Muyaka bin Haji (1776–1840) was a Swahili poet from Mombasa, a harbor city in today’s Kenya. He was a master of the mashairi verse form that consists of hemistiches of eight syllables and end-rhyme for each half-line as well as a refrain at the end of a stanza. The translation adheres to the hemistiches and syllabics of the original and adds occasional rhyme.
Mwalimu Sikujua first wrote down Muyaka’s poems in the 1890s at the behest of the Reverend William Taylor. Sikujua used Arabic as well as a Swahili-Arabic script, an adapted script that distinguishes vowels and consonants that are useful for Swahili and the Kimvita dialect of Swahili in which Muyaka wrote his poetry. The Arabic scripts add a different aesthetic to the poems with lines that have four hemistiches and with cursive letters that can be stretched to give each line the same physical length. Muyaka’s poems were not given a title but were often introduced with a variation on the phrase “the poet said” as is commonly found for Arabic poetry. The translation captures parts of this aesthetic by creating similar lines, avoiding titles and minimizing punctuation not present in Sikujua’s writing.
Read the poem this note is about, “Bwana Muyaka said.”
Alex de Voogt is an associate professor at Drew University where he received his MFA. He has published translations of Greek and Swahili poetry.