As illustration only are added here some examples of the finest manuscripts from East Africa. They are not connected with the list of authors on the left side of the page.

Chuo cha Herkal or Ut̪end̪I wa T̪ambuka ‘The poem of Tabuk.’

Staats- und Universitätsbibliothek Hamburg, Cod. Afr. 90 4° Kps. Nr. 6

Chuo cha Herkal (‘The Book of Herkal’)

Swahili Manuscript in Arabic Script, 35 fol., Acquired in Autumn 1936 in Lamu.

Out of the 35 sheets (70 pages), 69 of them contain written text.

It has 1047 Ut̪end̪i verses. In East Africa, the poem is known by the name Ut̪end̪I wa T̪ambuka ‘The poem of Tabuk.’ Tambuka is the form of Tabuk which has been adapted to the Swahili phonetic. At this point, a battle between the Muslims and the Byzantine Emperor Heraclius took place in 630 AD. The Swahili epic described this battle. In the poem it is stated that Bwana Mwengo Athmani was the author. He lived in the first half of the 18th century in Pate and is not to be confused with the famous poet, Bwana Mwengo Bakari, who dealt with the battles between Pate and Lamu. The Ut̪end̪i wa T̪ambuka was created at the suggestion of Ahmed Fumo Lut. He was the ruler of Pate, on the island by the same name. He had read an Arabic version of Muhammed’s campaign against Tabuk. Subsequently, he commissioned Bwana Mwengo Athmani to deal with this topic in a Swahili poem. According to N[abhany], the work is traditionally said to have originated in the year 1728. […]

Utenzi wa Khupula

(the epic of Khupula), composed in Angoche and written in Swahili Ajami. Khupula was an 19^th century Angoche Swahili chieftain who fought the Portuguese to guard his slavery monopoly in the area.

Sayyid Abdallah bin Ali bin Nasir Abdallah’s most popular work, Al-Inkishafi, sometimes translated as “The Soul’s Awakening.”

As a Muslim theologian, Abdallah wrote poems using Islamic ideas to think about history, power, and the transitoriness of life and human institutions.

The poem, “Al-Inkishafi”—written after 1749— is a fragment of a longer work that Sayyid did not get to complete. But even in its unfinished state, it is a 308-line meditation on the decline of a powerful East African sultanate.