Il romanzo Swahili a Zanzibar: una lettura di Utengano di S.A. Mohamed

Abstract

The Swahili novel is one of the new literary genres developed in Tanzania after Independence, promoted by the cultural policy of Ujamaa (African socialism); the most significant novelty during the Seventies and Eighties has been the emergence of a Zanzibarian prose very appreciated by Western and African literary critics. The novel Utengano by Said Ahmed Mohamed is an emblematic work of this trend: its thematic and stylistic features are analysed underlining both the representation of the contradictions in post-revolutionary society and the writer’s serious attitude towards style and lexical research.