The Emergence of an African Regional Literature: Swahili

Abstract

Some scholars feel that an African, or, more properly, Pan-African literature is developing in Africa. This literature is seen as continent wide and is written in the various colonial languages. It is seen as a unified literature responsive to a simultaneously emerging African society (Roscoe 1971: 252; Joyaux 1972: 313-14). Adrian Roscoe, who holds this view, feels that given such a continental literature, it is unlikely that Africa will see the development of independent national literatures (1971: 252). Whether or not one subscribes to this view, it is the thesis of this paper1 that there is another kind of literature emerging in Africa-an East African regional literature. East African literature in Swahili, as it is developing, appears to differ from what is being referred to as African literature in both non-vernacular and other vernacular languages. It is a regional literature in an African language with a character which is neither tribal, national, nor continental. In East Africa, unlike the rest of the continent, literature in the colonial languages has never flourished as much as that in Swahili. Swahili has been spoken and written on the coast since the thirteenth century. At first, Swahili literature was written in the Arabic script employing Arabic genres and now it employs the Roman script adapting and modifying western genres. The emerging regional Swahili literature is receiving added impetus from conscious efforts being made in countries such as Tanzania and Kenya to promote Swahili literacy in the Roman script and to encourage Swahili as a national and and official language. The point here is that modern written literature in Swahili has developed in the last thirty years as a distinctive regional East African literature through its use of western literary genres. This development of modern written Swahili literature is in contrast to the classical written literature of the Swahili coast which is influenced by Arabic forms and Islamic themes. It is also in contrast to the Pan-African literature in European languages. In the 1950s and 1960s modern writers in Swahili began to produce biographies, autobiographies, essays, novels, poetry, and plays. These literary genres must be considered alongside the modern and classical Swahili poetry in the Arabic script commonly thought to be dominant in Swahili letters. In general that classical literature, though vernacular, was based on the coast and accessible to a primarily religious literate elite rather than to a heterogeneous regional population. On the