This paper examines the song Riziki1 (2005), composed and performed by Ja-Mnazi Afrika, which theorizes night work. Written and performed by the Kenyan musician Michael Otieno Ooko a.k.a Awillo Mike Ja’mnazi, the song appropriates the Swahili word “Riziki” which refers to a livelihood to complicate the idea and value of work, and particularly work by night. This way, the song’s Swahili lyrics muse upon and animate the work process to an East African audience. The song narrates night work dynamics, with a temporal sensibility, and proffers dignity to work-by-night subcultures. Borrowing from performance analysis and close listening analytical approaches, this paper argues that the song communicates the stress and pressures of night work while simultaneously emphasizing how imperative the continued work is to secure people’s livelihoods. Furthermore, the choice of language, for the most part, of the song in Kiswahili, an African language, and a language of trade in Eastern Africa is perhaps aware of the diversity of people and occupations included in night work. This way, the song complicates the cultural dynamic of night work to move beyond its association with the pleasure economy to locate work by night within capitalist work cultures.

New investigations at the coastal settlement of Unguja Ukuu in Zanzibar have demonstrated the effectiveness of magnetometry as a survey method. The early occupation of this Swahili port, from the sixth century AD, presents a unique opportunity to develop our understanding of the growth and development in settlement and trade along the East African coast. The geophysical survey has allowed the size of this important site to be reassessed and an industrial component to be identified. It also offers an insight into the role that early Islamicisation may have played in helping to establish the settlement as a key port during the growth of the Indian Ocean trade network.

Indian Ocean maritime networks have become a special focus of research in recent years, with emphasis not only on the economics of trade but also the movement of domesticated plants and animals (see Fuller et al. in Antiquity 2011: 544–58). But did such contacts inevitably lead to radical social change? Excavations at Tumbe reveal a settlement of the late first millennium AD that was heavily engaged in the traffic in exotic materials and may have been producing shell beads for export. This activity seems to have flourished within a domestic context in a village setting, however, and does not seem to have stimulated pronounced social stratification nor to have led inexorably towards urbanisation. These results demonstrate that some communities were able to establish a stable balance between the demands of the domestic economy and long-distance trade that could persist for several centuries. Activities at Tumbe should hence be viewed in their own right, not as precursors to the formation of the Swahili trading towns of the later medieval period.

This article examines how a group of Tanzanian journalists employ various tactics of intersubjectivity to achieve mutual understanding during a conversation at work. The analysis focuses on one particularly challenging episode of talk wherein political figures and clothing styles from the early days of African independence are referenced, and an ensuing joke about body image is made using the phrase kumaintain figure ‘to maintain figure’ in reference to a male journalist. The joke arguably (re)appropriates the original meaning of the phrase and challenges the relevance of Western body aesthetics for Africans. All participants laugh at the joke, but the basis for their laughter is ambiguous. The participants' interpretations of the joke are examined through ethnographic methods within the framework of (re)entextualization (Silverstein & Urban 1996). The analysis shows that the participants have produced somewhat different indexical orders (Silverstein 2003) for the phrase and, therefore, have different reasons for finding it humorous.