8 Tongues are Spears Shame and Differentiated Conformity
1. The Swahili word that I am rendering as "a-i-b-u" can also be spelled "a-y-b-u." The difference represents a slight difference in pronunciation, and following fairly close attention to the word while in Old Town in summer 1988, I am inclined to believe that the spelling used here is nearer the way most community members pronounce the word. Akida et al. (1981:4) is the only dictionary listing the term and the spelling there is a-i-b-u. [BACK]
2. Acknowledged polygyny, as noted in chapter 4, is extremely rare, but polygyny involving secret marriages may be more common. As would be true anywhere, getting information about such practices is difficult. In this community it is, if anything, even more so. [BACK]
3. Predictability is necessary to continuing social relations, but it is not sufficient. Most who are familiar with lions confidently predict that they will eat you. This does not usually lead to a social relationship. [BACK]
4. It is not entirely clear where mature women and young women fit in this. My mainly male informants say that the youths who misbehave are always male and that the mature women are not around (being subject to tawa, the separation of the sexes) to see them doing it, so that it is always young men who become sick because of their misbehavior in the presence of mature men. It could be that young women who misbehave in the presence of mature women also become sick from mato ya wazima, but I have no information on this to indicate whether this is or is not so. [BACK]
5. This seems to function in the way jito, the evil eye, does but is said to be entirely different in that husudu, jealousy, is absent. [BACK]
6. Most informants say that women and girls should not go to the movies as a general part of their not going out in public save for school and, increasingly, work. Some families, however, allow their daughters to go to the special women's showing of Indian films that are mainly patronized by women from the large Indian Muslim community in Mombasa. In the mid-1980s, I have seen young Swahili women attending Western films with other women, their brothers, or, sometimes, their husbands. [BACK]