Spazi e luoghi urbani nella narrativa swahili: il caso di Dar es Salaam

Very often, literature provides visions of the city that are typical of both common sense and collective imagination. Therefore, investigating literature we can sometimes better understand some unexplored ‘territories’. In the case of Dar es Salaam, novels and short stories show two different interpretation of the city, concerned as they are with different places and aesthetics, and suggesting an interesting analogy between the city structure and the narrative text.  Reading Swahili fiction published at the end of the 20 th century, we get a survey of both urban texture and a picture of the urban space: poverty, migration and illegal activities drive the reader to a fictionalised, yet very real, Dar es Salaam.