The Digital Ukumbi: New Terrains in Swahili Identity and Poetic Dialogue

Abstract

In this essay I address the remediation of the centuries-old East African practice of poetic dialogue in the twenty-first-century digital social network of Facebook. Focusing on an online duel between two young poets from Mombasa, I demonstrate how East Africa's new media are transforming traditional poetic conventions in Swahili. Even sites that endeavor to preserve authentic literary Swahili have become in practice controversial crossroads of language, culture, and identity. By bringing voices of Swahili cultural authority, which draw from the East, into sustained contact with voices of the contemporary urban youth culture, which draws from the West, these new media are ultimately opening new terrains for literary production and debate.