Testi e tessuti: la comunicazione tramite kanga

This work aims at analyzing the communication by way of a kanga, a popular dress amongst the Swahili women. Kangas contain a printed inscription, so they work as message-bearing cloth. After having described kangas and traced back their history, this paper will show how the kanga is constituted as a communicative sign and how it works as a text in which strategic ambiguity is pervasive. The forms and functions of kangas will be analyzed basing on a corpus of 143 kanga’s inscriptions: almost ⅔ of the messages exhibit the formal structure of a proverb, while the remaining ⅓ of kanga’s inscriptions are structured as a direct message, but they are still ambiguous, as addressee, content, context and even addresser are ambiguous.