Laura Fair

Project title

Swahili Foodways

Project description

Laura Fair’s bookproject takes as its starting point a striking puzzle: the Swahili have nearly two dozen quite distinct breads — sweet and savoury, flat and leavened, baked, grilled, and fried — yet the Swahili grow no wheat, and well into the twentieth century no wheat was grown anywhere in East Africa. How did Swahili women, the region’s principal cooks, come to master this foreign ingredient and imbue their creations with such imaginative creativity? How and when did indigenous breads — crafted from millet flour and baked in something akin to a tandoor oven — come to be supplanted by breads of wheat and rice? And what moved bread from an occasional indulgence to a central component of contemporary Swahili diets?

These questions set the tone for a broader exploration of how the consumption of fruits, vegetables, animal and non-animal proteins, and a variety of grains, tubers, and musaceae has changed over time. Organised around popular Swahili dishes, the book examines the social, cultural, environmental, and health impacts of Swahili foodways, with a particular focus on dietary change over the past 150 years.

Selected publications

• Pastimes and Politics: Culture, Community and Identity in Post-abolition Urban Zanzibar, 1890-1945 (Athens,OH: Ohio University Press, 2001). Herskovits Prize Finalist. Choice Outstanding Academic Book of the Year, 2001.
• Historia ya Jamii ya Zanzibar na Nyimbo za Siti binti Saad (Nairobi, Kenya: Twaweza, 2013). (English translation: A Social History of Zanzibar and the Songs of Siti binti Saad)
• Reel Pleasures: Cinema Audiences and Entrepreneurs in Twentieth Century Urban Tanzania. Ohio University Press, 2018. Winner of the African Studies Association Bethwell Ogot Prize.
• ‘Meeting up at the movies in Tanzania,’ in Bologun, Gilman, Graboyes and Iddrisu (eds), Africa Every Day: Fun, Leisure and Expressive Culture on the Continent (Ohio, 2019), 253-64.