Swahili Yūsuf

What you are hearing is a part of Qiṣṣati Yūsufu in Swahili verse. Commissioned in 1937 by German Africanist Ernst Dammann, the manuscript was deliberately copied for a Western audience. The longstanding written heritage tradition of Swahili in Arabic script dates back to the eight century, when the characters of the language of the Holy Quran came to the East African coast alongside Islam and were adapted for writing on coins and tombstones or inscriptions. Zhukov, Andrey, 2004. “Old Swahili-Arabic script and the development of Swahili literary language,” Sudanic Africa, 15, 1-15.

The handwriting style is beautifully crisp: the Arabic and Persian letters are well-defined and the general impression is one of accuracy, not least because the poetic lines (Sw. mistari) are well-aligned. The manuscript is made up of eighty-four pages and consists of pairs of adjacent folios which have never been bound together properly.Part of the same eighty-four-page notebook manuscript contains another handwritten text by the same scribe, Kijuma. This occupies the last ten pages of the notebook and is a prose text titled Qisat Qadhi (‘The Story of the Chief’), but that is another story… The attentive reader can notice the superscript page number that has been written in pencil, possibly during the own collation of the German Africanist Ernst Dammann: the numerals are placed in the top-right corners of the outer margins on the right side of the rightmost sheet in each pair of folios.

Throughout the first twenty poetic lines framed in these two pages, the narrator sets his own pre-story and starts telling about Yaqub’s tree with eleven branches (Sw. tandu), an anecdote missing in Sura XII but mentioned in Genesis. The tree is lacking the branch of his beloved son: Yusuf.

After Yaqub’s prayer for a branch, the angel Jibril (Gabriel) makes his appearance in the poem for the first time. He arrives with a beautiful branch (Sw. njema simbo) cut from paradise for Yusuf.

This anecdote frames the poem’s pre-story and is the basis for Yusuf’s dream about his branch growing immense and withstanding the wind while his brothers’ branches are snapped off. The father interprets the dream that foreshadows his beloved son's grandeur, but Yusuf’s stepmother overhears it. Yaqub warns her not to tell her sons about it. She promises not to, but relates Yusuf’s dream about the branches to her sons anyway.

This information stirs the brothers’ jealousy , hatred and anger against Yusuf, who was beloved by his father.Compared to the dream of the eleven stars, shared by both the Sura XII and the Swahili Qissati Yusufu, the anecdote about Yaqub’s tree and Yusuf’s dream of the eleven branches affects the Swahili poem more substantially, since it plays an even more prominent role than the dream about the eleven stars. While the latter dream occupies only ten stanzas (28–37), the anecdote about the branches and its related dream spans over twenty stanzas of narration (5–18; 38–42)The dream of the branches has been adapted in different ways across traditions. According to the Jewish legend, Yusuf dreams of gathering fruit in the company of his brothers, and while his fruits remain ripe, those of his siblings rot. The Persian poet Firdausi refers to three different dreams about branches prostrating before Yusuf, and about ten fagots and ten fascines sprouting flowers in front of himsee Croisier 1989, 22). The Book of Genesis talks about stalks of wheat (in German, Bündel Korn), an image also adapted by Thomas Mann (see MANN 2015, 137–149).