As a result of contacts with Muslim merchants from the Swahili coast and Sudan in the second half of the 19th century, Arabic script was circulating in certain regions of the Congo (Maniema, Kisangani, Uele, etc.) even before the arrival of Europeans, and continued to do so throughout the colonial period, giving rise to a varied corpus in Arabic and Swahili in Arabic characters: correspondence, contracts, amulets, political treaties, books, etc. The aim of this project is to identify new documents that have remained in situ, to better understand their evolution over time and their circulation circuit, and to propose a linguistic analysis of Swahili documents in Arabic script produced in the Congo at the end of the 19th century.
Director project: Xavier Luffin
PhD Researcher: Shaibu Champunga
Website : https://kalamunawino.org/