By Alessandra Vianello
GENERAL INTRODUCTION
Chimiini is the Bantu language that is spoken exclusively in the urban context of Brava, a coastal town in Southern Somalia, located approximately 200 kilometers south of Mogadishu and part of the coastal region that is known by the Arabic name of Benadir, i.e. “the ports”. Owing to the geographical position of the town, it has been surrounded by Somali-speaking clans for several centuries and has remained isolated from all Swahili-speaking populations (the nearest of which, the Bajuni, was settled until recently over 300 kms. to the south).
The name of Brava, though attested since medieval times, is never used by its inhabitants, who call their town Miini (formerly Mwiini), probably from muuyi = town + locative suffix. Therefore Chimiini is simply “the language of the town”. In old times, and especially in the local literature, the language was also referred to as Chimbalazi, where mbalazi – possibly derived from Arabic balad – means “settlement”, and therefore “language of the settlement’, i.e. urban language.
Brava, Somalia (© Google Maps Nov 2014)
The town developed in an arc along the sea-shore and is dominated, on its western side, by a high barren hill that separates it from the fertile plain of the Shebelle River in the interior. No roads, even in modern times, passed through Brava, and historically the best way to reach the city was by sea. The harbour, well-known to seafarers for centuries, was considered the best of the whole Benadir, but a line of reef parallel to the coast could make it hazardous and rendered it unsuitable to any vessel larger than dhows. The project of building modern port facilities that the Italians began before World War I was never completed.
In the 19th century, Brava was a walled city and consisted of two main quarters called Mpaayi and Biruuni. Mpaayi, situated on a rocky spit of land some 16 metres above sea-level, is the oldest core of the town and possibly the only one originally encircled by walls, as the name of Biruuni derives from the Persian word meaning “outer area”. However, at present no other memory or physical trace of a Persian presence in the town remains. Both quarters are aligned along the sea front, Mpaayi to the north, and Biruuni on a lower sandy stretch to the south. At the end of the 19th century the total number of stone buildings was assessed at over one hundred. These included fourteen mosques – the oldest dating to at least the early 16th century – and one- and two-storey houses built of coral rag and lime mortar. These buildings were interspersed with, and surrounded by a much higher number of huts. In the first decade of the 20th century the Italian colonial authorities intervened on the fabric of the town, ordering all huts to be removed from the central areas of Brava and thus creating the two peripheral quarters of Baghdadi (to the north) and Al-Bamba (to the south). After the town walls were pulled down, and especially from the 1950s onwards, the town expanded also towards the west farther from the sea-shore, and several new quarters sprang up.
No reliable census of the population of Brava exists for recent times. An unofficial census carried out by the then Italian Resident in 1907 counted 5,062 inhabitants and probably by 1990 there were about 10,000 residents, with an added number of possibly some 5,000 Chimiini-speakers living and working abroad (most in Saudi Arabia and the Gulf) or in other centres of Somalia (especially in the capital, Mogadishu), but still keeping close ties with their home town.
The town population was ethnically mixed and included people whose ancestors had migrated – individually or in groups – from different regions of Arabia in ancient or recent times: the Hatimi, the Bida, the Ashraf whose forebears had settled in Brava towards the end of the 17th century, and the Hadramis who had arrived in considerable numbers in the last decades of the 19th century. In Brava lived also a large number of Somali-speakers, the Tunni Shan Gamas, who had migrated to Brava from the Lower Juba area. By the end of the 19th century they made up almost half of the urban population and represented the bulk of the population living in the region around Brava. Their five “gamas” or sub-clans are the Dafaradh, Dakhtira, Hajuwa, Goigali and Wirile. Intermarriage between members of the all above groups is common and the affiliation to a group depends exclusively on an individual’s patrilineal descent.
Chimiini was the common language of all the inhabitants of Brava, irrespective of their ethnic origins. It was the first language for Hatimi, Bida, Ashraf and many of the Hadramis of the second and third generation (locally called “Arabs of Brava”), and the first or second language for the Tunni urban population. Chimiini has proved to be a decisive cohesive factor for all the peoples of Brava and the most evident defining feature of their identity.
During the twenty years of the Siyad Barre’s regime the linguistic situation in Brava remained quite stable, with the local population stubbornly resisting all attempts at full “somalisation” that included, in the early 1970s, the introduction of the Somali language as education medium in the government schools and the re-settlement in Brava of over two thousand Somalis from the northern regions that had been hit by a severe drought.
Disaster struck in 1991, when the overthrow of Siyad Barre marked the beginning of a clan-based struggle for the possession of territory in the Lower Shebelle region, where Brava is situated. Militias of the different factions seized, lost and won again the town in swift succession, with the helpless town population unable to resist the widespread robbing, raping, and killings that marked each new take-over. By the end of 1991, all those who had the means to do so had left the town, either by sea or by land, most heading to Kenya. Wealthy Bravanese who had been living for many years in Mombasa put at the refugees’ disposal an old school as a first temporary shelter, and later refugee camps were created in the outskirts of Mombasa. From there, many Chimiini-speakers were re-settled in the U.S., Canada, and some European countries with the help of U.N. agencies or taking advantage of immigration quotas established by the different nations. Chimiini-speakers were recognized to be a minority and especially at risk, since most of them did not fit into the clan-based ethnic structure of Somalia and therefore were defenceless against all militias, who indiscriminately considered them as expendable outsiders.
The re-settlement in Western countries that took place in the mid to late 1990s meant not only the dispersal of Chimiini-speakers very far from each other, but often also the breaking-up of families, with parents, siblings and relatives living now in different countries and even in different continents. Their total numbers have not been assessed, but some communities are quite considerable, like those based in the United Kingdom or in Atlanta, Georgia.
Some elderly people refused to leave Brava and those belonging to the poorer sections of the population had not the means to do so. Since the 1990s many Somalis, mostly of the Habr Gidir clan, settled in the town and “colonized” it, exploiting the local resources, especially fishing and the charcoal that was exported in large quantities to Arabia. In more recent years, after Brava fell into the hands of the Al-Shabaab fundamentalists, the town has been off-limits to foreign aid workers and to expatriate Bravanese alike. As a result, the number of Chimiini-speakers living in Brava at present is unknown. However, the most recent information (Spring 2015), received after the Al-Shabaab were evicted, points at a good resilience of Chimiini in Brava, where also some newcomers (mostly Somali males), after marrying local women, have become more or less proficient Chimiini speakers.
LINGUISTIC AFFILIATION
Chimiini is a Bantu language with many affinities with the Northern Swahili Dialects. However, it is to be noted that its speakers unanimously deny that their language is a form of Swahili. This is well reflected in the works of Abasheikh (alone or with Kisseberth): as a Chimiini speaker, Abasheikh studiously avoided calling the language a Swahili dialect and preferred some more general definitions, such like “Bantu language closely related to Swahili” and “Bantu language of the Eastern type”, pointing out the significant differences that exist between Chimiini and Swahili at the morphonemic, morphological, and lexical levels, as well as important syntactic divergences (Abasheikh 1978). Also those linguists who initially unreservedly classified Chimiini among the Northern Swahili dialects (Nurse1985) later admitted that the lexico–statistical figures based on word lists throw doubt on this status (Nurse and Hinnebusch 1993).
It is a fact that Chimiini and all Swahili dialects are mutually unintelligible, mainly because approximately 20% of the Chimiini lexicon consists of Somali loanwords, because many Swahili words are used in Chimiini with a different meaning, and because Chimiini retains some archaic features of Northern Swahili.
LANGUAGE VARIATION
Although Chimiini was spoken only in the restricted urban area of Brava, some variations at phonetical and morphological levels are noticeable in speakers hailing from different moities of the town. People of Mpaayi, and especially the Hatimi of the older generation retain the older (-w-) forms when prefix m- is followed by vowel where most people in the community have now lost it (a clear example is Chimwiini versus Chimiini). Most people from Biruuni do not use the negative future tense, replacing it with the negative of either the present or the habitual. They also pronounce more clearly a (v) where others would use (w) or (β), while many inhabitants of the Baghdadi quarter replace Arabic (dad) with (L), where other Chimiini speakers would replace it with Swahili dh (e.g. farli for fardhi – cf. Swahili faradhi). In Baghdadi only we find also an extended use of a demonstrative enclitic –po related to space and location, which is not used in the other areas of Brava. Such variations have not yet been scientifically studied or described.
ORTHOGRAPHY
There is no unified orthography for writing Chimiini in Latin script (Roman-based alphabet), either by linguists or by Chimiini-speakers. Linguists have adopted different devices/symbols to reproduce the phonetic peculiarities of Chimiini (cf. Kisseberth & Abasheikh, Nurse& Hinnebusch, B. Henderson, Meikal Mumin, forthcoming PhD thesis). After the official introduction of a standard Somali orthography in the early 1970s, some Chimiini-speakers have used it also to write Chimiini, but these attempts have lacked consistency and uniformity.
Arabic script has been traditionally the written medium for religious poetry in Chimiini. Most of the extant compositions date to the turn of the 20th century, a time when the Islamic brotherhoods were most active and used these compositions in the vernacular to spread the knowledge of Islamic tenets and practice to people who did not know Arabic. The best manuscripts show that, in addition to the entire Arabic alphabet, five modified characters were introduced to reproduce sounds not existing in Arabic, but common to Chimiini and Swahili (ch, g, p, v, and ng) and three more for sounds that are specific to Chimiini only (Somali DH, non-dental T, coronal L), while nasals and rhotacizations were indicated by further notations above the line. However, the many texts that were copied only as an aide-memoire to recitations made in the privacy of households use only the basic Arabic alphabet and no Ajami script, or modified Arabic characters tailored to reproduce the sounds of Chimiini.
LINGUISTIC SKETCH
Consonant phoneme inventory (Kisseberth & Abasheikh 2004: xi, Nurse & Hinnebusch 1993: 570):
p t t ch k q ʔ
p d d, dh j g
f θ s sh (x)
ɓ, v ð z ɡh
w l l, r y
m n n ny
mph nth nth nchh nkh
mb nd nd nj nɡ
Segments in the second column are dental. Those in the fourth column are palatal or alveopalatal. Nonprenasalised voice stops are implosive. The segment written above as <dh> is described by Kisseberth & Abasheikh as a voiced retroflex stop and occurs in loanwords from Somali. /q/ in loanwords can be pronounced as [x], but not vice versa. Example: qaaδi or xaaδi (from Arabic qāḍi ‘judge’), but xatari, never *qatari ‘dangerous’ (from Arabic khatar). This consonant inventory is larger than in all other Swahili dialects.
As Swahili, Chimiini has five vowels, but unlike Swahili it contrasts short and long vowels (xkúla ‘to grow’ vs. xkúula ‘to extract’) in inherited and borrowed items. Vowel length may change in various contexts, according to prosodic rules. Unlike Swahili, with (penultimate) stress, Chimiini has pitch accent. The default accent on words with two or more syllables is penultimate: in (the few) monosyllabic words, accent is on their only syllable (mbú ‘mosquito’, nzí ‘fly’). The accent may shift in certain environments.
Phonologically, Chimiini differs from all other Swahili dialects in certain ways, most (not all) having to do with retaining archaic features lost in other dialects. Thus for example: contrastive vowel length; pitch accent; retention of the nasal as in mph, nth, nth, nchh, nkh; retention of /l/ (wazeele ‘elders’, taambula ‘recognise’, kulu ‘big, great’, l-kuta ‘wall’, versus wazee, tambua, kuu, ukuta). Other features are not obviously retentions. Thus high vowels elide when a voiceless obstruent follows (mafuta > mafta ‘oil’, lupeembe ‘horn’ > lpeembe, masiku ‘nights’ > masku). Elision of the vowel then leads to consonant modification (ku-pika ‘to cook’ > k-pika > x-pika, ki-kapu ‘basket’ > chi-kapu > chkapu > shkapu).
Word order is generally SVO.
Like Swahili, Chimiini is an agglutinating language, with prefixes and suffixes attached to stems. Nouns are organized into classes. Most classes are paired into sets, referred to as genders. Each gender has a singular and plural prefix: 1-2, 3-4, 5-6, 7-8, 9-10, 11-10, 14, 15, (16, 17, 18). The last three are bracketed as they do not occur with nouns but only in demonstratives: 16 páapo, 17 kóoko, 18 móomo. There is a system of concord in which verb subjects, adjectives, numerals, demonstratives, possessive pronouns agree with the head noun in class and number. Concord of prepositions in associative constructions is partially different from Swahili, cf. Swahili soko la mji with Chimiini suukhu ya muuyi.
Verb affixes mark various grammatical relations, such as subject, object, tense, aspect, and mood. A typical affirmative complex verb form consists of a subject prefix, aspect/tense marker, optional object marker, verb root, and several optional suffixes, called extensions, that define argument roles such as causative, passive, stative, and reciprocal, plus a final vowel to signal indicative, subjunctive, or negation. The reversive extension has almost disappeared, and an extension in –at-, of uncertain function, appears in many verbs taken from Somali (bar-at-a ‘learn’). Whereas Swahili retains a final –i or –u in verbs borrowed from Arabic, Chimiini replaces these with Bantu –a (Chi. –ihtaaja, Sw. hitaji) ‘need’, Chi. faham-a ‘understand’, Sw. faham-u) In some verb forms, the subject is unmarked in the singular. Negative prefixes are partially different from Swahili. There are significant differences in the formation of relativized verbs (Chimiini muuntu takeend-o ni Ali ‘the person who will go is Ali’ vs. Swahili mtu ataka-ye-kwenda ni Ali).
The tense-aspect system differs from that of Standard Swahili in several ways, some categorial, some morphological (eg perfect marked by suffixal –ile/-ele, not prefixal –me-, as Swahili). The system is somewhat reduced from that of Swahili. Hitherto the Chimiini system has been interpreted as a combination of tense and aspect (Nurse & Hinnebusch 1993: 692-3, Kisseberth & Abasheikh 2004: xxxi-xxxiv, Nurse 2013, Bantu Tense and Aspect systems, app.2, G411), as in Standard Swahili (Nurse 2013, Bantu Tense and Aspect systems, app.1, G42d). Recent consideration suggests this is not right. A major criterion for distinguishing tense and aspect is how they behave in two word compounds. Aspects can occur in the first or the second word, but tenses occur only in the first, not the second verb. Of all the Chimiini markers, –ta(ku)-, indicating future, occurs only in the first and never in the second position, that is, it is the only true tense (Swahili has past and future tenses). Chimiini has lost its original past tense (retained in the past auxiliary wa:liko), and its past function has ben taken over by the Perfect. This results in an unbalanced system. Here is a sketch:
Future: sh-taakú-la ‘we will cry’, NEG. ha-sh-ta-ku-wóna ‘we will not see’.
Perfect: chi-som-eelé ‘we read’ or ‘we have read’, (si) chiwa:liko sh-tesh-elé ‘we had laughed’, si sh-takuwa sh-tesh-elé ‘we will/would have laughed’. This is perfect in shape but combines perfect aspect and past tense meanings. NEG ntha-sh-ku-maliza ‘we didn’t finish’ (also ntaasa ntha-sh-ku-teka ‘we haven’t laughed yet’.
Progressive: chi-nax-tek-á ‘we are laughing’. NEG ntha-chi-na-x-tek-a, si sh-taku-wa chi-nax-teka ‘we’ll be laughing’, si chi-wa:liko chi-nax-tek-a ‘we were laughing’.
Situative: sh-chi-tek-á ‘we laughing, if we laugh’. NEG ntha-sh-chi-tek-a. Chi-wa:liko sh-chi-tek-a ‘we used to laugh’
Habitual: si hu-teka ‘we (always) laugh’, NEG (si) ha-sh-tek-i
LEXICON
Compared to Swahili, Chimiini exhibits (1) loss of much vocabulary related to plants and animals (probably due to the different environment), (2) use of Bantu terms that are old-fashioned or obsolete in Swahili (e.g. nsi for Sw. samaki ‘fish’), (3) use of terms in common with Swahili but have acquired another meaning (examples: Sw. dada ‘elder sister’ vs. Chim. daada ‘grandmother’, Sw. potea ‘get lost’ vs. Chim. potela ‘fall down’, Sw. msuani ‘shroud’ vs. Chim. msuwaani ’woman’s headkerchief’, and (4) Bantu words not found in any other Swahili dialects, e.g. mulo for moto = fire. Comparison of items on the core vocabulary list shows 61% cognation between Standard Swahili and Chimiini (Nurse & Hinnebusch: 274): using similarity rather than strict cognation would give a slightly higher figure, in the 70% range. Some 20% of the general lexicon consists of borrowings from Somali and of Arabic words that have entered Chimiini through Somali. The percentage of direct borrowings from Arabic is comparable to that in Swahili. In many cases, Chimiini-speakers have the choice of using either a Bantu or a Somali word that are synonyms: ndovu or moroodi (Somali maroodi) ‘elephant’, nso or kili (Somali kelli) ‘kidney’, mlima or ibuuri (Somali buur) ‘hill’, chiimbila ‘run’ or fakata (Som. fako). Somali lexical borrowings cover most aspects of life, including parts of the human body, illnesses, house implements, feelings, as well as most activities related to farming and animal husbandry. Somali nouns appear fully integrated into Chimiini noun classes. On the other hand, a comparison of Chimiini terms with reconstructed Proto-Sabaki lexis (Nurse & Hinnebusch 1993: 577 and following) shows that Chimiini has retained in most cases shapes that are nearer to original Proto-Sabaki than any Swahili dialect.
ROLE IN SOCIETY
Since Chimiini could be effectively used as a means of communications only in such a restricted area, Chimiini-speakers have always, by necessity, been to some extent bilingual: most of the Tunni-Somali urban population spoke Chimiini in addition to their Somali dialect, while those who had Chimiini as their first language needed to speak at least some (dialectal) Somali to interact with the people from the countryside who came daily to Brava to sell firewood, milk, etc. Swahili was not widely known, at least in the twentieth century, i.e. after the close commercial links that had historically been forged between Brava and the Swahili coastal centres, and in particular with Zanzibar, dwindled away during the colonial and post-colonial period. The large majority of the urban population had a basic knowledge of written Arabic, which children of both sexes learnt in the Koranic schools they regularly attended for several years, while many scholars – including some women – pursued their studies in Arabic, reaching a much higher level of competence.
Educated males of the older generation have generally also a good command of Italian, which was the general language of education until 1968. Those who attended secondary schools in Somalia in the period 1969-1976, and the few who were granted scholarships to study in American universities, acquired a good knowledge of English, while the men who entered the civil service of the Somali state acquired a good competence of oral, and later written, standard Somali.
STATUS, THE FUTURE
Chimiini has never had any official status in Somalia, the reasons being the restricted geographical area where it was (is?) spoken and the fact that its speakers were seen as a tiny ethnic minority. Since independence, the Somali state has always boasted of its unique position in Africa as a nation with one language, one religion, and a uniform ethnic background, and tried to impose criteria of uniformity in all spheres throughout its territory.
At present (2015), most Chimiini speakers live abroad, in tiny clusters and smaller or larger communities all over the world (U.S., Canada, several European countries, East Africa – especially Kenya and Tanzania – and Arabia). In these environments, the younger generation is not in a position to acquire or maintain a sustained level of linguistic competence in Chimiini: some understand but do not speak it; others speak it with noticeable phonetical and grammatical mistakes. Even those – and they are just a fraction – who are interested in the language have limited opportunities to practise it, as they speak it only with older family members, seldom with other Chimiini-speakers of their own generation, and never in public areas. The loss of the original environment and the activities related to it, and the break-up of the traditional social structure have also negatively impacted on, and heavily limited their vocabulary.
The language is already seriously endangered and the future looks definitely bleak.
HISTORY
The survival of a Bantu language – Chimiini – in Brava makes it necessary to posit the presence of a Bantu-speaking population in the area before all the groups that have been living there in more recent centuries. However, no memory of it remains and the beginnings of Brava as an urban settlement are still obscure, because no proper archaeological investigation has ever been carried out in the town. The only archaeological work to date has been Neville Chittick’s two-day survey of a site one kilometer south-west of the present town location (August 1968). This yielded some interesting finds, including shards of Kwale ware dating from the early Iron Age, of Islamic glazed vessels and of Chinese celadon, all of which, in Chittick’s opinion, could tentatively indicate a continued occupation of the site in the 9th – 10th centuries and another period of activity in the 15th or 16th century.
The best evidence that Brava originated as a Bantu-speaking settlement is offered by the continued existence of the Chimiini language and by the archaic features that point to its antiquity. According to some linguists (Nurse and Spear 1985) Chimiini could have been spoken previously in a much larger area stretching north as far as Mogadishu, and could have been fully formed by ca. 1100 AD.
The identification of Brava with the town that the Arab geographer al-Idrisi (12th century) called “Berouat” or “Merouat” is uncertain, but the Chronicle of Kilwa – as preserved in Portuguese sources of the 16th century – attributes the foundation of Mogadishu and Brava to migrants from the area of Al Hasa in the Persian Gulf in or about 908 AD. While the traditions that speak of the “foundation” of the East African coastal towns as “Arab colonies” are fully rejected by recent historiography, the 10th century AD could well have marked the beginning of a general spread of the Muslim civilization on the coast.
A first-hand description of Brava is found for the first time in the chronicles of the Chinese Ming dynasty and dates from the first decades of the 15th century, when large Chinese commercial fleets, headed by Admiral Cheng Ho, visited Brava at least three times, in 1416, 1423 and 1430. Brava is described as surrounded by stone walls and having houses made of stone slabs. The physical environment is still recognizable, as the Chinese recorded the barren hill west of the town and the “salty lake” enclosed by the reef.
By the 16th century Brava was a city-state governed by a council of elders (an internal administrative structure that remained in place until colonial times), and was actively participating in the coastal and international trade of the Western Indian Ocean. The town suffered severely at the hands of the Portuguese, who attacked and sacked it in the spring of 1506. In their bid to gain sole control of the sea trade, the Portuguese disrupted the existing commercial networks and Brava, like other coastal cities, declined. However, its location at the farthest northern point of Portuguese influence meant that, though obliged to pay tribute, the town never saw any occupation by Portuguese military or missionaries.
Very little is known about Brava in the following centuries. Nominally, it became part of the Omani dominions, but this overlordship became effective only in the first decades of the 19th century, when Sultan Sayyid Said settled permanently in Zanzibar, trying to attract trade from the coastal areas and exercising his powers by issuing regulations for the rates of import and export duties to be paid at each port, which formed a large part of his revenues. Except for a short-lived occupation by Egyptian forces in 1875, Brava remained firmly under Zanzibari rule until 1893, when the Sultan granted the administration of the Benadir towns of Mogadishu, Merka and Brava to Italy and the Italian Government trasferred it to private commercial companies. Only in 1905 did the Sultan relinquish all his rights to the Benadir, which became part of the colony of Italian Somalia until World War II. As a consequence of the Italian defeat, a British Military Administration was set up in Southern Somalia until the United Nations gave to Italy a 10 years mandate to administer the country until independence (1960).
REFERENCES
Mohammad Imam ABASHEIKH, The grammar of Chimwiini Causatives (PhD Dissertation, Urbana, Illinois, 1978)
Bana BANAFUNZI and Alessandra VIANELLO, Chimi:ni in Arabic Script: Examples from Brava Poetry. Paper presented at Workshop “The Arabic Script in Africa”, Cologne, 6-7 April 2010 and published in “The Arabic Script in Africa”, edited by Meikal Mumin and Kees Versteegh, Brill 2014.
Neville CHITTICK, An archaeological reconnaissance of the Southern Somali Coast (AZANIA IV, 1969)
- COUPLAND, East Africa and its invaders (1938, reprint New York 1965)
Charles GUILLAIN, Documents sur l’Histoire, la Géographie et le Commerce de l’Afrique Orientale (3 volumes, Paris 1852)
Charles KISSEBERTH and Mohammad Imam ABASHEIKH, The Chimwiini Lexicon Exemplified (Tokyo 2004)
Derek NURSE, Language contact, creolization, and genetic linguistics: the case of Mwini (Proceedings of the 17th Annual meeting of Berkeley Linguistic Society, 1991)
Derek NURSE and Thomas HINNEBUSCH, Swahili and Sabaki – A Linguistic History (University of California Press, 1993)
Derek NURSE and Thomas SPEAR, The Swahili – Reconstructing the history and language of an African Society, 800-1500 (Philadelphia, 1985)
Giovanni PIAZZA, La regione di Brava nel Benadir. (Bollettino della Societa’ Italiana di Esplorazioni Geografiche e Commerciali, gennaio-febbraio 1909)
Justus STRANDES, The Portuguese Period in East Africa (English translation from German, Nairobi 1971)
Alessandra VIANELLO One hundred years in Brava: The migration of the ʿUmar Ba ʿUmar from Hadhramaut to East Africa and back, c. 1890-1990, paper presented at the VIII European Swahili Workshop, Oxford, 19-21 September 2010; published in Journal of Eastern African Studies, volume 6, no. 4, November 2012.
Alessandra VIANELLO and Mohammed M. KASSIM (editors), Servants of the Sharia – The Civil Register of the Qadis’ Court of Brava, 1893-1900. (2 volumes, Brill 2006)