TiaSauti@Lab

In East Africa, reading is not done silently, but aloud to a public: a shared, sensorial experience. This project “gives voice” to Swahili pocket literature, a genre rarely included in scholarly discussions, classrooms, or bookshops. Its aim is to establish the TiaSauti@Lab (GiveVoice @Lab): an atelier to explore Swahili orature via digital content. The pilot initiative will be a vodcast series featuring conversations on contemporary Muslim cultural life through a rereading of 20th-century Swahili pamphlet literatures. TiaSauti@Lab involves the cooperation of local radio broadcasters, publishers, poets, and reciters from East Africa with a broader, international online audience.

TiaSauti@Lab is an extension of Portable Islam: Swahili literary networks in the Indian Ocean, a research project by Annachiara Raia (Leiden University / African Studies Center). It’s also linked to UMADA, a digitisation project focusing on the library of Ustadh Mau (Mahmoud Ahmed Abdulkadir), a poet and imam from Lamu, Kenya. Voice4Thought is one of two impact partners in TiaSauti@Lab. The other partner is publishing house Mkuki na Nyota in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania.