Intertextual Moments, Contested Meanings: Kitula King’ei’s Adaptation and Rewriting of Utendi wa Mwana Kupona

Abstract

This paper examines Kitula Kinge'i's reworking of a controversial nineteenth-century Swahili classic, Utendi wa Mwana Kupona by Mwana Kupona, into "biographical" children's books. It revisits some of the critical controversies surrounding her poem in order to underscore how King'ei's adaptations participate directly in the debates about the status and importance of Mwana Kupona's text within Swahili popular culture and imagination. The paper also highlights the ways in which, at the formal level, King'ei radically transforms Mwana Kupona's text, as well as the effects such transformations have on the way she is read in a new, global context. Ultimately, I demonstrate that although King'ei's transcreative adaptations of the formal elements of the poem are so extensive as to result in new texts, he is unable to decisively untether himself from its conservative, feudal class values. What would have been a radical project is, in the end, hampered by its didactic impulses and its ideological affinities to Mwana Kupona's poem.