The brutalist Philips Building in central London does not look very inviting at first. Nevertheless, it is a magnet for students and researchers from all over the world working on Asia and Africa. Nowadays probably the most important institution in the Global North for research on the Global South, SOAS (School of Oriental and African Studies) was originally founded in 1916 to train colonial officials and to produce knowledge about the British colonies.1 Little trace of this remains—today, SOAS calls itself ‘The World’s University’ and is considered internationalist, left-wing, and anti-imperialist.

SOAS is home to a formidable library containing valuable material for research on Africa and Asia. If we descend into the library’s basement, where the Special Collections reading room is located, our attention is drawn to a pillar with a manuscript in Arabic script displayed on it. On yellowed paper we see text in verse, impressively illustrated by a pair of eyes set in a triangle (see Fig. 1 above and Fig. 3 below). This is the Swahili poem ‘Utenzi wa Ndiwa na Kozi’, a ‘poem of the hawk and the dove’ about the prophet Moses. It comprises thirty-seven verses and was copied in the early twentieth century by Muhamadi Kijuma—an Islamic scholar on the island of Lamu who was the most important supplier of Swahili manuscripts to British and German Africanists.2

This poem is one of thousands of Swahili manuscripts held at SOAS. This unique collection was compiled on the East African coast by European scholars and then brought to London. It bears witness to a long-standing European interest in the East African lingua franca Swahili and its literature. From the middle of the nineteenth century, Europeans became increasingly interested in African languages. Among them were missionaries who wanted to convert Africans and needed to understand them linguistically and culturally, colonizers who saw language as a means of domination, and academics who were fascinated by African languages and literatures and were based at institutions in Europe—including at SOAS, where Swahili is still a major subject of instruction and research.
Researching Swahili Studies
The starting point of my research project is the importance of Swahili both in Africa and in Europe today. Swahili is probably the most successful indigenous African language. In Tanzania, it has been established as the undisputed instrument of nationwide communication. This is the result of successful post-colonial nation-building, but the ground was also prepared by German and British language policies during the colonial era, which focused on standardizing and enforcing Swahili as the language of instruction and administration.
Swahili continues to be at the centre of European interest in African languages. Whether at SOAS in London or at the African studies departments in Berlin and Hamburg (all three of which were founded during the colonial era), African languages are firmly established subjects of study and research in Europe, and Swahili is a significant component in Africanist research and the teaching of African languages.
It is precisely this history of research into Swahili by missionaries, colonizers, and academic Africanists that interests me. I ask how European knowledge of Swahili emerged and changed, and I use Swahili studies to examine the history of African linguistics and philology (German: Afrikanistik) in general as a missionary practice and academic discipline. I explore the ideological and political factors, the ideas, networks, and resources, that shaped the production of knowledge and thus the emerging academic field of African linguistics.
I focus on the practices of knowledge production: the documentation, recording, and transcription of previously undocumented languages; the collection, editing, and publishing of Swahili manuscripts; and the writing, commentary, and reviewing of academic texts—ultimately, the path from fieldwork in Africa to Africanist publications. This approach can only be successful where there is dense source material that provides insight into the daily work of the Africanist. In the following, I would like to show how the source material that I collected in missionary, academic, and state archives during my scholarship at the German Historical Institute London can help me in this respect.
Archival Insights into Knowledge Production
At the National Archives in Kew, I consulted files from the Colonial Office, the Foreign Office, and the War Office. I examined exchanges between colonial administrations and Africanists about language policy and text production, as well as negotiations between British ministries and SOAS on the school’s funding and the recognition of Swahili diplomas for colonial civil servants. The holdings of the International Africa Institute, located at the London School of Economics, provide an exciting insight into the activities of this important transnational and, at the same time, British institute that funded African studies in Europe. Lambeth Palace Library holds the Archbishop of Canterbury’s correspondence with missionaries, for example about Swahili translations of religious texts. And the Cadbury Research Library at the University of Birmingham houses the archives of the Church Missionary Society (CMS), whose missionaries were among the first Europeans to publish Swahili dictionaries, grammars, and language specimens, and were heavily involved in the linguistic codification of the language.
Above all, however, it was the holdings at SOAS that gave me a unique insight into the work of Swahili scholars. The Special Collections hold the records of missionary organizations, such as the International Missionary Council, which was instrumental in institutionalizing academic African studies in London, as well as various personal papers of scholars and missionaries working in East Africa.
The Swahili manuscript collections contain copies of centuries-old Islamic Swahili poetry, which are consulted by Swahili scholars today to produce new editions of classical Swahili literature. Of interest to me, however, are the accompanying correspondence, notebooks, manuscripts, and typescripts. These sources can be used to critically examine collecting, editing, and publishing practices, as well as the collaboration between Europeans and Africans, and have so far only been used to a very limited extent.
The William Taylor Collection, for example, contains dozens of the Swahili scholar’s notebooks from the 1880s and 1890s when he was stationed as a CMS missionary in Kenya. Among other things, I found handwritten instructions for his informants and the transcribed and then translated verses of the poems and songs they collected—sometimes in various versions, with corrections that reveal the individual steps of the work involved.
Traces of African actors can be found throughout the notebooks—for example, an African scholar who adopted a simplified Latin script for his collaboration with Taylor, written in the very characteristic block capitals of someone who usually wrote in Arabic. He provided the explanations necessary for Taylor and other Europeans to understand classical poetry. His philological notes alternate with Taylor’s comments, additions, insertions, and corrections, giving a vivid impression of the collaboration between the two scholars.
Letters between the informant and Taylor (addressed as ‘Bwana Tela’) are also preserved in the collection, along with contracts in Swahili concerning payment and the terms of their cooperation. In addition to this correspondence in Latin script, which was completely alien to the Swahili people at the time, Taylor’s correspondence with scholars in Mombasa has also survived. This was not written in Latin script, but used the Arabic or the Swahili Ajami alphabet.



Another more recent collection was amassed by the colonial administrator and amateur researcher William Hichens in the 1930s and 1940s. In addition to the Swahili manuscripts he acquired, there are extensive collections of typescripts, transcriptions, and translations that he produced with his African colleagues. Particularly interesting is his collaboration with Mbarak al-Hinawy, a governor in the British colonial service and a prolific author, editor, and promoter of Swahili literature in Kenya.3 In typescripts of Swahili literary editions, Hichens pencilled notes addressed to Mbarak asking for contextual information, corrections, additions, and alterations, as well as translations of verses he could not make sense of.
These sources raise questions about authorship that deserve close scrutiny. In 1940, when Hichens wrote a preface to a literary edition in Swahili for African readers, he received scathing criticism from Mbarak, who claimed that it was poorly written and completely incomprehensible to native speakers—as if Hichens had simply translated an English text word for word into Swahili. Hichens accepted the verdict and asked Mbarak to rewrite the preface completely and sign it with his name. This is not the only instance of negotiations over authorship. On the title page of the 1937 typescript of Al-Inkishafi, the credit ‘translated and edited by William Hichens’ was supplemented with the handwritten words ‘in collaboration with Sheikh Mbarak Ali Hinawy’.
The trajectory of some of Hichens’ publication projects, including successes and failures, can also be reconstructed from the correspondence. There are letters not only between Mbarak and Hichens, but also in exchange with lecturers at SOAS about the possible inclusion of Hichens’ publications in the syllabuses of Swahili courses. Being part of the SOAS curriculum was particularly important, as Hichens’ negotiations with various publishers were often difficult due to the limited public interest in Swahili poetry. Organizing third-party funding for philological editions proved unsuccessful, as the old Swahili language seemed no longer relevant or worthy of support in an era when the colonial Standard Swahili prevailed.



Featured image: Folio of the Swahili poem ‘Utenzi wa Ndiwa na Kozi’ (SOAS, MS 45022c). Photo by SOAS Digital Collections. Published under a CC BY-NC-SA 3.0 licence.
- Ian Brown, The School of Oriental and African Studies: Imperial Training and the Expansion of Learning (Cambridge, 2016). [↩]
- Gudrun Miehe and Clarissa Vierke (eds.), Muhamadi Kijuma: Texts from the Dammann Papers and other Collections (Cologne, 2010). [↩]
- Zulfikar Hirji, Between Empires: Sheikh-Sir Mbarak al-Hinawy 1896–1959 (London, 2012). [↩]
OpenEdition suggests that you cite this post as follows:
Florian Balbiani (July 9, 2025). Knowledge Production between Mission, University, and Colonial Administration: Swahili Studies in Britain and Germany, 1840s–1940s. German Historical Institute London Blog. Retrieved November 6, 2025 from https://doi.org/10.58079/14axw
