Scholars of Tanzanian Kiswahili fiction have frequently described a historical shift from a broadly realist mode representation in the post-independence Ujamaa era towards a more experimental, less mimetic mode in the 1990s and 2000s (see, for example, articles by Said Khamis, Mikhail D. Gromov, and others). While this is generally understood—at least by Khamis—to be an effect of the representational problems posed by the entrenchment of advanced capitalism that followed the end of socialism in Tanzania, the precise nature of the challenge that this posed to literary representation remains to be elucidated in detail. This paper argues that this challenge was that of how to theorize the human (or “binadamu” in Kiswahili).
I first suggest that the proliferation of realist literary production in the 1960s had in part to do with the necessity to bolster Tanzanian socialism’s emphasis on the centrality of the human, an emphasis that was implicitly opposed to the dehumanization of colonialism. Realism, it is argued, is a mode that assumes the givenness of the human and this made it particularly appropriate for that moment in Tanzanian history. This assumption of the primacy of the human, I then argue, was destabilized from the late 1970s onwards not only by the sudden end of Ujamaa socialism, but also by the implementation of neoliberal-style reforms under subsequent Structural Adjustment Programs. A novel such as Said Ahmed Mohamed’s Dunia Yao (2006)—which presents the experiences of a fragmented narrator: Ndi- and -Ye—can therefore be read as an attempt to use literary form to negotiate the “crisis” of the idea of the human. This, I conclude, also suggests a change in the societal role of Tanzanian literature. In the past, literature’s role had either been to reflect or critique societal changes, but from the 1990s onwards, it becomes an intellectual space where new forms of the social and the political are theorized.