MATHIAS E. MNYAMPALA (1917-1969) : POÉSIE D'EXPRESSION SWAHILIE ET CONSTRUCTION NATIONALE TANZANIENNE

Mathias Eugen Mnyampala (1917-1969) was a Tanzanian writer, lawyer, and poet who wrote in Kiswahili. Although his mother tongue was Cigogo, and he learned to read and write in Kiswahili at the age of fifteen in a local Roman Catholic Bible school, he placed his poetic art at the service of the development of Kiswahili, the language of the new nation, following the independence of Tanganyika in 1961. The dynamics of Tanzanian nation-building are reflected in the destiny of this young pastor from Ugogo, who became a recognized master of Kiswahili poetry and a national artist.

This thesis investigates the formal metric structure and linguistic description of Mathias E. Mnyampala's poems. It addresses how to define these structures, their relationships with the classical corpus of Kiswahili poetry from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and why this particular type of poetry—considered both formally and linguistically—was promoted at the national level and received official recognition from successive political authorities in Tanzania.

To achieve a political interpretation of the formal and linguistic analysis of these poetic texts, the study synthesizes existing theories in metrics to develop a formal and reductionist framework. The analysis of Mathias E. Mnyampala's poetic corpus based on this framework demonstrates ex materia creative processes linked to the metrics of the classical corpus, which inform the context of the nation-building in which they are utilized. This ex materia creation—neither strictly classical nor entirely modern—represents a third way of poetic composition. Ultimately, the research demonstrates that alongside the nationalization of the meters of classical Kiswahili poetry, there is a parallel process of the Africanization of the national culture.

Crucially, this research is founded on an unprecedented archival discovery. In 2007, an extensive collection of Mathias E. Mnyampala's archives was located, identified, and brought to light in Dodoma (United Republic of Tanzania) by the researcher Mathieu Roy, following the scholarly directives of Professor Mugyabuso Mlinzi Mulokozi from the University of Dar es Salaam (UDSM). During field research, Mathieu Roy successfully located the author's heir, his second son Charles M. Mnyampala, who had been safeguarding the entire collection. Entrusted by his father in 1969 with the mission to conserve and publish these precious records, Charles M. Mnyampala preserved them alongside other rare literary archives. A complete digital copy of the archives was made by Mathieu Roy, who has safeguarded it ever since. This rare collection contained several unpublished manuscripts. Two of these (Maisha ni kugharimia and Ugogo na ardhi yake) have since been published by Mathieu Roy, while others remain unpublished, including Azimio la Arusha na Maandiko Matakatifu and various treatises on poetic writing.