Easy to handle and travel with: Swahili booklets and transoceanic reading experiences in the Indian Ocean littoral

This chapter studies how reading practices on the twentieth-century East African Muslim coast were shaped both by producers and by users of Swahili-language religious pocket books printed in Roman and/or Arabic script. The focus will be on editorial strategies, the charity book market, and users’ practices in the first seventy years of Muslim vernacular book printing in East Africa (1930–2000) as viewed through two case studies, each representative of a different genre: prayer booklets (dua) and stories of the prophets (Visa vya Mitume). These booklets played an important role in the circulation of vernacular religious literature and the creation of a transnational reading public connected via Muslim authors and works. Not only did the pocket-sized format shape individual readers’ ease of access and experiences with reading, but the booklets also circulated widely across a vast stretch of the Indian Ocean world and forged a transoceanic, pan-Islamic vernacular community of parents and children reading the same authors and stories via handy transliterations, translations, and serial issues, easy to handle and to travel with. The collected data derives from archival, paratextual, and fieldwork research conducted at the Leiden University Libraries Special Collections in the Netherlands, and with local Islamic stakeholders and at bookshops in Mombasa and Nairobi.