Hiistoriya’s projects bring together research, storytelling, and community collaboration to celebrate and reclaim Swahili heritage.
Every Hiistoriya project is decolonial by design, ensuring that the stories we tell are guided by the communities themselves. Together, they form a growing archive of memory, creativity, and cultural renewal along the East African coast.
Visual Storytelling for a New Generation
Hiistoriya brings the history and heritage of the East African Coast to life through short, visual storytelling across social media, where past, present, and future meet in motion. These stories reimagine our shared heritage for Gen Z audiences, using meme culture, trending formats, and creative visuals to make history engaging and relatable. By leveraging platforms like Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube, Hiistoriya reaches thousands of viewers, connecting them with Swahili culture in fun, interactive ways.
The most popular impactful among these has been in the series, “Who is a Swahili?”, explores the Swahili people’s identity as Bantu-speaking communities central to intercontinental trade linking Africa with Asia, the Middle East, and Europe. It is a clear example of how Hiistoriya uses animation and storytelling to make history accessible, relatable, and visually engaging.
Audio Recordings
Hiistoriya records disappearing Swahili songs, chants, and oral traditions, creating a reference for cultural influences, such as drawing upon connections between Indian influences into Swahili taarab music, swahili dialect differences and other poetry. Hiistoriya’s plan is a podcast that bridges past, present, and future, to blend historical stories with contemporary topics, preserving culture while engaging local and global audiences.
Decolonising Museums Spaces
Hiistoriya works with researchers and writers to challenge colonial legacies in East African museums. One such example is on why Kenya’s Lamu Museum renovation sparks debate on indigenous heritage. Through these collaborations and advocacy opportunities, Hiistoriya promotes initiatives that raise awareness about how indigenous Swahili and coastal histories are often sidelined, advocating for local voices, inclusive narratives, and community-led representation in cultural institutions.
#SafariTales Story Telling Series
Hiistoriya partners with Halal Safaris Africa to create the #Safaritales series, blending storytelling with travel to bring East African heritage and history to life. Through short, engaging videos, the series connects historical narratives and cultural insights to travel destinations, enriching the travel experience with deeper cultural understanding. This collaboration transforms each journey into a meaningful exploration of heritage and identity.
Oralising Texts: Bringing Written Heritage to Life
Hiistoriya’s Oralising Texts project explores new ways of making historical and cultural writings accessible, engaging, and relevant for local communities. By pairing visual documentation with oral storytelling, the project allows custodians, elders, and artisans to narrate their own histories, ensuring that knowledge is experienced as heard, seen, and felt, not just read.
The initiative covers a wide range of texts — from Qur’anic manuscripts to family records, poetry, and historical documents . Through participatory research, collaborative authorship, and multimedia storytelling, the project decolonises access to knowledge, preserves underecognized heritage, and creates living archives that communities can engage with directly.
Bajuni Voices in Motion
A creative archive in motion documenting Bajuni cultural heritage to engage younger audiences, especially Gen Z and non-traditional readers, through creative storytelling that blends visual art, animation, and digital media. This approach brings oral traditions, poetry, and language to life in a way that is accessible, immersive, and culturally resonant, helping to preserve and promote Bajuni heritage while connecting it to contemporary modes of expression.
One example is the Koronya Media. During the COVID-19 period, Hiistoriya created Koronya Media — a playful digital campaign using memes, animation, and Bajuni voice-overs to share public health information in an engaging, relatable way to the Swahili audience. By creating key educational messages into local dialects and humor, the project turned learning about COVID-19 into everyday storytelling. It broke communication barriers, reached remote audiences online, and showed how creative media can educate while celebrating local culture.
Fasihi
Hiistoriya’s Fasihi is a digital space that celebrates Swahili arts, crafts, and history by providing an alternative platform for community members, academics, professionals, local women, youth, among others to share their research, stories, and perspectives. From tangible heritage to history, Fasihi highlights the different aspects of the coastal identity. It also explores historical context, contemporary debates, and op-eds, connecting tradition with modern ideas.
Fasihi seeks to break the gatekeeping often seen in academia, giving voice to those who know and live their culture but may not have scholarly credentials or access to publication funding. This especially includes women and other marginalized community members, ensuring that a diverse range of voices is heard and celebrated. The project fosters pride, dialogue, and creative engagement with Swahili heritage, making culture accessible, dynamic, and participatory for all.
Children’s Books Project
Hiistoriya collaborates with Vitabuks to develop beautifully illustrated children’s books that revive cultural knowledge and nurture pride in Swahili heritage. Through storytelling, poetry, and art, these books reconnect young readers with local traditions, language, and values in playful and imaginative ways.
The first book in this series, ABCh Herufi za Kiswahili (https://hiistoriya.com/swahili-alphabet-book-celebrates-language-and-culture-for-young-reader), celebrates the Swahili alphabet through everyday words and imagery that children recognize — helping them see their culture reflected in what they read and learn.
Baraza is a Hiistoriya initiative launched during the COVID-19 period to create virtual spaces for dialogue and reflection on Swahili heritage and identity. Traditionally, barazas — community gathering spaces — are social hubs where men meet to discuss politics, culture, and daily life. Women often remain in the background or hold separate conversations in private spaces.
By taking the baraza online, Hiistoriya reimagined this tradition to be inclusive and gender-balanced, allowing women and men to share ideas freely in ways rarely seen in traditional settings. These digital barazas brought together artists, scholars, and community members to exchange knowledge, debate cultural issues, and imagine new futures for coastal heritage.
In doing so, the project not only preserved a vital form of communal conversation but also challenged gender barriers — turning the baraza into a shared digital space of listening, learning, and transformation during a time of global isolation.
Maktaba: Swahili Literature Archive
Maktaba is Hiistoriya’s digital initiative dedicated to preserving, documenting, and sharing the culture, history, and heritage of the Swahili coast. The archive collects important books, articles, manuscripts, and research that illuminate East Africa’s rich Swahili traditions, arts, and knowledge systems. By making these resources accessible to communities, scholars, and the public, Hiistoriya ensures that the history and culture of the East African coast remain easily accessible for generations to come.