ILLNESS AND MORALITY IN THE MOMBASA SWAHILI COMMUNITY: A METAPHORICAL MODEL IN AN ISLAMIC CULTURE

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Abstract
The Swahili of Mombasa are Muslims, part of an ethnic group whoseforebears founded East Africa‘s pre-colonial cities. Their cosmopolitanculture, in common with the cultures of some other, mainly Muslim,groups elsewhere includes a system of beliefs concerning the body‘sfunctioning and illness as the result of relations among the body‘sfour humours. The Swahili version of this system and its use in curingis described and briefly compared to several others. Despite theavailability of a variety of other systems, including the biomedicalemployed in the much patronized cost free treatment at governmenthospitals, the humoural system of beliefs is almost universallyheld. An hypothesis seeking to explain this suggests that becausethe Swahili schema is conceptualized by what Lakoff calls a“metaphorical model” emphasizingbalance which is also used to conceptualize the values applying tokey social relationships, the two schemata support one another,presumably by making the knowledge and emotions applying to oneavailable in the other.

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