In this episode Conversations with Neighbours, we ask how the global Swahili worlds might reframe our thinking of connections across waters. We ponder with Kenyan novelist Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor on the Swahili name for the Western Indian Ocean and the importance of telling unvoiced stories; Halima Ali reads the work of Haji Gora Haji, a Zanzibari poet and seafarer whose biography is enfolded in the waves of the ocean; and we travel to the docks in Cape Town with visual artist Meghna Singh, who draws us into the invisible world of mobile populations immersed in new forms of economic servitude at sea.