For the past 150 years studies on Kiswahili language, literature and culture have engaged the scholarly attention of many researchers (Hauner 1979. In their analyses of Kiswahili literary works, however, most critical studies have, generally, tended to neglect the aspect of artistic design. Instead, the central focus has primarily been on two interlocking aspects of these works: (1) their content, values or thematic messages and (2) their cultural and socio-historical contexts (Dorsey 1988). This widespread tendency to undervalue the importance of artistic design in Kiswahili literary works is not surprising as it was largely promoted by some of the earlier European authorities who popularised the idea that Kiswahili literature `is not of literary interest´ and `that social, cultural, and historical commentary by anthologists are more relevant to this literature than literary study´ (Biersteker and Plane 1989:451). It is encouraging to see, however, that in recent years more and more scholars, like Mlamali (1980), Fiedel and Shariff (1986), Biersteker (1991) and Mbele (1996), to mention but a few, address issues of artistic design in their critical appraisals of Kiswahili literary works. This article is a modest attempt to follow their example by looking at Utenzi wa Shujaka as an object of design; how the poet has used the technical instruments of verbal craftsmanshjp in his bid to elicit an aesthetic response from his audience.

In old Swahili tendi and homiletic poems about 50% of vocabulary is of Arabic origin (Bertoncini 1973), and besides single words, they include noun phrases or even whole Arabic sentences. In order to prove my point, I will discuss some verses taken from the Utendi wa Shujaka by one Hasan bin Ali from Lamu. The only extant manuscript of this epic poem in 295 stanzas was brought to Germany in 1854 by Ludwig Krapf and is kept in the Library of the Orientalistic Society in Halle. The poem is written in the Lamu dialect with many archaic features, like the incomplete palatalization of KI, the demonstratives in S- and others. But what is striking is the great amount of Arabic phrases and whole sentences, to the extent that we may perhaps speak of a case of code-switching. In fact, several verses of the poem cannot be understood properly without some knowledge of the main features of Arabic grammar, such as verb conjugation (both perfective and imperfective), verb forms (or classes), active and passive participles, noun inflection (masculine and feminine, broken plurals, construct state), personal, relative and possessive pronouns, prepositions and their combination with enclitic pronouns, numerals, conjunctions and particles, as well as word order.