Swahili library worlds: unpacking the Indian Ocean intellectual history of three twentieth-century “living archives” in East Africa

Counter to the idea of “restricted literacies” on the African continent, a thirst for knowledge has stimulated the making of local libraries and archives in various parts of Africa. This paper offers three snapshots of twentieth-century living libraries in Kenya and the multiple Indian Ocean forms associated with them. The aim is to show the Swahili Muslim Indian Ocean worlds emanating from so-called maktaba (libraries) or duka la vitabu (book- or printshops): how do Swahili library owners, as well as the forms (handwritten manuscripts, books, and other ephemera) and materialities that they collect and the multilingual locals they emerge from, act as coproducers of simultaneously regional-and-transoceanic Indian Ocean histories? By seeking to answer this question, the overarching objective of this research is to shed light on endangered archives and bypass simplistic notions of a monolithic African Islam by looking at texts and objects, their materiality and people as coagents of a transregionally grounded intellectual history.