Paper long abstract:

The most famous and ancient legend on the Swahili coast is that of the hero and master singer Fumo Liyongo. The episodes and songs of the hero who had to fight for the throne of Pate have been explored and re-explored at various points in time in Kenya as well as the diaspora. Stories of the invincible warrior-poet Fumo Liyongo have been part of oral traditions for centuries and have more recently made their way into school and children’s books, performances and youtube clips. Increasingly, the Fumo Liyongo narrative has been used as template to narrate coastal resistance against oppression or African empowerment.

My first aim in this presentation is to consider the dynamic history of adaptation in the 19th, 20th and 21st century, when more coherent narratives were forged out of episodes and song cycles. Secondly, I will also take a look back at the more ancient poems, which are difficult to date: They were first committed to writing in the 19th century, but have been dated back to the 12th, 14th or 16th century. I would like to focus on those poems, which have rather been neglected in more recent adaptations, since they did not seem to add to the Liyongo narrative. Differently from both later Liyongo narratives and the Islamic poetry of later centuries, they are not plot- or argument-driven, but evoke still lives of the material culture of the coast, including fruits, plants, scents and attire. Their powerful language creates sensory links to the mainland and the Indian Ocean, open up another view on the complex history of encounter at the coast and suggest a different notion of poetics (typically neglected in the context of later narratives).