This article will present a short story which appeared in the newspaper Mzalendo on the 15th January 1978, but it took twenty-six years before it was published in a book. Presumably it was written in the same period as both the play Kaputula la Marx and probably also as some of Kezilahabi’s poems from the second collection Karibu ndani (1988). It is a period of his most critical works. In Mayai – Waziri wa Maradhi the author blames, in a highly symbolic manner, the leading classes of his country who became rich at the expense of common citizens during ten years of Independence, symbolized by ten emaciated ghostly children.

After being for a long time in the shadow of its Tanzanian counterpart, Kenyan fiction has recently come into the foreground with writers such as Kyallo Wadi Wamitila, Rocha Chi-merah, Mwenda Mbatiah and Ken Walibora. The paper deals with his second novel Kufa kuzikana. Although Kufa Kuzikana is a powerful accusation of how ruthless ethnic feelings still inform many people from the intellectuals and top politicians to the uneducated villagers, the novel does contain a positive message as well in that it shows how true friendship can overcome ethnic and other differences and survive even in the most adverse circumstances.

Saad Yahya, born in Zanzibar in 1939, studied architecture and town planning in Great Britain and in Canada; since 1968 he has lectured at the University of Nairobi. He portrays everyday life of typical inhabitants of Zanzibar and Nairobi, displaying a penetrating understanding of their problems and of their state of mind, linked with a remarkable stylistic ability. He is an acute observer who presents his characters with humour and irony, but also with a profound insight. Furthermore, in his stories, under the surface of everyday activities there is always some hidden antagonism or passion, never spelled out, but only alluded to. Several years ago Yahya sent me the manuscript of two other stories which I hoped to translate and publish in Italy, but ultimately it was not possible. I have included one of them, called Nyoko-nyoko and consisting in five typewritten pages, in the syllabus of my literary courses in Naples and in Paris. It is a rare - if not unique - Swahili story in which the main character is a Mzungu, a white man: the British governor of an imaginary East-Aftican country called Nyalia, who has to abandon his post suddenly for unspecified reasons. He regrets to must leave the country he has learned to know and to like; however, behind the mask of liberality and tolerance is hidden a self-conceited racist. The story describes his last day in Africa after a long stay.

A mention of name in literature is almost always likely to recall the question Juliet posed to Romeo about his family name Montague in William Shakespeare´s Romeo and Juliet. In reading creative works we tend to identify characters basically by the names given to them. It is on this basic premise that some character analysis methods tend to define characters by taking recourse to their names and sometimes identifying them in metaphorical terms or as speaking names. Names play a very central and important role in any reading exercise and so would certainly the names given to characters be of importance to us. These are linguistic or semiotic signs that play a very crucial role in the overall linguistic structure of a literary text or its signification. Decoding of the names therefore becomes an important critical engagement in as far as it helps the reader in his deciphering of the text in which the names are. Characters´ names, as this article will show, can be used artistically to achieve a number of goals like encoding a central trait in a particular character´s signification, embracing crucial thematic motifs, ideological toning as well as even showing the particular writer´s point of view. Some of these qualities are easily lost in translation.

This study aims at studying one of the most important contemporary Kiswahili writers: Euphrase Kezilahabi. In a way this paper can be seen as a continuation of my earlier articles on the same writer. It is definitely different from the other ones though a certain thread links them: the interest in Kezilahabi`s philosophy. In this paper my interest is with two main motifs namely contemptus mundi and carpe diem. Contemptus mundi is a Latin expression for contemptible world, world as a bad place and one that is perceived contemptuously. I intend to explore the said motifs in Kezilahabi\''s prose works: Rosa Mistika, Kichwamaji, Gamba la Nyoka, Dunia Uwanja wa Fujo, Nagana and Mzingile. The latter two works are slightly short, lacking the novel length of the other four works. I do not, however, want to entangle myself in the polemics of genre as to what a novel or novella is. I will, however, regard the two as novellas at least by the virtue of their length.

Reading Mohamed´s novels Kiu (`Thirst´; 1972) and Nyota ya Rehema (`The Star ofRehema´or `The Destiny of Rehema´; 1976), one is struck by abundant use of `implication´ technique. Implication is regarded as a feature that is statistically more frequent in poetry than in prose, hence the presence of this technique in abundance in Mohamed´s idiom, renders it a quality of poetic prose. The purpose of this paper is therefore to show how various linguistic features are used as vehicle for the realisation of the implication technique used to create exponents for the semantic structure in his novels. Exponents as literary devices need not be implicit as in Mohamed`s idiom, however if used implicitly, they form an artistically engineered correlation with literary substance of the novel and gives it a certain quality that affects our `attitude´ and `judgement` towards it. Hence in this paper we hold it that the reader`s involvement in the interpretation of the novel eventually entails the decoding of the corpus for the externalisation of the literary substance. A reader who is fully involved in the interpretation and processing of implied meaning(s) in the novel, digs into its semantic structure by condation and deduction and comes out with more lasting impressions than he would if he were to deal with a less subtle or totally explicit idiom that may be regarded as plain and spoon-feeding.

The only play by Kezilahabi, Marx`s shorts, is a political satire, so pungent that it has not yet been published, although its photocopied manuscript has been in circulation for almost twenty years (it is dated 1978). Probably it was written soon after Julius Nyerere`s pamphlet Azzmio la Arusha baada ya Miaka Kumi (1977), where he overtly admitted for the first time the failure of his policy, clearing the way for critical literary works.

Taking its depature point in a translation of a play by a Czech playwright and philosopher, Václav Havel, into Swahili, the article strives at a cross-cultural comparison of a pivotal concept of Havel`s thought, lidství (`humanity´), and an equally central concept of Swahili moral and philosophical thought, utu. The basis of this copmparison is, on the Czech side, an explanation of Havel`s concept and its grounding in existentialist philosophy. The Swahili side is presented in a two-step procedure. First, the semantic field of `humanity´in the Swahili language, comprising utu and several concepts related to it (especially ubinadamu), is analyzed. Second, the concepts belonging to the semantic field of utu are traced in the development of Swahili literature, as a prominent representative of intellecual discourses in the Swahili culture.

Marehemu Shaaban Robert is well-known in Russia not only among specialists, but also in the circles of the reading public at large. It was in Russian (the only European language) in which Shaaban Robert´s prose writings were translated for the first time for the general reader. The creative work of Shaaban Robert occupies a special place in the scientific research of Russian scholars. They regard him as a philosopher, a distinguished public figure, a founder of modern literature in Kiswahili who connects centuries-old traditions of Swahili oral and written literature with the demands of modern times. Affirming new social ideals and expressing views of the new intellectual elite, Shaaban Robert, through his literary works, directly participated in the development of the political and philosophical ideas of his country.

Nyimbo, kama tanzu ya fasihi yeyote ile zina majukumu mbalimbali ambayo hutekeleza katika jamii. Lengo kuu la fasihi ni lile la kuielimisha na hata kuiburudisha jamii. Ndivyo ilivyo katika nyimbo kwa sababu kupitia kwazo wanajamii huburudika na kuelimishwa. Ni kwa sababu hiyo ndipo makala hii inalenga kuangalia nafasi ya nyimbo zinazopendwa katika fasihi ya Kiswahili. Huu ni utanzu ambao huwafikia watu wengi katika jamii. Kutokana na kutumia lugha ya Kiswahili, utanzu huu unaweza kueleweka na Wakenya wengi. Nchini Kenya, vyombo vya habari vimeipa fasihi hii nafasi kubwa sana na hivyo basi kuipanua hadhira yake. Hii ni kutokana na sababu kuwa fasihi hii inathaminiwa sana na wengi na ipewe nafasi kubwa katika vyombo vya habari hasa katika redio kwa muda mrefu. Ni kutokana na sababu hii ndipo tunajaribu kuonyesha nafasi yake katika fasihi ya Kiswahili.