The Swahili Mtapta: Exploring Translation in Abdulrazak Gurnah’s Paradise​

A few days prior to that, he had struggled to convey what he was meant to and was looked at with suspicion and mistrust by all those who depended on his ‘voice’. Nyundo is the translator. He understands most of the Bantu languages spoken in the area where they are trying to trade, hence when the caravan arrives in Chatu’s land, he has to accompany them to see the chief, but ‘the men teased him that he was making up the translations as he went along’ (155). He is a reflection of the old adage, ‘traduttore, traditore’, ‘translator, traitor’. Nyundo often struggles with the task of bringing across the full depth of context, meaning and emotions carried in the original utterances. He struggles to deliver everyone’s words and finds himself at the centre of conversations and debates where all sides are suspicious of him. It is also implied that he is abbreviating and omitting original statements for he ‘spoke for only a few moments to Chatu’s minutes’, effectively displaying loss in translation. He also struggles to deliver everyone’s words hence all are suspicious of him. It is hard for him to remain objective as a translator; for example, following the beating that he endured under the caravan overseer, Mnyapara, he holds a grudge and divulges this to Chatu, the chief, who then orders that Mnyapara gets beaten almost to death. There is an overall feeling that Nyundo, a term that means a hammer in Kiswahili, is not offering smooth, faithful translations but rather ‘hammers on’. He is entangled in his own subjective views of what he is translating and whom he is translating for and to. Through Nyundo, Abdulrazak Gurnah presents one of the key roles played by translation in negotiations and power politics. Paradise allows the reader to understand how translations influence and shape opinions while acting as the vehicle for economic activities such as trade in the region.

There is a somewhat similar scene to the one enacted in Chatu which can be found in one of the early Kiswahili travelogues by ‘Selemani bin Mwenye Chande [spelt Sleman bin Mwenyi Tshande in the original]… one of Velten’s chief informants when he was official interpreter (mtapta) to the Governor of German East Africa’ (Rollins, A History of Swahili Prose, Part I 50), although the sequence of events and locations are shifted. Chande writes that during one of his travels, he came to Tshata (Chata), which is reached before Lake Tanganyika. In Paradise, the fictionalized town of Chatu is beyond the lake. Chata welcomes the trading caravan but leads an attack on the men from two sides and sets fire to their camp because they refused to come out and have a conversation in the middle of the night. Twenty-two locals and ten travellers die. In the end, however, Chande manages to recuperate half his goods. Similarly, in Paradise, Chatu attacks the caravan and leaves the traders with nothing. Both Chata and Chatu explain that they had to attack because a trader similar to Uncle Aziz had stolen from them. Chata names this person as a certain mwungwana (civilized gentleman) called Matuumla. Chata then tells Chande’s caravan that, if they want to recover their goods, they need to bring Matuumla to Chata. Chande’s men pretend to go look for Matuumla but instead report the theft to the German authorities located on the shores of Lake Tanganyika.

Chande writes that, when the men arrive where the white man is camped, his ‘boy’ asks them to wait for him to wake up and have his breakfast. In Paradise, the wait takes place as the white man washes his face in full view of the public and then has a meal. It is as though he were by himself. In Chande’s travelogue narration, once the white man in ready, this is what happens:

I begin with the above textual analysis because it offers an insight into the mediation that Abdulrazak Gurnah must have gone through while writing Paradise. Abdulrazak was inspired by the early Kiswahili travelogues, particularly Chande’s ‘Safari Yangu ya Bara Afrika’ from which Gurnah draws a great deal for the journey into the interior. For example, a lot of what Uncle Aziz says is also in Chande’s accounts. A good example is when Chande offers the history of Arab settlement around the current Tabora area and its demise (Velten 8–11), which Uncle Aziz does too, almost verbatim (Gurnah 130–33).

Through the adaptation and embedding of the Kiswahili travelogues,1 This is explored well by Hodapp (‘Imagining Unmediated Early Swahili Narratives in Abdulrazak Gurnah’s Paradise’) who argues that Paradise self-references African literary genealogies and is not dependent on European texts. He points out that Gurnah is not rewriting Conrad’s Heart of Darkness but rather imbues Swahili storytellers with interiority and agency. Abdulrazak Gurnah goes through a process of translation. This process is at the textual level, where he needs inter-lingual translation, at least from Kiswahili to English, and where there is a creative process of changing the narrative from Kiswahili in the travelogue to English in the novel. There is also intra-lingual translation since the travelogues use what we can call an archaic form of Kiswahili. Through this process, Gurnah also explores the para-textual, where he re-writes, paraphrases, and re-creates the narratives.

Critics including Fawzia Mustafa and Maria Olaussen, provide intertextual readings of Paradise. Olaussen (‘Shifting Paradigms: The Indian Ocean World in Abdulrazak Gurnah’s Paradise and Desertion’) suggests that the novel revisits the Koranic and Biblical story of Yusuf/Joseph and responds to or re-writes Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. Mustafa compares Paradise to Naipaul’s A Bend in the River and highlights the similar socio-cultural contexts in which the two authors write. In fact, it seems, Mustafa argues, that Gurnah ‘entangles the reader in alternative histories, mythologies, and related versions of the past, throwing into critical relief the current hegemony of the (anti)colonial order of things’ (‘Gurnah and Naipaul: Intersections of Paradise and A Bend in the River’ 234).

All these layers add to the centring of translation within the novel. We also find that Gurnah introduces a number of Kiswahili words and phrases which allow him to build a special relationship with his Swahili readership. This includes the prominence of generic words that are at times translated and at other times presented with contextual clues which offer a hybrid reading that needs to be unpacked. An example of how this works can be seen in the use of words such as ‘magendo’, which is referenced as ‘big money’ as opposed to its literal translation, ‘smuggling’ or ‘contraband’. He also presents phrases that appear exactly as one would use them in certain Swahili contexts. An example is the phrase ‘sikufanyieni maskhara’ (105) – ‘I’m not joking’ – uttered by the traveller who narrates the embedded story from ‘Safari Yangu ya Urusi na ya Siberia’ (‘My Journey to Russia and Siberia’ by Salim bin Abakari). This is a term that is particularly used by a coastal Kiswahili speaker to whom the language is their mother tongue. A non-coastal speaker would use ‘utani’ rather than ‘maskhara’.

As previously stated, interpreters, watapta, were crucial during trade as well as the establishment of the colonial project. Traders such as Uncle Aziz in Paradise needed services of interpreters to communicate, and similarly, as colonialism made headway into the land mass that is Africa, they needed the mediation that the watapta offered between themselves and the people that they met. This meant that the mtapta was often seen as a treacherous figure, rarely judged by the quality of the translations produced, but rather by the position he occupied as go-between. Paul Bandia agrees with this, pointing out that translators were ‘feared, mistrusted and disliked by other members of society’ (‘African Tradition’ 296). This echoes the role of the translator in history: for instance Douglas Robinson’s Mexican translator, Malinche, was seen as a traitor and was despised by her people. She was given a ‘contemptuous nickname, la Chingada, “the Fucked”’ (Translation and Empire 11) for being in the awkward position, at the middle of power politics: a ‘multilingual among monolinguals’ whose power cannot be ignored.

Nyundo takes this role in Paradise. He negotiates with the various rulers and guides so that the caravan, which is the size of a village, can move into the interior and trade. In a sense, Nyundo’s role is similar to that of the famous Swahili watapta including Selemani bin Mwenye Chande, mentioned above, and Salim bin Abakari, who also wrote some of the first travel literature in Kiswahili including his trips to Nyassa, Berlin, Russia, and Siberia. Abakari was born on the islands of the Comoros and from there went to Zanzibar, where he met Carl Velten, who took him to Europe. In 1896 he travelled from Berlin to Russia and Siberia, up to the border with China (Velten). In Paradise, Abdulrazak Gurnah embeds this journey through the presence of an uncle who is said to have gone on this very journey. Another renowned mtapta was Dallington Maftaa, who is believed to have originally come from Nyasaland, where he was made an enslaved person in his childhood. Once liberated, he was educated by the Universities Mission to Central Africa in Zanzibar. He accompanied Stanley on his journey to Lake Victoria in 1875 and, at Kabaka Mutesa’s court in Buganda, he helped Stanley translate portions of the Bible into Kiswahili. When Stanley left, Dallington remained at the court (Bridges, ‘Dallington, Maftaa’).

The Mtapta represented the colonial master when Swahili city states were being divided into different spheres of European influence which then amalgamated into larger colonial units. He is the person who informed the people who their new masters were as cities further north including Brava, Kismayu, and Mogadishu – ‘Muyi wa mwisho’ which means ‘last town’ in Kiswahili – became parts of Italian Somalia. Mombasa and Lamu were ‘scrambled’ by the British as part of Kenya. In the current Tanzania, Zanzibar fell under the British rule whereas Kilwa changed hands from the Germans to the British. The Comoros, on the other hand, became ‘assimilated’ by the French.

Understanding the position of the mtapta is important because ‘the history of translation in Africa during this period is closely linked to the policies adopted by the European colonial administrations’ (Bandia 298). Whereas the French advocated assimilation, the British instituted indirect rule, which was fertile ground for interpreters. The effect on literature and translation was that ‘while the English allowed for some kind of development in indigenous African languages leading to the earlier indigenization of the Anglophone text, the French policy of assimilation tended to hinder the development of local languages in the French colonies’ (Gyasi, The Francophone African Text 3). The Kiswahili-speaking area of Tanzania was thence inadvertently influenced by the British policies where ‘vernacular education was encouraged’ (Bandia 298). Thus, one finds that, as well as the oral translations, there were also a number of written translations that were undertaken into Kiswahili, as were a number of textbooks. The task of translating was done by Europeans who needed watapta’s knowhow as they undertook the task of translating.

In Paradise, it is not only Nyundo who carries the burden of the infamous ‘traduttore, traditore’ – ‘translator, traitor’, but also Khalil, the other boy who is pawned by his father and becomes an enslaved person in Uncle Aziz’s home – similar to Yusuf. Khalil buffers the seduction of Yusuf by the mistress, Zulekha. Initially, Khalil acts as the translator who violates all etiquette of a faithful translator by inserting his personal advice and views to Yusuf during exchanges: ‘Say anything, but shake your head a few times as if you are saying no. One or two firm shakes of the head will do’ (212). Khalil is fearful of his role as a translator and repeatedly says it puts his life in danger. He lives in fear that, should Uncle Aziz find out that he has been translating his wife’s desires for the beautiful boy who is Yusuf, everything that he knows will collapse. He is caught in a world where his services could be his own undoing.

Initially, most written works were transcriptions of Swahili epic poetry, just as the advent of Islam had a similar impact in some West African societies). These accompanied the messages from the Koran which were interpreted orally to the Swahili, who memorized them in their original Arabic form. Later, the utenzi (or utendi), a literature based on the narratives of the Koran and legends about the prophet which drew upon conventions of both Arab verse and Bantu song, were undertaken either as adaptations or imitations. The utenzi would normally be a ‘long narrative poem which commonly dealt with the wars of the faithful, the lives of saints or heroes, in short the subject matter of an epic literature’ (Whiteley, Swahili: The Rise of a National Language 18). Parallel to the utenzi were the Kasida, which are praise songs to the prophet Muhammad. The fact that these documents were written in the Ajami script that is adapted from Arabic script is a reflection of the influence of Islamic culture on Swahili society. When producing it, Sayyid Aidarus bin Athman Al Sheikh Ali, the translator, transcribed rather than translated most of the terminologies of Islamic origin.

In Zanzibar, this culminated in the establishment of centres of Islamic learning, the most famous being the Muslim Academy at Forodhani and the Masjid al Barza or the Barza Mosque. These produced high calibre Swahili scholars including Mwinyi Baraka and Abdallah Farsy. Since these literary centres were formed around families of the educated nobility and prominent poets, we find that it is through these scholars that the missionaries and explorers were initiated into Swahili literature.

Interpretation preceded translation, and Christian missionaries such as Edward Steere in Zanzibar endeavoured to take the initial European-oriented steps towards translation. The missionaries’ work generally comprised the translation of religious texts such as sections of the Bible and later of the entire Bible. For instance, in 1847 Johann Ludwig Krapf published the Kiswahili translation of the third chapter from Genesis and in 1868 Streere published the Kiswahili translation of the Gospel of Matthew.

Muslim sensitivity to having the Koran translated inhibited initiatives to translate it into Kiswahili. The first complete Kiswahili translation of the Koran was carried out by a Christian priest, Canon Godfrey Dale, of the Zanzibar-based Universities Mission to Central Africa in 1923. His primary objective was for Muslims to understand their religion, which he felt they did not, and also to provide Christian missionaries with a better understanding of Islam in East Africa so as to combat it better (Dale A Swahili Translation of the Koran). Dale explains that he had decided to translate the Koran into Kiswahili because Islam arrived in the region before Christianity, hence the situation in the hinterland required a translation of the Koran:

In Paradise Abdulrazak Gurnah does touch on the issue of Koranic translation where the debate has been concentrated around its untranslatability. Similarly, there is also the debate of who has the right to translate it, if it is to be translated at all. This debate is brought through Kalasinga, a Sikh who wants to translate the Koran into Kiswahili, although he does not understand Arabic nor does he know the language well (84). It seems that he would use the English translation to translate the Koran. This is what Canon Dale did for his controversial 1923 Koran translation, and this is also the case for a good number of other Kiswahili translations, including Alfu Lela Ulela, whose tales had circulated orally for centuries as part of the cosmopolitan world that was the Swahili civilization, which were later translated into Kiswahili through English source texts.

Kalasinga’s reasons to translate echo those of Canon Dale:

Mustafa argues that, Kalasinga’s parody is strong, since most of the world’s observant Muslims do recite the Koran in Arabic without understanding the language. Kalasinga’s crusade shows that he is ‘an agent of Western mediation depending upon English translation and thus on an emerging anglophone register, within which religious texts, first, and then novels such as Paradise itself, are couched’ (244). We can add that the given agency was part of translation in East Africa, at least, since the inception of prose translation into Kiswahili in the 1920s when British administrators such as Johnson strived to have prose literature in Kiswahili by translating English literary canons and using English source texts even for prose that was historically part of the Swahili world for centuries (Hadjivayanis ‘Norms of Swahili Translations in Tanzania’).

The inclusion of Swahili inter-texts that have been embedded, the Swahili terms scattered all over the novel, and the prevalence of a Swahili perspective in the novel has meant that translating Paradise has been an exercise in bringing the text back ‘home’. I should however make it clear that, since the travelogues embedded are not part of the general reading, they are not general knowledge. In fact, to many prospective Swahili readers, Paradise will shed new light on their own history. However, it will be a graspable history rather than one of a faraway exotic place. In that sense, Swahili readers will see themselves represented in print and see the reality of how everything transpired for their ancestors who were on the ground at the time when colonialism was making headway into the region. Also significant will be statements such as ‘the Germans were afraid of nothing’ (7) to Chatu’s ‘All these goods belong to us, because all the lands are ours’ (160). The latter utterances are a reflection of the general perception of German rule in East Africa, where administrators were referred to as ‘udongo mwekundu’ – red soil, because they soiled the land with the blood of the Africans who rose up against them. Interestingly, Chatu’s observation is part of the nationalistic debate even to date.

Speaking about his literary language in an interview, Gurnah said that his English is not a reflection of Kiswahili, although he accepts that it is ‘an English which is inflected by a kind of a cultural imagination, one might say, even more than language, which is not straightforwardly familiar to someone who has lived or grown up or spoken English in England or Britain’ (Cronin, ‘Abdulrazak Gurnah: “I Write About What I Know”’). It is that very cultural imagination that brings Paradise close to home for the Swahili audience, for example, the gendered spaces allocated within homes as well as on the outside of homes, and the different gender roles within the society. A Swahili reader instinctively understands that the three old men who sat on ‘a bench on the terrace in front of the shop’ (Paradise 21) made the neighbourhood’s barza or kijiweni – the meeting spot which one finds in every neighbourhood. It is generally only men who occupy the given spaces and converse about this, that, and everything. This familiar phenomenon, as it observes preparations for caravan journeys, day to day commerce, and everything in between, is part of what the Swahili reader will have the advantage of discerning.

The Kiswahili-speaking audience will also benefit from an insider’s perspective of a number of terminologies thrown into Paradise. For example, the Indian children call out to Yusuf ‘Golo golo’ (6). This is a term that not all who speak languages from the Indian sub-continent would understand, but it was used by Gujarati speakers to mean ‘Black person’. Its literal meaning is ‘slave’.

In Paradise, we have people who have embraced the ways of being like an Arab as being civilized – wastaarabu. We also have those who have not embraced that and through the eyes of Yusuf, we see that they are all civilized. Yet, there is unease between and within these people. For example, Kalasinga, the Sikh who wishes to translate the Koran is told by Hamid ‘I feel sorry for you sometimes, Kalasinga, whenever I think of your hairy arse sizzling in hell-fire after the judgement day’, and Kalasinga ‘cheerfully’ replies, ‘I’ll be in Paradise screwing everything in sight, Allah Wallah, while your desert God is torturing you for all your sins’ (102).

All these ‘civilized’ characters needed to be translated so that an objective view is presented. To a global English-reading audience, the humour in what Kalasinga and Hamid say above is unmistakable. To me as a translator whose mother tongue is Kiswahili, I was very aware that Kalasinga’s view is relevant to his way of thinking and needed to be presented as originally intended. But given the sensitivities surrounding the Kiswahili-reading audience, I did wonder whether, similar to Nyundo, I was better off omitting some parts of the novel. In the end, I left the mtapta strategies to Nyundo and instead applied situational equivalence, hence bringing across all that is in the source – as much as I could.