When I Was a Swahili Woman: The Possibilities and Perils of “Going Native” in a Culture of Secrecy

Abstract

Combining evocative and analytic autoethnography, I explore the ambiguous and ambivalent relationship between conversion, “going native,” and socialization through a case study of my own experience. I examine fieldnotes written during my two-year marriage to a Zanzibari man and audio recordings from my linguistic ethnographic fieldwork among Zanzibari women during the same period, not only revealing my own previously concealed secrets but also arguing for the value of such revelations. I demonstrate how I was lured into “becoming Swahili” because of the relationships “Swahiliness” enabled me to build with my interlocutors in the field and thus the access to ethnographic secrets it gave me. Paradoxically, doing so socialized me into a culture of secrecy that not only restricted my research but also endangered me. I conclude by drawing parallels to a culture of secrecy in academia, where norms about what is appropriate to include in scholarship prevented me, until recently, from sharing the negative aspects of “going native” through marriage and conversion.