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The Emergence of an African Regional Literature: Swahili
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 23 May 2014
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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 paper 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.
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- Copyright © African Studies Association 1977
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