The making of the historical narrative in the Swahili utenzi

This article argues that a literary tradition, with its inventory of literary genres, provides a mold to understand experience and thus defines what ‘reality’ is in a particular culture. The epistemological, experience-shaping working of literary genre is to process lived experience into ‘reality.’ The register of genres also establishes a diachronic dimension, ensuring a continuity of concepts over time which capture the sense of reality. This article explores the role of a genre through the example of history-writing along the East African coast, as a culturally specific mode of realist representation. In particular, this case study looks at the tradition of history-writing through epic poetry, through the genre called utenzi. It shows how, through this genre, East African history-writing maintains at its base a specific conception of time and of historical development, encoded in the style of emplotment and the temporal scheme of the utenzi. The traditional structure of the utenzi may then be projected onto contemporary historical events or processes to provide them with a broader cultural and historical meaning through a contextualized historical narrative. The case study connects to earlier research on the utenzi tradition and studies three instances of post-independence tenzi. Despite the significant “revolutionary” redefinition of the utenzi genre during the period of Tanzanian socialism, ujamaa, the structure of the utenzi is preserved in continuity with the past. The utenzi then becomes a pattern of narrating history across pre-colonial, colonial, and post-colonial periods.