My Fun Bow

This puzzle consists of 6 pairs of arrows and targets, along with 12 puzzles. Listening to the second one or glancing at the “simba” or “jenga” themed puzzles tells us this will be themed around Swahili.

The answer to each puzzle is a single “word” in Swahili or related to the language or culture. If it is an arrows puzzle, the length of the word is the number of arrows. If it is a target puzzle, the number of letters is the number of rings. Furthermore, there are one or two arrows in red, and there are one or two “x”’s on the target. Finally, as we solve, we may notice that the arrow words all start with consonants and the target words start with vowels. This offers additional confirmation for an answer to any individual puzzle. Solutions to each individual puzzle are in the appendix.

Taking the consonants and vowels marked yields NINI KWA MUNGU JUU, which translates roughly to “what to God above.” Utukufu kwa Mungu juu mbinguni (“Glory to God in Heaven”) is a hymn/song and so the answer is UTUKUFU.

Authors' Notes

mafumbo means puzzles.

The original idea was to imagine a beginner’s puzzlehunt for a Swahili-speaking audience, and so this contains a variety of common puzzle tropes like caesar shifting, anagrams, trigrams, and reference puzzles. Endurance King is my favorite puzzle of the set. Things I wish I could have included:

• Using numerical values and number of the noun classes
• SKIZA numbers in Bongo Next
• The word metameta.

In practice, the audience (and author) of this puzzle is mostly not Swahili-speaking, and so words not discoverable in dictionaries found here were excluded as much as possible. Additional steps were taken to keep the meta shell itself as straightforward as possible, like giving enumerations (and word breaks) for all the answers, and grouping the arrows/consonants and targets/vowels so that the only ambiguity over the final cluephrase is spacing. (I had considered a version without colored arrows/“x” and with a matching step from arrows to targets.) I hope solvers appreciated the language and culture as much as I did when constructing it. Kwaheri ya kuonana!

Appendix

Cryp[ti]cs

Each sentence is like a cryptic clue: the wordplay is in English while the definition is in Swahili. However, the English wordplay is missing two letters for each of the words. The missing letters spell out JIBU NI NENO, meaning answer is word, so the answer is NENO

Bongo Next

Each of these clips is a song. As clued by the title, we need to find the next word. The songs are originally given in alphabetical order, but we can resort them by the length of the next word. Reading the first letter and using the blanks given gives us ASA ? EBU PINDA. These are lyrics from Inama, by Diuamond Platnumz and the missing word is INAMA, which is the answer.

Just Connecting

This puzzle references Only Connect. Connecting the first group yields the following sets, in order based on the number in parentheses. Summing the values of the cards and indexing into the category gives us USE CLASS.

In the final grid, we can categorize by Swahili noun class, and repeat the same extraction technique to arrive at the answer N.

Word Search

First, we find the words in the grid:

The remaining letters spell SHENG WORD. Sheng is Swahili slang. Each of the words on the right has a Sheng slang word that is an anagram of one of the words found in the word search, and the clues for those words contain numbers we use as indices in the Sheng:

Mbio means speed or fast, but we should do this step again, finding a Sheng word for “fake” that is an anagram of mbio. This word is IMBO.

Simple Cipher

Each of the lines is caesar shifted by a fixed amount. Be careful, Q and X are not letters in the alphabet! Once unshifted, the amount shifted by, using A=1, B=2, …, Z=24, spells COUNTY NUM TO ALPHA. Each of the unshifted words is one of the counties of Kenya, which have canonical number codes. Using A1Z24 again spells out KAUNTI NAMBA MBILI, or county number two, which is KWALE.

Best Fiction

These descriptions reference names of fiction that were recognized by the Safal-Cornell Kiswahili Prize for African Literature, either as the winner or runner-up. These works are listed in alphabetical order. Once identified, for each book-i-j triple, we take the jth letter of the ith word. The books are:

Decoding the letters reads SAUTI YA DHIKI MTUNZI; the author (mtunzi) of Sauti ya dhiki is Abdilatif Abdalla, giving the answer ABDALLA.

Endurance King

These pictures are formations from Eliud Kipchoge’s sub-2 hour marathon. In this marathon [full stream], he had a team of 41 pacers run in a V-formation. Over the course of the run, he had 9 teams of pacers switch out roughly every 10-15 minutes. Each image in the puzzle depicts one of these teams in order. Taking the extracted letter (either from first initial or the nth letter of the last name) spells MAFANIKIO (success).

Recipes

Each of the recipes is for a local dish. After identifying the dishes, we can read the letters as indicated by the underscores; unused numbers are spaces for word boundaries. This spells out CHEMSHA UNGA WA MAHINDI (boil corn flour) which refers to the dish UGALI.

All answers

Simba’s Friends

Each set of trigrams clues a set of animal species from a popular movie or series with animals. Each set is missing a single letter. Reading those letters gives PUMBAA. Since all of the trigrams are species, we want the species, which is NGIRI (warthog).

… Means Hello

This refers to the alphabet book Jambo Means Hello, as clued by 📖📖. Each emoji references one of the letters in the book. Resolving each one, we get 📖📖: SLEEPING ❓❓. The only letter in the book that could complete this phrase is Beauty, or UZURI, which makes the title of another story.

Clockwise

We identify the islands around Lake Victoria, which are given in alphabetical order, and read the indicated letters clockwise to fill the enumeration 4 3. This is NILE MJI, or Nile city. Jinja is the only Nile city on Lake Victoria, so the answer is JINJA.

World’s Shortest Jenga Game

We can figure out the 5 blocks that are taken out and placed at the top of the stack before the tower topples. These spell out UUNZI (formation/scaffolding).