Investigating topics and style in Vuta N`Kuvute by Shafi Adam Shafi

In the last decades many literary critics have appraised the works of Zanzibarian writers; referring to the prose of Mohamed Suleiman Mohamed, Said Ahmed Mohamed and Shafi Adam Shafi, M M. Mulokozi wrote in 1985: \"The most significant, and certainly most spectacular, development in the Swahili fiction of the Seventies and Eighties has been the emergence of Zanzibar as the producer of the best Swahili fiction to date, and the apparent torch bearer for the Kiswahili novel of the near future\" (Arnold 1985: 174). The same enthusiasm was shared by R. Ohly who, confronting the novels written by Zanzibarian writers and those by Tanzanian and Kenyan writers in a time span going from 1975 to 1981, has defined the Zanzibarian prose a challenge to the artistic competence of other Swahili writers (cf. Ohly 1990). Although I found the comparative pattern used by Ohly debatable, having concentrated for the up-country literary production only on popular short novels - to be better evaluated not following negative, contrastive cliches but within the context of that particular trend -, obscuring moreover other talented writers like Euphrase Kezilahabi or Claude Mung`ong`o, his criticism has nevertheless the merit of having highlighted the main qualities of Zanzibarian novels, namely a deep interest for historical and social matters, along with an extremely rich and colourful language and a serious concern for stylistic features. These attributes of Zanzibarian literary style fit very well to the last novel by Shafi Adam Shafi, Vuta n`kuvute, published in 1999; in the following pages my aim is to explore the way the author of this work artistically manipulates themes, literary suggestions and stylistic devices, re-elaborating thus the experience of Kiswahili and Zanzibarian prose in a creative way