Introduction

Summary

The emergence of prose fiction in the age-old Swahili literature provided the opportunity for a new evaluation of literature's political function. The experimentation with novel forms is closely tied to the political adventure in which East Africa and particularly Tanzania was involved in the mid-twentieth century. In this book, I would like to draw attention to the nature of this link between literature and politics in the making of Swahili literature with an emphasis on the novel.

A characteristic of the substantial amount of work on the Swahili novel is that it focuses on political questions, exclusively the socio-cultural dimension. The novel has often been analysed as a means of interrogating the cultural conditioning of classical Swahili literature. In 1973, many relevant articles were published in the journal Kiswahili. They stressed the need to take a new critical approach to Swahili literature which, until then, had been regarded as no more than the cultural embodiment of an hypothetical vision of the Swahili world. The aim of these articles was to respond to an ethnographic tradition inspired by colonization and to propose a socio-historical reading of literature, notably classical poetry.

All these young critics had taken note of the need to alter the perception of modern Swahili literature as one confined to the coastal cultures that are presented as the cradle of Swahili civilization. This enquiry will emphasize the historical and social nature of the literature, not merely its cultural aspect. Works of the early Swahili novelists will be studied from this new critical perspective.