Amandina Lihamba's Gendered Adaptation of Sembene Ousmane's The Money-Order

This essay examines the adaptation and translation of Sembene Ousmane's novella The Money-Order (originally published in French in 1966 as Le mandat) into Hawala ya Fedha (1980), a Kiswahili play by the Tanzanian woman dramatist Amandina Lihamba. Drawing on the contemporary theories of translation and adaptation that demote fidelity to the original as the cornerstone of translation, I demonstrate that the changes that Lihamba introduces in her text do not result from the incommensurability among the languages involved (Wolof, French, English, and Kiswahili), the much-vaunted clash of civilizations, or the supposed incompatibility between the two genres (novel and play); rather, she is invested in amplifying gender issues in Sembene's novel through a popular public medium to signify the urgent need for women's literacy in Julius Nyerere's Tanzania.