National language as an object of modern Kiswahili poetry in the Roman and Arabic scripts in East Africa

The article presents a survey of Kiarabu, a tradition of writing in Swahili using the Arabic script, as an integral component of the so-called East African Swahili civilization which since the Medieval Times had been constituted as a network of coastal and island sultanates extending from the South of Somali to the North of Mozambique along the coast of the Indian Ocean. In the colonial times this kind of indigenous literacy gradually came out of use being replaced with the Roman script-based literacy within the project of standardization and making the standard form of Kiswahili an official language in British East Africa. However, Kiarabu still remains an occasional practice and a means to manifest Swahili cultural identity in some areas, where poets-traditionalists write verses in it involving newly designed dialect-based modifications of the alphabet.