and at one point group members engaging in this trade are recorded as making between 35 sh and 500 sh each in a fortnight. Tototo shop records show that in 1978 14,969 sh was paid out to individuals and 920 sh to the group, which took the proceeds from one necklace in every batch an individual produced. This money was ploughed back into the bakery along with the money raised from group subscriptions. The women, however, produced more necklaces than the Tototo shop could sell, and after 2 years the trade came to a halt along with other forms of handicraft production which Tototo had attempted to introduce. Looking back upon this enterprise group members blame Tototo for its failure, an experience similar to Mkwiro's [another group that I studied]. The local, Malindi, market for necklaces remains small -- they are bought by Kamba middlemen and sold to tourists in the town -- and ndale production is not a significant source of income in Bomani; much the position when the group's trade with Tototo started. (1986:

A young member of Bomani Women's Group in 1985

There's more detail in my field notes, though group members gave different accounts of the sequence of events and the role of the various actors. According to Bomani's chairwoman, they were shown how to make ndale in 1978 by Daudi Mtingi, one of the three older men (wazee) who had started the adult education class that gave rise to the women's group. He was already marketing the ndale made by his two wives, who were founder group members, taking the pendants to Kamba middlemen in both Malindi and Mombasa. Tototo started taking them for sale in Mombasa in the same year: the pendants were collected every Thursday or sometimes taken to Mombasa by the group's secretary, Esther Kenga (who later became a Tototo employee).

According to another group member, Mary Ngonyo, they bought strings of ndale beads that had already been made by folding small lengths of copper ('red') or brass ('white') wire around pieces of thread (nyuzi) using a special instrument, and it was these strings that they bought at the price of a shilling for each length of around 1½ feet. The women then added coloured beads (virangi), bought in the local shops, to make neck pieces, and chains (viwele) to make the pendants, which were rather easier to produce. At first they just took them to Malindi for sale, but found it difficult to sell them. It was Esther Kenga who first wrote to and visited Tototo. There were around 20 women in Bomani Women's Group at this time. They were joined by women from the nearby village of Madzayani when they heard that there was a market for ndale, though after Tototo stopped taking the pendants they left to form their own group. As well as ndale, Tototo also persuaded the Bomani women to produce small woven bags, baskets, and straw hats for sale. But all this came to an end when Tototo told them to stop. By this time running the bakery had become the group's main focus. Some women continued to make both copper and brass ndale as well as other items of women's jewellery, and two or three years before I did my research Kamba buyers had begun coming directly to the village to purchase them. The group's chairwoman still kept a few pendants to show guests and in 1985 had presented some to a group of official visitors from Zimbabwe.

Feeding the next generation, Bomani 1985

The failure of collective marketing is an all too familiar tale. Selling local handicrafts was a great idea, but supply and demand weren't always well matched. Tototo's handicraft operation had problems of its own: staff often lacked key marketing and other business skills, and the shop wasn't particularly well run. To make matters worse, some managers were suspected to be dipping their hands into the till or fiddling the accounts -- widespread practices in an era of rampant corruption at every level of society. It's ironic that just as field staff were advising women's groups on how best to manage their various enterprises, their colleagues in Mombasa were sometimes struggling to manage the NGO's own affairs. Although Tototo received extensive help from World Education and other partners, the shop lost the comparative advantage that it once had, and the organisation itself was eventually closed down. Nevertheless, in the heyday of pendant production and marketing a fair number of these attractive handicrafts must have found their way into the hands -- and perhaps even around the necks -- of visitors to the coast. I imagine that they are still made in at least small quantities, though I can't see any evidence of this on the internet.

Kamba girl's necklace (from Lindblom 1920)

Disappointed though they were by Tototo's actions, the ndale episode wasn't an entirely negative one in the history of Bomani women's group and the evolution of local gender relations (and as it happens, greater disappointments were to come, detailed in my 1986 study). There are two particularly heartwarming stories that deserve to be told and remembered in this context.  One is the role that Daudi Mtingi played in fostering and supporting the adult education class, an associated nursery class, and then the women's group -- as well as introducing them to ndale production and marketing, he also provided significant assistance to the bakery business by injecting capital into it at a time when it was floundering, and then selflessly handing the profits over to the group. The second is a story that I've already told in brief in an article about the gendered control and use of income from group activities, which explains why women's income generation doesn't necessarily translate into their empowerment within joint households (Walsh 1987). Following a long personal struggle to attain economic independence and the right to educate her son, Bomani's chairwoman, Jumwa Kiti, encouraged group members to invest their profits from pendant sales in goats, and kept their money in safekeeping until they had accumulated enough to do so. This acted as a check on husbands' ability to commandeer their wives' ndale profits, and though it didn't stop some of them from later appropriating their wives' livestock, it did enable a number of group members to accumulate and exercise a degree of control over assets that wouldn't otherwise have been possible.

It's quite likely that the pendant hanging on my wall was made by one of those women, and possible that it contributed in its own small way to her greater empowerment and the improved welfare of her children. It might equally have been a token of hope that turned to disappointment, as her newly-acquired wealth was seized by a greedy husband or her expectations of greater profit were dashed by Tototo. And whatever the case, it may well have helped to line the pockets of one of that organisation's less scrupulous employees. I can only guess. But I feel much more satisfied having these and other possible histories to ponder than I would have done without knowing anything about my shining pendant's past.  

References

A.I.M. 1939. A Kikamba-English Dictionary. Compiled by: The Language Committee of the Africa Inland Mission in Ukamba (third unrevised edition, 1970). Nairobi: The Literary Centre of Kenya for The Afrolit Association.

Deed, Florence 1964. Giryama-English Dictionary. Nairobi: East African Literature Bureau.

Hobley, C. W. 1910. Ethnology of A-Kamba and Other East African Bantu Tribes. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Krapf, L. and Rebmann, J. 1887. A Nika-English Dictionary (edited by T. H. Sparshott). London: Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge.

Lindblom, Gerhard 1920. The Akamba in British East Africa: An Ethnological Monograph. Uppsala: Appelbergs Boktryckeri Aktiebolag.

McCormack, Jeanne, Martin Walsh and Candace Nelson 1986. Women's Group Enterprises: A Study of the Structure of Opportunity on the Kenya Coast. Boston: World Education, Inc.

Mumba, Maurice Kambishera 1987. The Wrath of Koma. Nairobi: Heinemann Kenya.

Taylor, W. E. 1891. Giryama Vocabulary and Collections. London: Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge.

Walsh, Martin 1986. Interim Report for a Study of Income Generation and its Effects among Women’s Groups in Kenya’s Coast Province. Report to World Education Inc., Boston.

Walsh, Martin 1987. Buying power? Some outcomes of income for women. Reports (World Education Inc., Boston) 27: 14-16.

Walsh, Martin 1989. Tototo Home Industries: assistance strategies for the future. In C. K. Mann, M. S. Grindle and P. Shipton (eds.) Seeking Solutions: Framework and Cases for Small Enterprise Development Programs. West Hartford: Kumarian Press, Inc. 365-385.

Walsh, Martin 2013. The Segeju Complex? Linguistic evidence for the precolonial making of the Mijikenda. In Rebecca Gearhart and Linda Giles (eds.) Contesting Identities: The Mijikenda and Their Neighbors in Kenyan Coastal Society. Trenton, New Jersey: Africa World Press. 25-51.

COCKROACH KILLER

by Martin Walsh

I'm not a great fan of cockroaches, at least not the urban varieties, and it's hard to forget some encounters. I wasn't too thrilled by the evil antennae that emerged from a dry plughole to welcome me to the house that I'd borrowed on the University of Dar es Salaam campus in July 1980. I didn't jump for joy when I switched on the kitchen light one night (circa 1986) in Guraya, Mombasa, and was greeted by the sight of a chaotic mass of cockroaches of every shape and size swarming over the floor. And I didn't smack my lips when the body parts of a drowned roach surfaced in my soup one lunchtime in the Bella Vista off Moi Avenue (this was well before the seedy Italian restaurant became the bar / nightclub that was recently subject to a deadly grenade attack).

After living for a few years in the sweaty centre of Mombasa (Guraya, then Kibokoni), where I became an expert in spotting cooked cockroach legs, we moved out to the suburban calm of Nyali, with its Bougainvillea blooms and sea breezes. But the roaches still came. That is, until I copied down the following recipe:

Cockroach Killer recipe and chemist's label for the key ingredient

I was given this by a friend and colleague in Nairobi, who told me that she'd been given it by an older couple in the highlands out west (I've forgotten where exactly; Kericho perhaps). It worked so well, especially when placed in the kitchen cupboards, that if I saw an adult cockroach in the house -- the younger generations disappeared completely -- I was able to accuse our Belgian neighbours of being its source (we were living in interconnected maisonettes). I even wondered how much money might be made out of the recipe if production could be scaled up and Cockroach Killer balls marketed commercially. But thanks to the internet, I can now see that boric acid was registered as an insecticide many years ago, and that there are similar home recipes all over the web. So here's the one that worked for me.

WHERE THE DOCTOR IS IGNORANT

by Martin Walsh

A page from the Cambridge Expeditions Medical Handbook

Flat on my back, beneath the Galaxy, I fear

This burning in my groin is gonorrhoea.

-- Tony Harrison, Manica

When I first went to Tanzania in 1980 my portable medical library comprised the Ross Institute's Preservation of Personal Health in Warm Climates and the Cambridge Expeditions Medical Handbook. The former, aka the Little Red Book, betrayed its origin in a milieu in which the nervous disposition of one's wife and the behaviour of one's servants were common concerns -- more, certainly, than they were to a 22 year-old explorer of the nether regions of Ujamaa (later in life, though, I could have done with an update). The Cambridge Handbook was much more useful, though its diagnostic tables tended to induce hypochondria. Instead of reading possible diagnoses from the combination of symptoms, it was much easier to pick on the worst disease and imagine the symptoms that were listed under it. And so every crick in the neck mirrored meningitis and every instance of colic conjured up appendicitis. Although this is a hazard associated with all self-help health guides, the Handbook's crude diagrams and simple matrices seemed designed to maximise the inflation of illness and a category of anxiety that the Little Red Book didn't cover.

The cover of the 1979 edition

I first heard about the virtues of Where There Is No Doctor, the English version of David Werner's Donde no hay doctor, from my ethnographic guide Alison Redmayne. I didn't buy a copy until sometime later when I was living in Mombasa. I was persuaded of its efficacy when a sister-in-law living with us in Kibokoni fell ill with shingles, and her head ballooned in an alarming way, and began to resemble a cross between a football and a scaly pufferfish. None of us knew what the cause of this was, and she resorted to a variety of local remedies, including smearing her head with a concoction of herbs. However, after a quick read of Where There Is No Doctor, I was able to confidently declare that she had no need to waste any more money on waganga ("traditional" doctors), because the swelling would go down of its own accord, and the scaliness disappear. As you might expect, no one took any notice of me, but she did indeed get better as I had smugly predicted she would. I've lost count of the number of times I've made use of the book, and for some years I've kept a second copy in Zanzibar so that I don't have to carry it back and forth. One day in Dar es Salaam I found a dog-eared copy of the Swahili translation, Mahali Pasipo Na Daktari, and mama watoto (the missus) has been using it ever since.

The Swahili version, c.1984

Never mind where there really is no doctor, the state of medical training in East Africa is such that you need all the help you can get even in places where there is someone with that distinguished title. I'll save the story of my imaginary blood clot -- imagined by some of the finest doctors in Kenya -- for another occasion. I'll also refrain from detailing all the horrors suffered by loved ones, far too many of whom haven't survived to tell the tale themselves. But you get the drift. Over the years Alison Redmayne has performed heroics in ministering to the sick in and around Iringa and Mufindi, and has been an indefatigable campaigner against bad practice in the hospitals and clinics of this particular corner of Tanzania. Talking about this with her one day around the turn of the millennium, I quipped that Where The Doctor Is Ignorant would be a more accurate title for our favourite medical guidebook, at least in the local context. This is not to denigrate the good work that many doctors and medical agencies do in East Africa, or to downplay the difficult conditions in which they strive, often with rudimentary facilities and inadequate medical supplies. But lack of adequate medical knowledge is a serious and widespread problem, and can't be denied.

The full text of Where There Is No Doctor can now be downloaded for free from the website of Hesperian Health Guides, together with other community health guides, including Where Women Have No Doctor and Helping Health Workers Learn. These and other resources are also available in a variety of languages, which can be seen at a glance on Hesperian's Resources by Language page. Unfortunately Mahali Pasipo na Daktari, the Swahili version of Where There Is No Doctor, is no longer in print: indeed there are no Swahili resources on the Hesperian site. That's a pity. An updated translation of this and other books, especially if well distributed and accompanied by relevant training, would go at least some way towards filling the medical knowledge gap in Tanzania and other parts of the region where Swahili is widely spoken.

References

Davies, T. W. Undated [c.1979]. Cambridge Expeditions Medical Handbook. Cambridge: Cambridge Expeditions Medical Scheme.

Harrison, Tony 1987. Manica. In Selected Poems (2nd edition). London and Harmondsworth: Penguin Books. 31-34.

Ross Institute 1978. Preservation of Personal Health in Warm Climates. London: Ross Institute of Tropical Hygiene. [first published in 1951]

Werner, David Undated [c.1984, 2nd printing]. Mahali Pasipo Na Daktari... Kitabu cha Mafunzo ya Afya Vijijini. Dar es Salaam: Rotary Club of Dar es Salaam.

OF FROGS AND FIELD GUIDES

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 forested environment that Amani is famous for. Its subject was identified for Jonathan by Kim Howell (another friend, and Professor of Zoology in the University of Dar es Salaam) as an example of Mitchell's reed frog, Hyperolius mitchelli, a species that has also been recorded in Malawi and Mozambique. It might well occur elsewhere in Tanzania, but very little collection or sound recording of frogs has taken place in the country, and our knowledge of the distribution of many species like this is correspondingly sketchy.

Banded rubber frog in one of my notebooks

Despite having lived in environments with a superabundance of cacophanous anurans (most notably amidst the seasonally-flooded wetlands of Usangu and the verdant rice valleys of Pemba island), I don't own a single photo of a toad or frog, and regret now that for many years I didn't have a camera capable of taking one. My notebooks, though, do feature the occasional frog that attracted my attention, like the Banded rubber frog (now Phrynomantis bifasciatus, formerly Phrynomerus) that I stumbled upon one day in 1992 in our garden in Nyali, on the north coast of Mombasa. I identified this with the aid of the only guide that I had at the time, Norman Hedges' Reptiles and Amphibians of East Africa (1983), which includes fuzzy and poorly reproduced colour photographs of fewer than a tenth of the frogs known to occur in the region. Needless to say, the Banded rubber frog is quite distinctive, with two vermillion (or orange, or red) stripes along its black back, and that's why it had caught my eye in the first place. For the same reason it's well known in the pet trade. What I didn't know when I scooped it up was that this bright colour scheme signals the presence of skin toxins that can be fatal to predators and result in a raft of distressing symptoms when they enter the human bloodstream. You'll be glad to hear that we didn't exchange body fluids.

I had less success in identifying other frogs. The 'one that got away' was a delicate yellow tree frog that I saw one evening in the foliage next to our outdoor table at the Jambo Inn in Kilimani in Zanzibar town. It was bright and glossy yellow all over its smooth and tiny body, and I noted it as a curiosity before continuing with the meal. This was in July 1996: much later I asked Kim Howell what it might have been and he merely shrugged. Perhaps this was the juvenile or colour morph of an otherwise well-known tree or reed frog, but I still haven't been able to identify it. Lack of a good field guide also scuppered my sundry efforts to make sense of indigenous knowledge about frogs. When living on Pemba in 1994-96 I recorded bits and pieces of information about the island's amphibians, and in 1997 drafted a short article about the local classification of frogs and toads. But I gave up on this when I realised that my preliminary attempt to map Pemban names onto scientific taxonomy was deeply flawed, and based on little more than unsubstantiated guesswork. I had Pakenham's (1983) checklist of the island's amphibians (which he knew was incomplete), but no illustrated field guide with which to compare local descriptions.

Things began to look up at the turn of the millennium, when I was based in Iringa and became aware of the work of Alan Channing (Professor of Biodiversity and Conservation Biology in the University of the Western Cape) and colleagues. Indeed my sole (and admittedly feeble) claim to frog fame is to have been consulted over the specific name of the newly discovered Red sand frog, Tomopterna luganga, first collected by another of my friends, David Moyer, from Kigwembimbi, 14 km east of Iringa town (Channing et al. 2004). This is in the heart of Uhehe, and the name that I was asked to check, luganga, is one of the Hehe words for 'sand'. I bought a copy of Alan Channing's Amphibians of Central and Southern Africa (2001), and at last had a field guide that provided better guidance than Hedges' slim section on frogs. Channing and Howell's Amphibians of East Africa (2006) came out after I'd left East Africa, and I still haven't got my hands on it, though I do have the boiled-down version that was published in the same year in the Pocket Guide to the Reptiles and Amphibians of East Africa (Spawls et al. 2006).

When he was working on the main guide, Kim Howell sent me a list of local names of frogs that he and his colleagues had collected, together with older records by the herpetologist Arthur Loveridge. While many dictionaries and vocabularies only give a single word for frogs, it is evident that finer discriminations are made in a number of East African languages. Ethnotaxonomies of frogs have been even less studied than the frogs themselves, and it is not impossible that complex systems of knowledge like those of the Kalam (Karam) of highland Papua New Guinea (Bulmer and Tyler 1968) are waiting to be described. At least we now have better guides to work with, together with an increasing number of images online, and if I ever identify that tiny yellow frog, or figure out those Pemban classifications, I'll write another frog blog.

Acknowledgements
As should be clear, I couldn't have written this post without the friendship of Jonathan Walz, Kim Howell and David Moyer. I'm especially grateful to Jonathan, who generously provided a copy of his photograph of Mitchell's reed frog and gave me permission to edit and reproduce it.

References

Bulmer, R. N. H. and M. J. Tyler 1968. Karam classification of frogs. Journal of the Polynesian Society 77 (4): 333-385.

Channing, Alan 2001. Amphibians of Central and Southern Africa. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University.

Channing, Alan and Kim M. Howell 2006. Amphibians of East Africa. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

Channing, Alan, David C. Moyer and Abeda Dawood 2004. A new sand frog from central Tanzania (Anura: Ranidae: Tomopterna). African Journal of Herpetology 53 (1): 21-28.

Hedges, Norman G. 1983. Reptiles and Amphibians of East Africa. Nairobi: Kenya Literature Bureau.

Pakenham, R. H. W. 1983. The reptiles and amphibians of Zanzibar and Pemba islands (with a note on the freshwater fishes). Journal of the East Africa Natural History Society and National Museum 177: 1-40.

Spawls, Stephen, Kim M. Howell and Robert C. Drewes 2006. Pocket Guide to the Reptiles and Amphibians of East Africa. London: A&C Black.

THE LOST WORLD OF THE BAJUNI

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 between Kismayu (Somalia) in the north and the Lamu archipelago (Kenya) in the south. And the political turmoil of recent decades in Somalia has turned it into a valuable historical document, a record of a way of life that for thousands of Bajuni has been shattered by persecution and conflict.

The Bajuni minority in Somalia didn’t have a very good time during the regime of Mohamed Siad Barre (1969-91), suffering discrimination and a variety of indignities. From 1974 fishermen had their fishing gear and boats confiscated and were compelled to join government cooperatives, while some were force to move off the Bajuni islands (Abby 2005: 14). But matters went from bad to worse following the outbreak of the Somali civil war and the overthrow of Siad Barre in January 1991. Bajuni joined the general exodus of victimised groups from Somalia, and many of them fled to UNHCR refugee camps in and around Mombasa, where the Kwa Jomvu camp became their main home until it was finally closed down in 1998.

At the time I was living in Mombasa, and remember the influx of refugees – most noticeably those who were installed in St. Anne’s, near the Manor Hotel – and the flood of cheap computer equipment that also came into the port as Mogadishu descended further into chaos. Knowing that many of the refugees had come from Brava, Kismayu and elsewhere on the southern Somali coast, I realised that this might provide an opportunity to do some research on the northernmost dialects of Swahili, Mwiini (= Bravanese) and Bajuni. The linguist Derek Nurse was planning a visit to East Africa, and I suggested this possibility to him in a letter written in May 1992. But his primary target then in Kenya was the little-known Sabaki language Ilwana: he’d already studied Bajuni and had access to enough Mwiini data to be going on with (cf. Nurse and Hinnebusch 1993: 5-7).

Conducting linguistic research with Swahili-speaking refugees in Kenya might have been tricky in those early days, politically and research-permission-wise at least. The subsequent emigration of large numbers of Bajuni and others to Europe and North America has perhaps made it easier, though a generation has now grown up in a very different linguistic and cultural environment from that of their original homeland. Asylum-seekers’ histories of displacement, including their knowledge of language and place, are of special interest to the immigration authorities processing their claims and the civil society organisations and lawyers defending their rights (cf. Allen 2008). Since 2004 Derek Nurse has engaged with numerous cases of refugees claiming to Bajuni from Somalia, and this work has seen him return to research that he began in northern Kenya in 1978 (Nurse 1980).

The academic fruits of this are now online in his Bajuni Database. This comprises a general overview of ‘Bajuni: people, society, geography, history, language’, a Bajuni lexicon, a grammatical sketch (that updates Nurse 1982), and three maps (one of the whole Bajuni coast, plus sketch maps of Chovae and Chula islands). These aren’t polished documents, but are very useful nonetheless. The overview – part of which is a gazetteer of Bajuni villages down to the Kenya border – is of particular interest. Very few Bajuni remain in Somalia, and their world is clearly not what it was in the days before the dictatorship of Siad Barre and the Somali Civil War. Current prospects for research on the south Somali coast and Bajuni islands don’t look good, and recording what we know of this lost world and its former inhabitants is the best we can do. It is also important for the Bajuni diaspora, and a poignant reminder of the widespread suffering that the Somali conflict has caused.

References

Abby, Abdi 2005. Field Research Project on Minorities in Somalia. Unpublished report, Oxford House, London, October 2005.

Allen, Brian 2008. The Bajuni people of southern Somalia and the asylum process. The Researcher (published by The Refugee Documentation Centre, Dublin) 3 (1): 2.

Grottanelli, Vinigi L. 1955. Pescatori dell’Oceano indiano: saggio etnologico preliminare sui Bagiuni, Bantu costieri dell’Oltregiuba. Rome: Cremonese.

Nurse, Derek 1980. Bajuni historical linguistics. Kenya Past and Present 12: 34-43.

Nurse, Derek 1982. The Swahili dialects of Somalia and the northern Kenya coast. In M.-F. Rombi (ed.) Etudes sur le Bantu Oriental (Comores, Tanzanie, Somalie, et Kenya. Paris: SELAF. 73-l46.

Nurse, Derek 2010. Bajuni Database. Online at http://www.ucs.mun.ca/~dnurse/bajuni_db.html

Nurse, Derek and Thomas J. Hinnebusch 1993. Swahili and Sabaki: A Linguistic History. Berkeley: University of California Press.

THE LONGEST INSECTS IN THE WORLD

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 Mountains) in north-east Tanzania, I stumbled upon what was by far the longest stick-insect that I have ever seen. It was clinging to the sides of some cement steps, and at first I mistook it for a growth of leafless twigs. Not until I saw that these grey twigs were perfectly symmetrical and growing out of nothing did it dawn on me that I might be looking at a living creature. I showed it to some of my colleagues, members of local women's groups, and they were only convinced of its real identity once they had frightened it into moving. Like me they were astounded by its size, and all of them declared that they had never seen anything like it before. They were, indeed, somewhat alarmed, and killed it with a few well-aimed rocks.

I had all but forgotten about this incident until recently, when I came across the following statement in last year's edition of The Guinness Book of Records (p.40): "The longest insect in the world is the Giant Stick Insect Pharnacia serratipes of Indonesia, females of which have been measured up to 330 mm (13 inches)". How I wish that I had made use of a tape measure and camera that day! I could swear that my Same stick insect was much the same size as the longest of its Indonesian cousins. It was certainly much longer than the norm - or what I suppose to be the norm in my ignorance of the relevant entomological records. I would be very happy for someone to write and enlighten me. Otherwise, and not just for those with an eye to the record books, I would recommend a visit to the hostel recently opened by the Roman Catholic Diocese of Same. The hostel buildings enclose a small garden, host (one hopes) to the relatives of a very long, but unfortunately very dead, stick insect. (Walsh 1991)

A couple of months later, in November 1991, I found a dead stick insect in our swimming pool in Nyali, on the north coast of Mombasa. It wasn't quite as big as the one I'd written about, but, with a body length of 180 mm and an overall length (including legs) of around 291 mm, it was impressive enough (the photograph and sketches shown here are of this apparently drowned specimen). The next week I bought a second-hand copy of Pinhey and Loe's introductory text, A Guide to the Insects of Africa (1974), with Ian Loe's illustration of the Congolese Palophus leopoldi (= Bactrododema leopoldi (Schouteden, 1916)) on its cover. This looked superficially similar to my Nyali stick, but was evidently a much longer species, described as the largest stick insect in Africa, "which, with legs stretched out in front and behind, measures over 400 mm" (1974: 20).

Then, searching for better sources in the library of the National Museum and East Africa Natural History Society in Nairobi, I discovered an old reference to large stick insects in the vicinity of Lohumbo in Shinyanga District in (what was then) Tanganyika:  a report of a male "which measured fifteen and a half inches from the tips of the front legs to the tips of the hind legs", and a collected female specimen, tentatively identified as Palophus episcopalis (= Bactrododema episcopalis (Kirby, 1896)), whose total length was "just over fourteen inches" (Carpenter 1942: 75). At c.394 mm the male was reputedly almost as long as the Congolese record-holder. And both of these African Palophus (= Bactrodema) were longer than the 330 mm that The Guinness Book of Records gave for the Asian Pharnacia serratipes (= Giant Malayan Stick Insect, Phobaeticus serratipes (Gray, 1835)) (McFarlan 1989: 40).

I therefore wrote to the Editor of The Guinness Book of Records drawing his attention to the different measurements and enclosing photocopies of my article and the two sources on African stick insects that I'd found. I ended my letter by noting that "Unless the basis for these measurements is different, or they are simply wrong, then it appears that the Palophus of Africa should be described as the longest insects in the world" (Mombasa, 4 December 1991). In reply I received a courteous letter from the Deputy Editor, Maria Morgan, thanking me for my observations and promising to follow up on them: "It may be that the methods of measurement differ slightly but your letter will receive our fullest consideration and the entry will of course be amended if necessary" (Enfield, Middlesex, 6 January 1992). Much to my surprise the next edition of The Guinness Book of Records was changed to read: "The longest insects in the world are stick-insects (walking sticks), especially of the African species [sic] Palophus, which can attain lengths of 400 mm 15¾ in in the case of Palophus leopoldi" (Matthews 1992: 38). It looked as though this had been done without reference to proper scientific authorities, but merely in response to my amateur intervention and ultimately on the basis of the sketchy description in an introductory guide.

The African pretender, Palophus leopoldi (= Bactrododema leopoldi (Schouteden, 1916)), reigned supreme for two years, through to the 40th edition of The Guinness Book of Records (Matthews 1993: 41). Back in England I corresponded with Paul Brock, the Treasurer and Membership Secretary of the Phasmid Study Group, and became PSG Member No.1234. Stuck in a dull academic job, I dreamed of searching for more East African stick insects, until I was discouraged by the discovery that reference materials were few and far between and often difficult to find. This was compounded by the realisation that scientific collecting and study would require the kind of dedication and expertise that I singularly lack.

I planned an early version of this note, describing how the entry in The Guinness Book of Records had been changed without any real evidence, and making the point that the interesting scientific question was not how long particular species and specimens were, but how and why some stick insects had evolved to such large sizes. Using the few sources at my disposal, including Brock (1992), I drew up a table of the reported lengths of the longest stick insects. As soon as I did this, it dawned on me that two different measurements were being reported in the literature, body length and the total length including the outstretched legs. The earlier records in The Guinness Book of Records were based on body length (330 mm for Pharnacia serratipes), whereas the reports for Palophus spp. that I'd found were based on overall length (e.g. 400 mm for P.leopoldi). It may be that some of the African Palophus (= Bactrododema) had bodies equal or greater in length to the Asian Pharnacia (= Phobaeticus), but there was no actual evidence for this. When writing to The Guinness Book of Records I'd expressed some caution about the basis for different measurements, and now it turned out that I was right to do so.

In the summer of 1994 I returned to East Africa and forgot about my phasmid fantasies. The next edition of The Guinness Book of Records gave primacy to Pharnacia kirbyi (= Phobaeticus kirbyi Brunner von Watenwyl, 1907), a species from Borneo. Although I didn't know it at the time, phasmid researcher Phil Bragg had published a paper in The Entomologist pointing out that the original record was based on a misidentification, and that the African record was based on the measurement of overall rather than body length (1995: 26). I didn't see another large stick insect until one day in May 2002, driving from Dar es Salaam to Iringa in a project Landrover. As we sped along the road approaching Kitonga I caught sight of a very large stick crossing in front of us, heading into the bush northwards. We were travelling at 110-120 km per hour, and I had a split second in which to ask the driver, Aston, to slam on the brakes. I thought of the hassle, hesitated, and the moment had gone. Gone too, I mused, was my chance to change the record books again, this time with some real evidence. Instead the world record is now held by another Bornean species, recently described by Phil Bragg (Chan's Megastick, Phobaeticus chani Bragg, 2008) and displayed in the Natural History Museum in London.  

Afterword, 20 August 2010

Martyn Tovey has kindly gone through different editions of The Guinness Book of Records (and its successors) and painstakingly examined the entries for the world's longest insect. His analysis shows a surprising number of changes, updates, and errors. One change is of particular significance to my own tale: whereas early editions had all made it clear that the principal measurements given referred to the body length of stick insects, this detail was omitted from the 29th edition (published in 1982) onwards, and wasn't reintroduced until the 41st edition (1994), which picked up on Phil Bragg's observations. Martyn's notes are reproduced with minor amendments below. For details of the different editions and their dates of publication readers are referred to his wonderful Guinness Record Book Collecting website.

The longest insect record appeared in the very first edition in 1955 (under Insects, Largest), as:
Some tropical stick-insects (Plasmidae) have a body length up to 13 inches (330 mm.) [p.34]

The entry was slightly modified in the 2nd edition in 1956 (now known as the 5th edition):
Some tropical stick-insects (Phasmidae) have a body length up to 13 inches (330 mm.) [p.30]

The 10th edition (1962) has:
Some tropical stick-insects (Phasmidae) have a body length up to 13 inches (330 mm.) and in the case of the Palophus titan from Australia a wing span of 10 inches. [p.29]

The description changes slightly for the 13th edition in 1966:
Some tropical stick-insects (family Phasmidae) have a body length up to 13 inches and in the case of the Palophus titan from Australia a wing span of 10 inches. [p.35]

In the 18th edition (1971), the record changes again to:
Some tropical stick-insects have a body length of up to 13 inches (e.g. Phoboeticus fruhstorferi) and, in the case of Palophus titan from Australia, a wing span of 10 inches. [p.41]

The next (19th edition) moves the record into its own category (Insects, Longest):
The longest insect in the world is the tropical stick-insect Pharnacia serratipes, females of which have been measured up to 33 cm (12.99 inches) in body length. [p.42]

In edition 28, published in 1981, the record becomes:
The longest insect in the world is the giant stick-insect Pharnacia serratipes of Indonesia, females of which have been measured up to 330 mm (13 inches) in body length. [p.46]

The 29th edition had a reference to the record in the usual place, but the actual record was shown in a two-page table of "Superlatives of the Animal Kingdom". It omitted the detail "in body length". The table appeared in the 30th, 31st, 32nd and 33rd editions. For the 34th edition (published 1987), the record was back in the main text as:
The longest insect in the world is the Giant stick-insect (Pharnacia serratipes) of Indonesia, females of which have been measured up to 330 mm 13 in. [p.39]

The record in the 39th edition is:
The longest insects in the world are stick-insects (walking sticks), especially of the African species Palophus, which can attain lengths of 400 mm 15¾ in in the case of Palophus leopoldi. [p.38]

The record changes in the 41st edition to:
The longest recorded insect in the world is Pharnacia kirbyi, a stick insect from the rainforests of Borneo. The longest-known specimen is in the British Natural History Museum in London, UK: it has a body length of 328 mm 12.9 in and a total length, including the legs, of over half-a-metre 20 in.

The total length is given as 546 mm (20 inches) in the 42nd edition, but 54.6 cm (21.5 inches) in the 43rd. The 1999 44th edition (published in 1998) has a picture of the specimen from the Natural History Museum (pp.258-259). The 2008 54th edition updates the record:
Two stick insects share this record, depending on how they are measured. Pharnacia kirbyi is a stick insect from the rainforests of Borneo. The longest specimen known had a body length of 32.8 cm (12.9 in) and a total length, including the legs, of 54.6 cm (21.5 in). This makes it the longest insect in the world based on head-plus-body length. A specimen of Malaysia's Phobaeticus serratipes had a head-plus-body length of 27.8 cm (10.9 in), but when its outstretched legs were included, it measured a record 55.5 cm (21.8). [p.45]

The 2010 56th edition (published in 2009) has a new entry:
On 16th October 2008, the UK's Natural History Museum announced a new holder for the record of the longest stick insect: Phobaeticus chana - aka Chan's megastick - from the rainforests of Borneo. The longest of the three known specimens [...] measured 56.6 cm (22.3 in) with its legs stretched; its body alone measured 35.5 cm (14 in) - also a record for the insect class. [p.48]

Paul Brock adds that in his opinion "an Australian species Ctenomorpha gargantua Hasenpusch & Brock, 2006 will compete for the 'longest insect in the world' title, as they are over 300mm".

Acknowledgements
I remain very grateful to Paul Brock for his correspondence in 1993-94 and for taking the trouble to send me hard-to-obtain literature on phasmids. I'm sorry that I've been able to make no better use of it than this! Thanks also to James Walsh for his photograph and drawing of the stick insect (very likely Bactrododema sp.) that appeared in our swimming pool that Sunday morning in 1991. Martyn Tovey and, again, Paul Brock are thanked for their contributions to the Afterword.

References

Bragg, P. E. 1995. The Longest Stick Insect in the World, Pharnacia kirbyi (Brunner). The Entomologist 114 (1): 26-30.

Bragg, P. E. 2008. In Frank H. Hennemann and Oscar V. Conle, Revision of Oriental Phasmatodea: The Tribe Pharnaciini Günther, 1953, Including the Description of the World's Longest Insect, and a Survey of the Family Phasmatidae Gray, 1835 with Keys to the Subfamilies and Tribes (Phasmatodea: "Anareolatae": Phasmatidae), Zootaxa 1906.

Brock, Paul D. 1992. Rearing and Studying Stick and Leaf-Insects (The Amateur Entomologist 22). Feltham, Middlesex: The Amateur Entomologists' Society.

Brock, Paul D. 2004. Taxonomic Notes on Giant Southern African Stick Insects (Phasmida), including the Description of a New Bactrododema Species. Annals of the Transvaal Museum 41: 61-77.

Carpenter, G. D. Hale 1942. Notes by E. Burtt, B.Sc., F.R.E.S., on a Species of Palophus (Probably episcopalis Kirby): A Giant Phasmid (Orthoptera) from Tanganyika Territory. Proceedings of the Royal Entomological Society of London (A) 17 (7-9): 75-76.

McFarlan, Donald (ed.) 1989. The Guinness Book of Records 1990 (36th edition). Enfield, Middlesex: Guinness Publishing Ltd.

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Walsh, Martin 1991. A Stick Insect in Same. East Africa Natural History Society Bulletin 21 (3): 48.