Abstract

This chapter offers a series of reflections on Swahili mikoba ya ukili—hand-woven bags understood in Zanzibar as ‘traditional’ and deeply ‘local’—and their participation in social life as well as in visions of the person and of legacy. It begins by introducing Maua, a woman who finds belonging in her marital village by weaving beautiful mikoba that everybody wants. Acknowledging the challenges of conducting traditional ethnographic research in pandemic times, it considers the potential contribution of scholarship concerned with ‘new materialisms’ and the materiality of language in particular to the work of imagining from a distance, when a longed-for object is unreachable. Seeking an understanding of mikoba as visible objects, but also highlighting the weight materially borne by the powerful word ‘mikoba’ itself, this chapter proposes that mikoba crystallize ideas about knowledge, personhood, and learning, as well as about inheritance and re(-)membering—that is, about connections between the past and future.