Swahili Literature

Swahili literature is the written literary tradition of the Swahili (Kiswahili) language. Known as fasihi in the Swahili language, written Swahili literature evolved from centuries-old oral traditions and dates to the eighteenth century. It has largely developed across three forms: novels (riwaya), poetry (ushairi), and drama (tamthilia). Initially displaying strong Arabic influences, written Swahili literature was also shaped by European colonial influences in Swahili-speaking regions of Africa during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

In the postcolonial period, the production of Swahili literature has largely become concentrated in Tanzania and Kenya. Scholarly commentators observe that modern Swahili literature has since been divided into two main branches: Tanzanian and Kenyan. The Swahili language has held preferential status in Tanzania since the end of that country's colonial era, while Kenya initially instituted English as its language of administration before adding Swahili as an official tongue in 2010. Literary differences between these two main modern Swahili literary branches are largely rooted in these divergent national language policies.

Background

Swahili is part of the Bantu language family, which includes many languages spoken by the Bantu peoples of Africa. The Bantu peoples collectively comprise a large African ethnocultural group, spreading across the centuries from an origin point in west-central Africa to destinations throughout the central, southeastern, and southern regions of the African continent.

The oldest known evidence of Swahili as a distinct Bantu tongue dates to the second century CE when an unknown Greek scribe documented the growth of Swahili-speaking civilizations in East Africa. Arabic began to influence the developmental course of the Swahili language in the eighth century as the result of trade between Swahili-speaking East Africans and Muslim merchants based in the Middle East. Trends of Arabic impact on Swahili accelerated as Arab and Persian traders migrated to Swahili-speaking areas of East Africa, resulting over time in the hybridization of Arabic and Swahili culture. This became ingrained in Swahili-speaking cultures as Islam became the region's dominant religion. Commentators note that the term "Swahili" itself has Arabic origins. The Arabic word sawahil means "of the coast," referring to the coastal regions of East Africa where Swahili first developed.

Swahili evolved to become a common language of trade and interaction across the culturally, ethnically, and linguistically diverse regions of Central and East Africa. It has since grown to a position of high prominence in contemporary Africa, with the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) instituting World Kiswahili Language Day in 2021. The UNESCO move made Swahili the first African language in UN history to earn such recognition.

The majority of Swahili's contemporary speaker base is centered in Tanzania and Kenya, with many additional Swahili-speaking populations throughout African and Middle Eastern countries, including Burundi, Comoros, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Malawi, Mozambique, Oman, Rwanda, Uganda, and Yemen. Out-migration from these areas has also resulted in Swahili establishing a foothold in many Western countries, with the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) launching Swahili-language broadcasts in 1957. According to UNESCO, Swahili ranks among the ten most widely spoken languages in the world as of 2024, with more than two hundred million speakers around the world.

Commentators also note Swahili's role in the African independence movement of the mid-twentieth century. In the early decades of the twentieth century, Indigenous population groups in Swahili-speaking African areas under European colonial control began using the Swahili language to facilitate transnational political mobilization efforts. Swahili came to develop strong associations with the African identity and anti-colonial independence movements as a result, with countries such as Tanzania, Kenya, and Uganda elevating it to administrative and official status after achieving independence. In the twenty-first century, Swahili has cemented its status as Africa's most widely spoken African language, with its estimated two-hundred million speakers vastly outpacing Yoruba (forty-five million speakers), Igbo (thirty million speakers), and Fula (thirty-five million speakers).

Overview

The oldest known documents written in the Swahili language date to the seventeenth century, with scholars citing a manuscript titled Hamziya as the earliest surviving example of written Swahili literature. Authors began composing literary works in the Swahili language in the eighteenth century. At the time, Swahili was written in an Arabic script known as ajami. European colonial influences in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries resulted in a shift to Roman alphabet systems, which have since become dominant. Ajami continues to be used in localized areas, mainly by Swahili speakers from older generations. Most Swahili texts composed in the twentieth century and beyond use a Roman alphabet, with ajami Swahili texts generally consisting of historical documents and early forms of written literature.

Commentators generally divide the history of Swahili literature into two periods, which are broadly defined by their writing systems. Swahili literature written in ajami is usually said to belong to the tradition's historical or classical period, while texts rendered in Roman alphabets are generally associated with its postcolonial or modern period.

Historical and Classical Swahili Literature

Historical and classical Swahili literature largely evolved out of the language's well-established and ancient oral traditions. Analysis by the notable ethnolinguist and Swahili expert Jan Knappert (1927–2005) notes four main genres of Swahili oral literature: narrative stories, songs, proverbs, and epics. In general, each genre reflects a diverse set of cultural influences, with its native African character being impacted by cross-cultural contact with Arabian, Persian, and Indian civilizations. Many early works of Swahili literature committed these traditional stories, folktales, lyrics, and epics to written form.

In addition to works adapted from oral folk traditions, poetry is a dominant form of classical Swahili literature. Classical Swahili poetry was composed in an elevated, literary form of the language, and its emergence in the Swahili canon occurred centuries before other common forms, such as novels and works of drama, appeared. Early epic poems, known in Swahili as utenzi or utendi, initially focused on religious themes and reflected Islam's standing as the dominant religion of the Swahili-speaking world. During the classical era, Swahili poetry broadly conformed to the metrical, rhythmic, and rhyme conventions associated with the Arabic literary tradition and frequently adopted important chapters in the history of Islamic expansion and key events from the life of the Islamic prophet Muhammad (ca. 570–632) as subjects.

Lyrical poetry and didactic literature represent two other key genres of classical Swahili literature. Didactic works often took on poetic forms, though they also appeared in prose-based genres descended from the Swahili oral tradition. Traditional forms of lyrical Swahili poetry generally conform to structural and stylistic conventions originating in Arabic literature, with Swahili literature scholars of the classical era generally judging works based on the relational qualities of poets' creative expression within the confines of established poetic convention.

Postcolonial and Modern Swahili Literature

In the postcolonial and modern eras, the character of Swahili poetry began to evolve beyond traditional forms to embrace innovative and experimental approaches. Novels and drama became part of the Swahili literary canon, and a tradition of popular Swahili literature also emerged as production became commercialized. Expert commentators broadly describe the contemporary era of Swahili poetry as representing two divergent schools of thought. The first such school, more strongly associated with Tanzania, embraces experimentation and hybridized forms of poetic expression that celebrate the Swahili-speaking world as a point of confluence integrating both Eastern and Western traditions. The second school, more strongly associated with Kenya, continues to draw on traditional approaches to meter and rhyme while generally seeking to root the evolving Swahili poetic tradition in concentrated, culturally specific spaces and regions.

From the 1950s through the 1970s, the Tanzanian branch of Swahili literature significantly outpaced its Kenyan counterpart in terms of overall production. A complete and diverse range of prose-form works evolved in the Tanzanian branch, largely owing to the heightened level of prominence given to the Swahili language in postcolonial Tanzania. Scholars also credit the Tanzanian branch with driving poetic innovations including free-verse forms, along with establishing novels, drama, and popular literature as key literary genres. Meanwhile, the Kenyan branch remained more firmly oriented toward the didactic themes associated with classical Swahili literature.

Noteworthy prose genres in modern Swahili literature include utopian novels, ethnographic novels, contemporary novels, detective fiction, and biographies. Swahili dramatists in both the Tanzanian and Kenyan branches have enthusiastically embraced the play as a mode of contemporary literary expression since the 1980s, drawing on both historical and didactic content. Authors of the postcolonial and modern eras have also explored themes related to the African identity, African unity, and Africa's current and future place in a globalized world facing a multitude of challenges and threats.

New organizations have risen to promote the publication and a wider circulation of African literature. The Safal-Cornell Kiswahili Prize for African Literature, founded in 2014, recognizes literature written in African languages and encourages translations of such works. The award helps authors get their manuscripts published.

Bibliography

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Chaga Mwaliwa, Hanah. "Modern Swahili: The Integration of Arabic Culture into Swahili Literature." University of Pretoria, 2018, www.scielo.org.za/scielo.php?script=sci‗arttext&pid=S0041-476X2018000200007. Accessed 8 Nov. 2024.

Gromov, Mikhail D. "The Present State of Swahili Literature as an Artistic and Social Phenomenon." Journal of Language, Technology, and Entrepreneurship in Africa, vol. 5, no. 1, 2014, pp. 30-41.

Gromov, Mikhail D. "Visions of the Future in the 'New' Swahili Novel: Hope in Desperation?" University of Pretoria, 2014, www.scielo.org.za/scielo.php?script=sci‗arttext&pid=S0041-476X2014000200004. Accessed 8 Nov. 2024.

Knappert, Jan. "Swahili Oral Traditions." School of Anthropology and Museum Ethnography, University of Oxford, www.anthro.ox.ac.uk/sites/default/files/anthro/documents/media/jaso13‗1‗1982‗22‗30.pdf. Accessed 8 Nov. 2024.

Lisanza, Vivian. "Swahili Gaining Popularity Globally." United Nations Africa Renewal, 9 Dec. 2021, www.un.org/africarenewal/magazine/december-2021/swahili-gaining-popularity-globally. Accessed 8 Nov. 2024.

Mazrui, Alamin. Swahili Beyond the Boundaries: Literature, Language, and Identity. Ohio University Press, 2007.

Mugane, John M. "The Story of How Swahili became Africa's Most Spoken Language." The Conversation, 20 Feb. 2022, theconversation.com/the-story-of-how-swahili-became-africas-most-spoken-language-177259. Accessed 8 Nov. 2024.

"Swahili Literature." University of Illinois, 12 Aug. 2022, guides.library.illinois.edu/Swahililanguageandculture/swahililit. Accessed 8 Nov. 2024.