The Swahili novel: challenging the idea of 'minor literature'

Abstract

For more than fifty years a dynamic modern literature has been developing in the Kiswahili language. The political weight that Kiswahili carries as the emerging national and pan-national language of many East African countries places this literature, much of it in the form of novels, at the centre of heated literary debates on the social function of literature in the context of rapid global social change. This obsession with social issues relates to larger, all-pervasive political debates running through East Africa: in its press, its streets, its public and private places. The novels both record and provoke these debates.