Outline of Swahili Literature: Prose Fiction and Drama (review)

The first edition of Outline of Swahili Literature: Prose Fiction and Drama appeared in 1989, with Elena Bertoncini Zúbková as the sole author. Twenty years later, after enlisting as co-authors several distinguished writers and scholars concentrating on different zones of Swahili-speaking East Africa, Zúbková has launched not only a creative initiative of major value to Swahili literary researchers, but also a contribution of great intellectual merit in the critical study of Swahili literature.

Much of the analysis and documentation that was carried out by Zúbková in the first edition has been maintained in this edition, along with the division of the chapters—defensible in some ways and not so defensible in others—into Kenyan, Tanganyika mainland, and Zanzibari authors and texts. The major difference is the introduction, co-written with Mikhail Gromov, which incorporates extensive revisions in both analysis and outlook. Although some statements in the introduction are still problematic—as, for example, the claim that the misogynist attitude often evident in Swahili writing can somehow "be traced back to Swahili Islamic poetry" (6)—in general this revised introduction corrects the problems and flawed assumptions of the first.

The whole of chapter 1 on prose fiction in precolonial and colonial times is a modestly revised version of Zúbková's original text. Chapter 2 ("Contemporary Prose Fiction") and chapter 3 ("Drama") now have multiple authors: Zúbková covers the period from the 1960s to the 1980s for Kenya, mainland Tanzania, and Zanzibar; Gromov focuses on the Tanzania mainland from the 1990s to the present; Khamis and Wamitila look at texts arising from Zanzibari writers and Kenyan writers, respectively, in the post-1990 period.

As would be expected, the first appendix, which lists contemporary authors of novels, short stories, and plays, has also been revised, with added entries for writers such as Rashid Ali Akwilombe and Boukheit Amana. The second appendix is a revised and expanded list of novels, short story collections, and plays from the late 1980s to the present. Of the 685 entries, close to 80 percent are publications from Tanzania (both from the mainland and Zanzibar). Only about one-fifth originate from Kenya. Bearing in mind the several cases in which the boundary between Kenyan and Tanzanian texts is fuzzy, these statistics conform to the disparity in literary production that we would expect, given the differences in colonial and postcolonial language histories and policies. But is there reason to believe that this literary landscape is beginning to change? Is Kenya catching up with Tanzania in terms of Swahili literary output?

According to Wamitila, the period since the 1990s "has witnessed an unprecedented growth in Kenyan prose writing, with some new authors coming onto the scene and a few seasoned writers publishing more titles, heralding the coming of age of the Kenyan Swahili novel" (54). Yet if we look at the number of entries from this period and compare them to the entries for the 1970s and 1980s, Kenya manifests about a 10 percent drop in the volume of its publications in drama and imaginative prose. The growth obviously has occurred in one area of literature—in works that Wamitila describes as showing "maturity and greater complexity," and in the recent proliferation of the Swahili short story, whereas the less complex "didactic moralistic novelette" is apparently on the decline. Perhaps the pro-Swahili policy introduced by Daniel Arap Moi, which makes the language a required subject in all public schools, is beginning to bear literary fruit. Whether this development, as Wamitila suggests, will eventually result in a Swahili novel with a distinctly Kenyan character is a matter still in question.

In contrast, Tanzania shows a dramatic decline in the production of imaginative works in Swahili. About 75 percent of all the works listed in the second appendix date from the 1970s and 1980s. Is Swahili becoming less of an inspirational force in the...