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1 results

  • Chapter 14 - Pioneers of the Popular

  • from Part III - New Genres
  • Edited by Stephanie Newell, Yale University, Karin Barber, University of Birmingham
  • Book:
    African Literature in Transition
    Published online:
    23 October 2025
    Print publication:
    06 November 2025, pp 275-293

  • Summary

    Due to the dearth of indigenous publishing houses in colonial Tanganyika (mainland Tanzania), the Swahili press became an integral part of the local public sphere. Limited factual reporting and a well-established practice of public verbal exchange made letters to the editor and rhyming poems (mashairi) largely composed by amateur poets the key medium through which African writings circulated in the 1930s–50s. Contributors used the press to express communal values, articulate personal views and engage in dialogic exchanges. This chapter claims that the print space offered readers-turned-writers, here described as ‘pioneers of the popular’, a space to experiment with language and refashion local poetic canons by assigning pre-eminence to content over form, thus performing novel subjectivities and altering shared beliefs. This in turn sparked further textual experimentation. After locating press poems within the local cultural repertoire, the chapter turns to letters to the editor, showing that they reproduced key poetic features.