Pakani : A Gorwaa story

Though formal linguistics may seem far removed from projects of decolonization, the materials with which linguists work are often rich with insights into other ways of knowing, other ways of living, and, for the purposes of this volume, other ways of navigating colonial power. Pakani, a story gathered within a larger project to understand the grammar of the Gorwaa language, is a vivid account of how the Gorwaa people responded to a mandatory military training programme in which every able-bodied young man was to be sent far away from the traditional homeland and incorporated into a national fighting force. For a descriptive linguist, Pakani is a useful source of grammatical structures. For a reader interested in learning about how one group of people engaged with the sweeping changes brought about by European colonization of East Africa, Pakani represents one of the few Gorwaa accounts available in English. This paper presents 134 lines of the Pakani story, transcribed, translated into English, along with a linguistic gloss of the words. Additionally, each line of text given may be resolved back to its original utterance in an open access audiovisual record available online through the Endangered Languages Archive at SOAS.