Exercises
Unit Five: Words bearing ideologies
Proficiency Objectives
- exchange general information on topics outside your fields of interest
- convey your ideas and elaborate on a variety of academic topics
- write well organized texts for a variety of general interest purposes
- read and understand general information on topics outside your field of interest
- exchange detailed information on topics within and beyond your fields of interest
- support my opinion and construct hypotheses
- orally present a viewpoint with supporting arguments on a complex issue
- use appropriate presentational conventions and strategies in an oral presentation
- write using target language and culture conventions to present and elaborate a point of view
- write using target language and culture conventions for formal purposes
- understand narrative, descriptive, and informational texts
- read about a topic of special interest
Content objectives
- recall and list Swahili vocabulary related to gender and sexuality
- compare varying definitions of new and familiar vocabulary
- use a monolingual dictionary
- analyze and interpret short Swahili texts for embedded biases and ideologies
- plan an oral presentation in Swahili
- argue against biases and justify your arguments with culturally appropriate evidence
As you saw with the word -lawiti in my interview with Hasaan, words have different meanings to different language users, and sometimes those meanings can be quite biased or laden with ideologies. When those users have the authority to write dictionaries, their meanings can become dominant ones, thus helping to spread biases and ideologies. In this exercise, you’ll read some Swahili dictionary entries that concern gender and sexuality and try to identify the ideologies embedded in them.
In Ahmed Ndalu’s Kamusi Angaza kwa Shule za Msingi (2011), a monolingual Swahili dictionary,[1] each word includes a sample sentence illustrating its use.
Read the following examples and then answer the questions that follow.
- basha (mabasha) ‘mwanamume mwenye tabia ya kuwalawiti watu; mula, mende afande, mfiraji’ Example: Kijiji chetu hakina basha yeyote.
- ingilia ‘fanya kitendo cha ngono’ Example: Kuingilia yeyote asiye bibi yake wa ndoa ni haramu kubwa.
- lawiti ‘ingilia mtu kwa nyuma ya tupu; fira’ Example: Ni unyama kulawiti.
- mende 1. ‘namna ya mdudu aghalabu wa rangi ya kikahawiwa aliye na mguu sita na mbawa nne, apendaye kutafuna vitu kama vile nguo au karatasi na anayependa kukaa sehemu ya gizagiza; kombamwiko’; 2. ‘mtu mwenye tabia ya kuwalawiti wenzake; basha; mula’ Example: Wacha tabia ya kuwa mende.
Permissions and credits
- Ndalu, Ahmed E. Kamusi Angaza Msingi: Kwa shule za Msingi. Nairobi: East African Educational Publishers, 2015. ↵
