Beyond the Utenzi: narrative poems by Theobald Mvungi

Some time ago I came across a tiny collection of poems called Chungu tamu by Theobald Mvungi. The author was born in Mwanga province (Kilimanjaro) probably in the Fifties, as he graduated from the University of Dar es Salaam in 1975 and gained his M.Ed. degree in Nigeria (Ibadan) in 1978. He published his first collection of poems, Raha karaha, in 1982 and his third one, Mashairiya Chekacheka, in 1995. All Mwangi`s poems deal with social problems, but only those of the second collection are formally innovative. Five of the twenty poems of this collection tell a story and I am going to investigate three of them. It is striking and quite unusual in Swahili poetry to present the narration itself as another story. However, it is not the first time that it occurs in modern Swahili poetry. In fact, for instance Kezilahabi´s poem Hadithiya kitoto (from the collection Kichomi, 1974) opens with the scene of the narrator - the grandfather - sitting close to a fire with his grandchildren who want to be told a story, while roasting birds and potatoes. The last two strophes contain grandfather´s comment, i.e. a moral message. Thus the narrative act itself is represented, as it often happens in prose fiction. But whereas in Kezilahabi it only opens or frames the main story, in Mvungi the narrator´s interferences are intermingled with the main story to such an extent that in fact two parallel stories are narrated. I will call them the frame story and the main story