1. A Hero’s Many Worlds

The most reputed hero of the East African coast is Fumo Liyongo. Stories and songs attributed to the invincible warrior-poet Fumo Liyongo are the most ancient Swahili texts of which we have evidence. But they are not merely a tradition of the past: the oral traditions have been readapted over and over again, finding their way into handwritten manuscripts, school-books, and children’s books, stage performances, and YouTube videos. My aim in this article is to zero in on the changing form of the ramified Liyongo tradition and the worlds it has generated in an attempt to question some narrow notions that have dominated discussions of world literature. My account questions the teleological view of Western literary and written influence as the all-pervasive force that rendered hitherto inert forms of oral literature increasingly obsolete. There was no fundamental, earthquake-like shift brought about by Western modernity, which does away with anything pre-existing. Rather, my focus on mediatized orality, i.e. orality adapted to a new medium suggests that fundamental shifts happen all the time. All of this reminds us of the complexity of literary configurations, which is not particular to African contexts but to all verbal art, once we move away from defining a literary work nar-rowly by its author and the printed pages between book covers, or as literary history as mov-ing merely in one direction, as has too often been done in the context of world literature.