Traiettorie di sguardi sul romanzo swahili: Vuta n’kuvute di Shafi Adam Shafi

The present article investigates Shafi Adam Shafi’s Vuta n’kuvute (The tug of war, 1999), a historical novel which is set in Zanzibar in the late colonial period. Textual analysis highlights how the novel’s linguistic and stylistic peculiarities intermingle inextricably with the contents in constructing the text as a whole, as they are loaded with meanings and symbolic implications which help in the reconstruction of many aspects of the work in connection to the literary, socio-cultural and political context of contemporary Tanzania.