초록 열기/닫기 버튼
On the basis of the socio-historical fact that the Swahili on the East African coast in general, and those in Kenya in particular, have been peripheral in its negative sense of meaning in colonial and post-colonial Kenya and that a significant number of Kenyans, specifically non-Muslim Kenyans, have a quite generalized tendency not to regard the Swahili as their fellow compatriots, but to characterize them as others, this paper attempts to analyze Uhuru wa Watumwa (The Freeing of the Slaves) as part of colonial discourse and delineate the overall process of othering the Swahili in the context of imperial expansion. Special attention needs to be paid to the historical context in which Uhuru wa Watumwa was written and distributed as school textbooks at the height of colonial domination and local resistance that culminated in the Mau Mau Uprising mainly by the Kikuyu. In face of anti-colonial sentiment and military resistance by the colonized people, the British colonial government was in dire need of securing its own positive images as God-sent saviors with a civilizing mission. The positive identity formation of British colonialism through the stigmatization of the Arabo-Swahili as barbaric and savage slave traders was intended to silence and neutralize anti-colonial sentiment and local resistance. The fact that Uhuru wa Watumwa was written by an African who actively collaborated with the colonial regime and benefitted from it can be understood as a crude manifestation that the voices contained in this book are in line with what the British colonial regime tried to disseminate among the colonized people. Various rhetorical and discursive ways and means of stigmatizing the Arabo-Swahili as others such as use of binary opposition, stereotypes, colonial gazes, self-denial of the colonized, etc. are analyzed from a critical point of view. What this paper attempts is to elucidate how the Swahili were stigmatized as others in this book and its long-term implications in colonial and post-colonial Kenyan society as a whole.