Tenzi is a Swahili literary (and scholarly) museum celebrating the incredible wealth of the passed-on intellectual tradition of the Swahili Coast. It is a distillation of the Swahili spirit to its bare bones in its different modes of expression, in its different languages throughout time. It explores the rich history and ideologies as they outgrow the pulpit, soaked in the implicit assumption of Islamic belief into a secular ideal encapsulating the broader public, as it finally begins to reflect the daily life of the Swahili world; its absurdities, its grapplings with the smallest and wildest longings; its practitioners attempting to educate and simply delight.

Prior to the arrival of the Europeans, Swahili was the only written African language in the region, Arabic being relegated to religious purposes. The art of storytelling was well developed among the Swahili, adapting many stories far and wide from the orient. These story motifs finding themselves into the repertoire of many East African storytellers. Them also being the only writers of history, the only chronicles composed in sub-equatorial Africa before the advent of the European were in Kiswahili, in Ajemi script, mostly in the 19^th century.

Tenzi is the gathered inheritance for the contemporary young population that is now an exploration of that intellectual genealogy, reclaiming the luminaries, and the most ardent practitioners of Swahili inner intellectual life. Due to the absence of letters, diaries and accounts from royal proceedings, most of these figures have now become terra incognita, but from the sewn fragments, we propel them to the frontlines providing a nexus between the Swahili imagination and documenting the cultural heritage of the Swahili as manifested in their prose.