Texts on textiles: proverbiality as characteristic of equivocal communication at the East African coast (Swahili)*

Abstract

This article argues that proverbiality may be understood to include more than abstract properties of short, poetically condensed texts. Rather, proverbiality is seen as a characteristic of a specific communicative strategy in which equivocation plays a major role. The proverb itself is perceived as its manifestation. The empirical material on which this hypothesis is based consists of case studies of interpersonal communication by means of the wrap cloth kanga from the East African coast (Swahili). The kanga has proverbial texts printed on it, whose topics are subject to speech prohibitions: love, conflict and exhortative sayings. The cloths are used to ‘say’ something while ‘saying’ nothing. On the background of studies on proverb performance Bavelas' (1990) model on equivocal communication is used to explain the ‘how’ of kanga-communication. In order to explain the ‘why’ it is combined with some aspects of Brown & Levinson's (1987) politeness theory. In the case of the kanga, equivocation reaches amazing dimensions, ambiguating not only the four elements of addressing person, content, addresee, and context (Bavelas), but also to the medium, the kanga, which is at the core of the ambiguation processes surrounding the kanga. A focus is set on how exactly the elements are ambiguated. As to the ‘why’, it ‘works’ only in close social relationships, crosses hierarchies (of age, descent, gender), and touches on socially sensitive topics, as is expected of avoidance-communication. Overall, it is a communicative genre which affirms and subverts rather than transforms and violates rules, expressing the arrangement of women in a patriarchal society. * This article is based on my Ph.D. thesis, University of Cologne, Cologne (published as Beck 2001).