Links to External Online Resources

selected by Vincent de Rooij

Below you will find a selection of online resources that may be of interest to users of the LPCA website.

Africanhiphop.com
http://www.africanhiphop.com/
A great site with lots of information, lyrics and links to related sites; most of the information on the site is written by hiphop artists, editing is done by the Rumba-Kali web team in Amsterdam.

Bemba Home Page
http://www.emory.edu/COLLEGE/ANTHROPOLOGY/FACULTY/ANTDS/Bemba/
Information on Bemba with links to sound files; site created by Debra Spitulnik, Emory University

Centre Æquatoria: Centre de Recherches Culturelles Africanistes
http://www.aequatoria.be/
Website of the the Centre Æquatoria, a research center, library, and collection of archives, annex guesthouse, specialized in the languages, cultures, and the (pre-colonial and colonial) history of sub-Saharan Africa, with special emphasis on the peoples of the central Congo basin; site maintained by Michael Meeuwis, Ghent University.
Two of the major sections of site are:

• The Æquatoria Archives
  http://www.aequatoria.be/archives_project/index.html
  A voluminous collection of documents relevant to the historiographic study of linguistics and ethnology in colonial times
  
• The Placide Tempels website
  http://www.aequatoria.be/tempels/
  A collection of documents related to the life and work of Placide Tempels, author of Bantu Philosophy

CBOLD: Comparative Bantu OnLine Dictionary
http://www.cbold.ddl.ish-lyon.cnrs.fr/
A vast collection of lexicographic and bibliographic materials on Bantu languages; originally hosted by the Linguistics Department of UC Berkeley, the CBOLD website is now based at Le laboratoire Dynamique Du Langage (DDL) in Lyon

DISA: Digital Imaging Project of South Africa
http://disa.nu.ac.za/
Online archives of digitized political periodicals from the three key decades in the growth of opposition to apartheid rule.
DISA is located at the Campbell Collections, University of Natal

Ethnologue: Languages of the World
http://www.ethnologue.com/
Online version of the well-known publication of the Summer Institute of Linguistics: gives basic facts of the world's languages, such as number of speakers, dialects, and countries in which languages are spoken; the African section of Ethnologue is located at http://www.ethnologue.com/country_index.asp?place=Africa
Although Ethnologue is a great resource, I have my doubts on the accuracy of some of the information it provides. The entry on 'Swahili, Congo', for instance, states that 'There may be a few mother tongue speakers in cities.' Leaving aside the problematic nature of the concept of 'mother tongue' when dealing with multilingual societies (and multilingual speakers), anyone who has spent some time in the major cities of Eastern and Southeastern Congo knows that this is a serious misrepresentation of the actual situation: for hundreds of thousands of city dwellers in these parts of the DR Congo, Swahili is their first language (first in terms of being the primary language in daily communication and first in terms of being acquired during the first years of life).

The Kamusi Project: The Internet Living Swahili Dictionary
http://www.cis.yale.edu/swahili/
An exciting online project in which Swahili specialists from all over the wold work together in compiling a dictionary of contemporary Swahili. The Kamusi Project is under the auspices of the Council on African Studies at the Yale University Center for International and Area Studies.
Given that the Standard Swahili-English Dictionary and Lenselaer's Dictionnaire swahili-français are seriously outdated, consulting the Internet Living Swahili Dictionary can be useful when dealing with recent texts.

Kanga Writings
http://www.glcom.com/hassan/kanga.html
Kanga writings collected and translated in English by Hassan Ali; site contains nice photos of kanga.

Languages of Zambia.
http://www.albany.edu/~lb527/LOZ.html
A rich bibliographical source on languages spoken in Zambia; website created and maintained by Lee Bickmore, University of Albany

NTAMA: Journal of African Music and Popular Culture
http://ntama.uni-mainz.de/
Interesting contributions, some of which accompanied by music samples; NTAMA is hosted by the Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz

Swahili Forum
http://www.ifeas.uni-mainz.de/SwaFo/
Swahili Forum is an annual publication publishing "on all aspects of Swahili language, culture and society as well as book reviews pertaining to these topics."