The making of the historical narrative in the Swahili <i>utenzi</i>

Abstract 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.