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In:Anthropological Linguistics: Perspectives from Africa
Edited by Andrea Hollington, Alice Mitchell and Nico Nassenstein
[Culture and Language Use 23] 2024
► pp. 453–478

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Chapter 17
The narrative of a witness

A conversation-analytic approach to Swahili

 | University of Cologne
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Available under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives (CC BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.

For any use beyond this license, please contact the publisher at rights@benjamins.nl.

Published online: 1 February 2024
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https://doi.org/10.1075/clu.23.17rus
Abstract
On a regular basis, the news and other shows and documentaries on East African television feature various stories not only about events in politics and society, but also of personal fates related to them. In addition to the presenters, citizens of East African countries share their perspectives on how they experienced events. This paper focuses on the way in which these speakers tell their stories on a Kenyan TV show. It will show how the common ritual oral tradition in Swahili, also well-established in everyday conversation, is recontextualized in the media and therefore brought from the ritual frame to the digital context, where it is supposed to fulfill a particular purpose in favor of the TV program. Therefore, the presenters instrumentalize the narratives’ inherent linguistic practices applied by their witnesses to engage viewers in their program.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Narratives
    • 2.1Ritual storytelling: Types of Swahili traditional oral literature
    • 2.2Conversational storytelling: A cooperative enterprise
    • 2.3Elicited storytelling: Media and audience participation
  • 3.Narratives of the witness: The recounting of a past event for others
    • 3.1Ideophones and gestures
    • 3.2Elliptic repair initiation and questions
    • 3.3Interjections and direct speech
  • 4.A digital pathway from tradition to the future?
  • Notes
  • Abbreviations
  • References
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