Signs of New Features in the Swahili Novel

A quick glance at the development of the Swahili novel reveals that a number of Swahili novels written from the 1990s to date, have detached themselves in various ways from hitherto Swahili novels written following the mainstream realist mode. This "new" novel seems to "pervasively" adopt the fantastic, magical, and postmodernist tendencies that, according to the writer of this essay, adequately capture the cacophony and decay of the East African societies. The aim of this essay is not to trace the Swahili novel historically, but mainly to show it as "changing" conditioned by external or societal factors.