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Traditional Myths and Historian's Myths: Variations on the Singwaya Theme of Mijikenda Origins
- Thomas T. Spear
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- Journal:
- History in Africa / Volume 1 / 1974
- Published online by Cambridge University Press:
- 13 May 2014, pp. 67-84
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African myths of origin have long both fascinated and perplexed historians. Naively taken as fact, they have led historians to create their own myths, such as the Hamitic Myth and its corollary, Sudanic Civilization. The most radical corrective has been to dismiss origin myths altogether on the anthropologial rationale that all myths are simply cultural charters and bear little resemblance to historical fact. By so doing, however, quite frequently we uncritically dismiss our sole source for the history of African peoples prior to the nineteenth century. The task, then, is to try to sift the historical wheat from the mythical chaff in order to recover as much valid historical evidence as possible from origin myths without violating the canons of historical method.
A case in point is the Singwaya tradition of Mijikenda and other Kenyan coastal peoples' origins. The Singwaya tradition is one of the most frequently cited and discussed myths of origin of African peoples. Most of the discussion, however, has taken place in a void, because the myth concerns peoples about whom we have known very little and whose traditions have been collected only fragmentarily at best. Its appeal has lain in the fact that this tradition has been collected dozens of times from the 1840s to the present from virtually all the coastal peoples, including the Bajun, the Pokomo along the Tana River, the nine different Mijikenda peoples, the Segeju, the lowland Taita, and two Mombasa Swahili groups. Its widespread distribution has caused the tradition to have a fatal fascination for historians.
The first collections of traditions of origin for the coastal peoples were made in the latter half of the nineteenth century by Krapf, Rebmann, Guillain, Burton, Wakefield, New, and Taylor, the earliest missionaries and travelers in the Mijikenda area. These collections were sketchy, and although they mentioned northerly origins they did not specifically mention Singwaya. Starting with Hollis' earliest collections in 1897, the traditions rapidly acquired greater detail. Collections by Johnstone, Platts, MacDougall, Champion, Pearson, Werner, Osborne, Sharpe, Weaving, Hobley, Griffiths, Dammann, Kayamba, and Prins among various coastal peoples all relate a common theme: that the Pokomo, the Taita, seven of the nine Mijikenda peoples, the Segeju, and the Kilindini and Jomvu Swahili all shared common origins in a place called Singwaya located on the southern Somali coast; that they were driven from there by an invasion of the Galla; and that they migrated south in several groups to their present areas of settlement.
Traditional Myths and Linguistic Analysis: Singwaya Revisited
- Thomas T. Spear
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- Journal:
- History in Africa / Volume 4 / 1977
- Published online by Cambridge University Press:
- 13 May 2014, pp. 229-246
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In a previous article in this journal I warned about the dangers of facile generalization and misinterpretation of traditional origin myths leading to the elaboration of historians' myths which bear little resemblance to the traditional, linguistic, cultural, or documentary data. I then proceeded to analyze the Singwaya (Shungwaya) myth pertaining to the origins of the peoples of the Kenya coast to show how earlier interpretations cannot be sustained by the evidence, before demonstrating that the myth is nevertheless valid for the Mijikenda, Pokomo, Swahili, Taita, and Segeju, where such evidence supports its basic veracity.
As chance would have it, while the above article was in press I delivered a related paper on the same panel as Thomas Hinnebusch who, on the basis of extensive linguistic fieldwork and analysis of the same area, had found a number of fallacies in the published linguistic data on which I had relied. While confirming the exclusion of the highlanders (Thagicũ-speakers) from the same language group as the coastal peoples and hence presumably from common origins with the others at Singwaya, Hinnebusch also excludes both the Taita and Segeju from that group while adding the Swahili to it, thus calling into doubt the integrity of the Singwaya group as I had reconstructed it. Hinnebusch's data and his analysis of it, then, obviously require a reexamination of the role of the Taita, Segeju, and Swahili peoples in the migration from Singwaya while, at the same time, casting doubt anew on the validity of origin myths or legends. But the linguistic data also extends our view enormously.
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- By Rose Teteki Abbey, K. C. Abraham, David Tuesday Adamo, LeRoy H. Aden, Efrain Agosto, Victor Aguilan, Gillian T. W. Ahlgren, Charanjit Kaur AjitSingh, Dorothy B E A Akoto, Giuseppe Alberigo, Daniel E. Albrecht, Ruth Albrecht, Daniel O. Aleshire, Urs Altermatt, Anand Amaladass, Michael Amaladoss, James N. Amanze, Lesley G. Anderson, Thomas C. Anderson, Victor Anderson, Hope S. Antone, María Pilar Aquino, Paula Arai, Victorio Araya Guillén, S. Wesley Ariarajah, Ellen T. Armour, Brett Gregory Armstrong, Atsuhiro Asano, Naim Stifan Ateek, Mahmoud Ayoub, John Alembillah Azumah, Mercedes L. García Bachmann, Irena Backus, J. Wayne Baker, Mieke Bal, Lewis V. Baldwin, William Barbieri, António Barbosa da Silva, David Basinger, Bolaji Olukemi Bateye, Oswald Bayer, Daniel H. Bays, Rosalie Beck, Nancy Elizabeth Bedford, Guy-Thomas Bedouelle, Chorbishop Seely Beggiani, Wolfgang Behringer, Christopher M. Bellitto, Byard Bennett, Harold V. Bennett, Teresa Berger, Miguel A. Bernad, Henley Bernard, Alan E. Bernstein, Jon L. Berquist, Johannes Beutler, Ana María Bidegain, Matthew P. Binkewicz, Jennifer Bird, Joseph Blenkinsopp, Dmytro Bondarenko, Paulo Bonfatti, Riet en Pim Bons-Storm, Jessica A. Boon, Marcus J. Borg, Mark Bosco, Peter C. Bouteneff, François Bovon, William D. Bowman, Paul S. Boyer, David Brakke, Richard E. Brantley, Marcus Braybrooke, Ian Breward, Ênio José da Costa Brito, Jewel Spears Brooker, Johannes Brosseder, Nicholas Canfield Read Brown, Robert F. Brown, Pamela K. Brubaker, Walter Brueggemann, Bishop Colin O. Buchanan, Stanley M. Burgess, Amy Nelson Burnett, J. Patout Burns, David B. Burrell, David Buttrick, James P. Byrd, Lavinia Byrne, Gerado Caetano, Marcos Caldas, Alkiviadis Calivas, William J. Callahan, Salvatore Calomino, Euan K. Cameron, William S. Campbell, Marcelo Ayres Camurça, Daniel F. Caner, Paul E. Capetz, Carlos F. Cardoza-Orlandi, Patrick W. Carey, Barbara Carvill, Hal Cauthron, Subhadra Mitra Channa, Mark D. 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- The Cambridge Dictionary of Christianity
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- 05 August 2012
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- 20 September 2010, pp xi-xliv
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Jobs in Britain and the Commonwealth
- Thomas T. Spear
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- Issue: Quarterly Journal of Opinion (1971-1999) and African Issues (2000-2004) / Volume 7 / Issue 3 / Fall 1977
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- 13 August 2021, p. 28
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- Fall 1977
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Foreign universities are not the cure to the glut on the American job market, for the glut is a world-wide phenomenon, particularly in African studies. Americans already constitute a sizable proportion of academics in Canada, Australia, Britain, and Africa and the backlash against them is already developing in some. But some systems are still expanding, such as those in Nigeria and Australia, and they offer perhaps the best chances for jobs in the immediate future.