The system of East African beliefs through the prism of Swahili proverbs

Religious ideas are an integral part of any people’s life. Therefore, they are of great significance for understanding the national picture of the world. The article investigates the beliefs of the Swahilispeaking community through the prism of Swahili proverbs and sayings that reflect its polyconfessionality. In the study, the most complete and up-to-date collections of Swahili proverbs were used, such as Methali za Kikwetu (Proverbs of Our Place), Kamusi ya methali (Dictionary of Proverbs), Swahili Proverbs. Each of them contains about two thousand proverbial units. For quantitative evaluation, the largest modern corpus of Swahili proverbs compiled by the Center for African Studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign was used. It contains more than four thousand proverbial units. Swahili proverbs explicitly mention the names of traditional spirits (mizimu, pepo, zimwi), the performers of traditional cults and rites (mchawi, mganga), the supreme creator (Mungu), the creatures that are nearby (malaika), and demonic forces (ibilisi, shetani). There are also some paroemias containing indirect reference to Islam or orthodoxy by mentioning some religious traditions. Of particular interest are the results of comparing the frequency of usage of different religious lexemes. Noteworthy is that the semantics of these words is expressed in grammatical features, especially by the tools of the class system. In the article, the study of Swahili paroemias is correlated with the history of East African religions. The research confirms the conclusions of other scholars studying religion in Eastern Africa: here traditional and Abrahamic religions peacefully coexist, transforming and complementing each other. In any proverbial unit, the lexeme ‘God’ conveys sacral attitude toward its denotatum, and universal values come to the foreground. The predominance of paroemias on religious theme proves their importance in the national picture of the world of the Swahili people. The research results are of practical importance and may be used not only in paroemiology and linguistics but also in ethnography, cultural and religion studies.