SWAHILI NEWSPAPER FICTION IN KENYA: THE STORIES OF JAMES I. MWAGOJO

This dissertation focuses on Swahili newspaper fiction,a concentrating particularly on the critical analysis of a single story. It didn't start out to be this; maybe recounting the story of the journey toward what it eventually became can illuminate the eventual result. In studying Swahili as a foreign language, first as an undergraduate at the University of Texas under Ali Farsy, a exile from Zanzibar, almost from the outset I was exposed to literary works, specifically Muhammed Said Abdulla's first two novels, Mzimu wa Watu wa Kale (Shrine of the Ancestors). and Kisima cha Gfningi (The Giningi Well). Later in my Swahili studies at Texas, under the direction of Dr. Edgar Polome, I was to undertake a more linguistic training, but the seed was sown Then, as a beginning graduate student at the University of Wisconsin, with Dr. Patrick Bennett as my first Swahili teacher there, I had my first experience of Swahili newspaper fiction. Now the seed took root. In the years since, I never lost my interest in the possibilities of studying Swahili fiction from the point of view of investigating the nature of its popular or mass audience forms. These newspaper stories I translated in the process of learning the language were proof enough to me that such a thing as Swahili fiction available to a large reading public in a leisure reading context existed. In further Swahili study with Dr. Bennett, and then later with Dr. Lyndon Harries, I received a much more complete education in the study of both classical and modern Swahili literature. I still had a predilection for fictional narrative; now I was beginning to find out how much more was available in the Swahili fiction scene as a whole. Newspaper narratives took a back seat to reading academically esteemed writers like Shaaban Robert, Ebrahim Hussein, and Euphrase Kezilahabi; the journeymen like Faraji Katalambulla and J.M.S. Simbamwene; not to mention the classical poetry and narrative-studies by Harries, J.W.T. Allen, Jan Knappert, and Edward Steere. Newspaper and magazine fiction was for me now one current in the stream of modern Swahili print narrative publishing