Swahili facile? Langue, identité et culture urbaine à Lubumbashi

The Swahili of Lubumbashi is a variety of Swahili widely spoken in Katanga, which started to spread at the beginnings of colonial times and especially with the mining exploitation of Katanga, in particular in the agglomeration of Élisabethville, today’s Lubumbashi. In this contribution, I will present this variety of Swahili by underlining its autonomy, complexity and flexibility, and by drawing from different typologies of texts, which testify the variety of its uses also in literary and artistic productions.