THE WHALE AND THE PANGOLIN

by Martin Walsh

A pilot whale in Pongwe Bay, Unguja, Zanzibar (photo by Yaroslav Alexandrov)

‘Was there a proto-Bantu word for ‘whale’ and other mischievous questions’ is the characteristically thought-provoking title of an unpublished paper (last updated in 2012) by my good friend Roger Blench. As Roger points out, there is no listed proto-Bantu form for ‘whale’, though it is quite possible that early Bantu speakers were familiar with marine creatures, and certainly so once they spread from their putative homeland in southern Cameroon down the west coast of equatorial Africa. The rest of the paper sets out the lexical evidence for knowledge of marine fauna in northwest Bantu, including a generic term for whales (2012: 21-22).

This word did not, of course, make it across or around the central African rainforest to the eastern side of the continent. How, then, did Bantu speakers name whales when they first encountered them on the shores of the Indian Ocean? Knowledge of whales doesn’t require possession of a fully-fledged maritime culture, just familiarity with the seashore. As we know, whales can become stranded on beaches, as well as washing up when they are dead, as reported in my January 2012 post on ‘A pilot whale in Pongwe’.

There are more than 30 species of whale in the western Indian Ocean region (Richmond 2002: 398), and according to the TUKI English-Swahili Dictionary, nyangumi is the common Swahili name for all of them. Indeed, it’s the only name given for whales in both online TUKI dictionaries (English-Swahili and Swahili-English), which are our best guide to contemporary Standard Swahili. Older dictionaries, however, give variants of this term, which has an invariant plural – in the lingo of Bantuists it has 9/10 (singular/plural) noun class prefixes and takes 1/2 animate agreements.

There are even more variants of nyangumi in the different dialects of Swahili, as well as other names. Here’s a provisional list of the generic term for whales in all the dialects between Somalia in the north and Mozambique in the south for which I have data. I’ve also included terms from other Sabaki languages, which are Swahili’s closest historical relatives.

Swahili and other Sabaki language names for whales

Language and dialects	Attestation and noun class pairing (if known)	Source and comments
Swahili
Standard	nyangumi 9/10	Johnson 1939a, 1939b; TUKI 2019a, 2019b
	nyamngumi 9/10	TUKI 1981
Mwiini	yama 9/10 ~ iyama 5/4	Kisseberth 2016. Cf. nama 9/10 ‘meat, flesh’
Bajuni	muungumi ~ nngumi 3/4	Sacleux 1939; Nurse 2010
Pate	mngumi	Sacleux 1939
Amu	mngumi	Sacleux 1939
Pemba	mngumi	Sacleux 1939
Mvita	mngumi	Sacleux 1939; Abdulaziz 1979
	mgumi ~ nyamgumi	Binns 1925
Unguja	nyamgumi 9/10	Madan 1903
	mnyāngumi 3/4	Sacleux 1939, 1959
	nyangumi 9/10	field notes 2016
Mafia/Ngome	nyamabahari 9/10	Kipacha 2004. Cf. nyama 9/10 ‘meat’ + bahari 9/10 ‘sea’, lit. ‘flesh (animal) of the sea’
Koti	nangumi (1a/2a)	Schadeberg and Mucanheia 2000
Lower Pokomo
(New Testament)	ḅungumi	The British and Foreign Bible Society 1901; BTL 2019
Mijikenda
Giryama	mungumi	United Bible Societies 1951
Comorian
Ngazidja	ngume 3/4	Fischer 1949
	mngome ~ mngume 3/4	Ahmed-Chamanga and Gueunier 1979
	nduju	Fischer 1949. Cf. Lafon 1991, nduju 9/10 ‘dolphin’
	ndundju	Ahmed-Chamanga and Gueunier 1979
Ndzuani	ndruju 9/10	Ahmed-Chamanga 1992, 1997, Cf. fumba-ndruju 5/6 ‘dolphin’
Maore	mongume	Ahmed-Chamanga and Gueunier 1979

The Swahili names from Brava in Somalia (Mwiini) and northern Mafia island (Ngome) in Tanzania are euphemisms that allude to the animality, and perhaps edibility, of whales as large creatures of the sea. Comorian ndruju and variants seem to have been borrowed from Malagasy trózona, ‘whale’, or an earlier form thereof (see Simon 2006: 439). As Sander Adelaar (1989: 17) has pointed out – and kindly expanded upon while I was writing this post, this was originally a loanword from Malay *duyuŋ, ‘dugong’ – the English name of which is ultimately from the same source.

Derek Nurse and Tom Hinnebusch (1993: 665) tentatively reconstructed proto-Sabaki *mungumi 3/4 ‘whale’, citing the Amu, Unguja, Giryama, and Ngazidja forms. Allowing for errors in transcription, the expanded list provides additional support for this reconstruction. The only real anomaly is the initial consonant in Lower Pokomo ḅungumi, assuming that this isn’t a mistake made by different generations of Bible translators. Given that most Pokomo live along the Tana River and not near the sea, then perhaps we should not be surprised to see them using a skewed form of the name of a creature they were unlikely to encounter.

Where, then, did the ancestors of the Swahili and other Sabaki speakers get this word from? There’s no obvious connection between *mungumi (with the root *-ngumi) and another tentative proto-Sabaki reconstruction, *ngumi 9/10 ‘fist’ (Nurse and Hinnebusch 1993: 669). I don’t know if there are cognate whale names in other languages along the Tanzanian coast. The record of nyangumi in a modern vocabulary of Zigua (Mochiwa 2008: 52) might reflect recent borrowing from Swahili. An alternative possibility is that the transfer went in the opposite direction, i.e. that the Unguja and related forms aren’t inherited, but derive from Zigua or another mainland language.

A Termminck's ground pangolin in Iringa (video still by Martin Walsh)

The only similar name that I have come across is given to a very different animal in the drylands of central Tanzania, a long way from the Indian Ocean. Temminck’s ground pangolin, Smutsia temminckii, is called nyamung’umi (9/10, plural zinyamung’umi) by some speakers of the Gogo language (Swynnerton 1946: 30; field notes 2002), abbreviated to nyamumi by others (Rugemalira 2009: 83). Is this just a coincidence? What’s the connection, if any, between these little-seen scaly ant-eaters in the interior of Tanzania and the world’s largest marine mammals?

Gogo, a West Ruvu language, is classified in the same wider group of languages as Zigua and the Sabaki languages: Northeast Coast Bantu (NECB). As the name implies, NECB speakers occupy a large swathe of territory that begins in central Tanzania and sweeps eastwards and northwards, following the Indian Ocean coastline up to southern Somalia. They were presumably the first Bantu to arrive on the coast opposite Zanzibar, and perhaps the first to encounter beached whales on this side of the continent.

The ancestors of the Gogo and other NECB speakers would have been familiar with ground pangolins, which can be found everywhere in the hinterland of the Tanzanian coast. Is there anything that would lead them to dub whales with the same name? A clue may lie in the comparative rarity of pangolin and inshore whale sightings. Among the Gogo and their neighbours, encounters with pangolins were traditionally treated as auspicious events, triggering ritual actions that typically ended in the sacrifice of the animal (for examples see Walsh 1995/96, 2007).

Could it be that the stranding of a whale was viewed as a similarly auspicious event by early NECB settlers on the coast? Was the whale, like the pangolin, thought to offer itself for sacrifice? And did this lead whales to be dubbed with the same name, or a version of it?

I am, of course, letting my imagination run riot. The Gogo name for the ground pangolin, nyamung’umi, doesn’t seem to have a wider distribution, and I don’t know its etymology: it might even be a recent euphemism. Reflexes of proto-Bantu *kákà 9/10 ‘pangolin spp.’ are widespread in East Africa. Swahili kakakuona is one of them, though evidently borrowed from Nyamwezi ngakákύβonwá 9/10 (Maganga and Schadeberg 1992: 268, 305), perhaps via Gogo, which also has a related form, written as ngakakuona by my research assistants in 2002.

It may even be that Gogo nyamung’umi was itself borrowed from the coast (cf. the Swahili form nyamngumi). Whatever the case, the switch to or from velar nasal ng’ /ŋ/ would have to be explained. Likewise, the comings and goings of different prefixes and noun class designations, reminiscent of a case I’ve discussed elsewhere (Walsh 2004). Still, in the absence of alternative hypotheses, I find it difficult to resist speculation. There are certainly cases in which deep cultural knowledge is needed to make sense of an otherwise opaque etymology. This one is a long shot, but every now and then long shots hit the target.

Acknowledgements

Many thanks again to Yaroslav Alexandrov for letting me use his photos from Pongwe. I'm also very grateful to the wonderful Bonny Sands for LOT Project dictionaries (many more than are referenced here!), and Sander Adelaar for putting me right on ndruju. They’re real linguists, and the usual disclaimer applies.

References

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

Adelaar, Alexander A. 1989. Malay Influence on Malagasy: linguistic and culture-historical implications. Oceanic Linguistics 28 (1): 1-46.

Ahmed-Chamanga, Mohamed 1992. Lexique comorien-(shindzuwani)-français. Paris: Editions l’Harmattan.

Ahmed-Chamanga, Mohamed 1997. Dictionnaire français-comorien (dialecte shindzuwani). Paris: CEROI-INALCO / L’Harmattan.

Comorian dictionaries

Ahmed Chamanga, Mohamed and Noël-Jacques Gueunier 1979. Le dictionnaire comorien-français et français-comorien du R. P. Sacleux (2 vols.). Paris: SELAF.

Binns, H.K. 1925. Swahili-English Dictionary: Being Dr. Krapf’s Original Swahili-English Dictionary Revised and Re-arranged. London: Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge.

Blench, Roger M. 2012. Was there a proto-Bantu word for ‘whale’ and other mischievous questions. Unpublished paper. Online at http://www.rogerblench.info/Language/Niger-Congo/Bantu/Was%20there%20a%20proto-Bantu%20word%20for%20whale.pdf.

BTL 2019. Bible Translation  and Literacy, Pokomo Language Project. Online at https://kipfokomu.com/en/homepage.

Fischer, François 1949. Grammaire-dictionnaire comorien. Strasbourg: Société d’Édition de la Basse Alsace.

Johnson, Frederick 1939a. A Standard Swahili-English Dictionary. London: Oxford University Press.

Johnson, Frederick 1939b. A Standard English-Swahili Dictionary. London: Oxford University Press.

Kipacha, Ahmad 2004. Kingome-English lexicon. Swahili Forum 11: 179-209.

Kisseberth, Charles W. 2016. Chimiini-English Dictionary and Chrestomathy. Online at http://swahiliendangered.cdh.ucla.edu/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/Chimiini-Lexicon-and-Chrestomathy-February-2016.pdf.

Lafon, Michel 1991. Lexique français-comorien (shingazidja). Paris: Editions L’Harmattan.

Madan, A.C. 1903. Swahili-English Dictionary. Oxford: The Clarendon Press.

Maganga, Clement and Thilo C. Schadeberg 1992. Kinyamwezi: Grammar, Texts, Vocabulary. Köln: Rüdiger Köppe Verlag.

Mochiwa, Zacharia 2008. Kizigula: Msamiati wa Kizigula-Kiswahili-Kiingereza [Zigula-Swahili-English Lexicon]. Dar es Salaam: Languages of Tanzania (LOT) Project, University of Dar es Salaam.

Nurse, Derek 2010. Lexicon for Ki-Bajuni = Ki-Gunya = Ki-T^hik^huu. Online at http://www.ucs.mun.ca/~dnurse/bajuni_database/wordlist.pdf.

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

Richmond, Matthew D. (ed.) 2002. A Field Guide to the Seashores and Eastern Africa and the Western Indian Ocean Islands (2^nd edition). Dar es Salaam: Sida/SAREC & UDSM.

Rugemalira, Josephat M. 2009. Cigogo: Kamusi ya Kigogo-Kiswahili-Kiingereza / Kiingereza-Kigogo / Kiswahili-Kigogo [Gogo-Swahili-English / English-Gogo / Swahili-Gogo Dictionary]. Dar es Salaam: Mradi wa Lugha za Tanzania, Chuo Kikuu cha Dar es Salaam.

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

Sacleux, Charles 1959. Dictionnaire Français-Swahili (2^nd edition). Paris: Institut d’Ethnologie.

Schadeberg, Thilo C. and Francisco Ussene Mucanheia 2000. Ekoti: The Maka or Swahili Language of Angoche. Köln: Rüdiger Köppe.

Simon, Pierre R. 2006. La langue des ancêtres Ny Fitenin-dRazana: Une périodisation du malgache de l’origine au XV^ème siècle. Paris: L’Harmattan.

Swynnerton, G.H. 1946. Vernacular names for some of the better-known mammals in the Central Province, Tanganyika Territory. Tanganyika Notes and Records 21: 21-38.

The Bible Society of Kenya 1951. Chuwo cha Malagano Masha ga Bwana Wehu Jesu Masihi Mokoli Wehu [The New Testament and Psalms in Giryama].  Nairobi: The Bible Society of Kenya.

The British and Foreign Bible Society 1901. Chuo cha Ḍamano Ibfya ḍya Ḇwana na Mubfonya Jwehu Yesu Kristo [Pokomo New Testament]. London: The British and Foreign Bible Society.

'Whale' in Pokomo, Matthew 12: 40

TUKI 1981. Kamusi ya Kiswahili Sanifu. Dar es Salaam: Oxford University Press.

TUKI 2019. Kamusi ya Kiswahili-Kiingereza. Online at http://www.elimuyetu.co.tz/subjects/arts/swa-eng/index.html.

TUKI 2019. English-Swahili Dictionary. Online at http://www.elimuyetu.co.tz/subjects/arts/eng-swa/index.html.

Walsh, Martin T. 1995/96. The ritual sacrifice of pangolins among the Sangu of south-west Tanzania. Bulletin of the International Committee on Urgent Anthropological and Ethnological Research 37/38: 155-170. Online at https://www.academia.edu/708993/The_ritual_sacrifice_of_pangolins_among_the_Sangu_of_south-west_Tanzania.

Walsh, Martin T. 2004. Variability and compounding of affixes in Hehe animal names (Tanzania). Paper presented to the 34th Colloquium on African Languages and Linguistics (CALL 34), Leiden University, 23-25 August. Online at https://www.academia.edu/1691467/Variability_and_compounding_of_affixes_in_Hehe_animal_names_Tanzania_.

Walsh, Martin T. 2007. Pangolins and politics in the Great Ruaha valley, Tanzania: symbol, ritual and difference / Pangolin et politique dans la vallée du Great Ruaha, Tanzanie: symbole, rituel et différence. In E. Dounias, E. Motte-Florac and M. Dunham (eds.) Le symbolisme des animaux: L'animal, clef de voûte de la relation entre l'homme et la nature? / Animal Symbolism: Animals, Keystone of the Relationship between Man and Nature? Paris: Éditions de l’IRD. 1003-1044. Online at http://horizon.documentation.ird.fr/exl-doc/pleins_textes/divers16-08/010041952.pdf.

Walsh, Martin T. 2018. The Swahili language and its early history. In S. Wynne-Jones and A. LaViolette (eds.) The Swahili World. Abingdon and New York: Routledge. 121-130. Online at https://www.academia.edu/36719077/The_Swahili_language_and_its_early_history.

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.