KISWAHILI PROFESSOR SAID AHMED MOHAMMED- UNSUNG MAESTRO OF EAST AFRICAN LITERATURE...

 I was watching a William Shakespeare TV documentary with a couple of secondary school students, recently. In the middle of the programme one asked if I had read Hamlet. I said, I had. Romeo and Juliet? Yes. Julius Caesar? Sure.

“Where did you read them?”

I said at Ilboru secondary school in the highlands of Arusha, Tanzania. I also acted in a Caesar play; I was Cassius and saw “Romeo and Juliet” film at the British Council in Dar es Salaam.Yes. William Shakespeare is known in Africa, I explained.

The youths thought Shakespeare is an archaic thing only forced unto them (to waste time) whereas the writing legend has been utilized for ages across the planet to learn English. Shakespeare is the second mostly quoted English writer after the Bible while his plays the most used in cinema. And what significance for the British? It means glory for the English language plus financial gains.

Swahili prolific author and lecturer, Prof Said Ahmed Mohammed Khamis
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KINDLE, E-BOOKS AND THE FUTURE OF TANZANIA’S POOR READERSHIP ...

I was chatting to a shop assistant at one bookshop in Zanzibar two months ago. Like Casey bookshop in Arusha, this is the best in town yet on the shelf were mostly school text materials and very, very few Swahili authors. Yes, I saw one or two copies of Professor Said Ahmed Mohammed, the late Mohammed Said Abdullah and Adam Shafi 

Famous author and promoter of Swahili literature and language Adam Shafi  when he visited the UK in 2007. Pic by  F Macha

Had I been a foreign tourist searching for Tanzanian literature I would have been disappointed.  No Ismael Mbise's “Blood on our land”(1974), autobiography of former cabinet minister Edwin Mtei (From Goatherd to Governor, Mkuki 2009) or historian Mohammed Said's The life and times of Abdulwahid Sykes (Minerva, 1998).
 It is like visiting a country that has just experienced war; no writers, no stories to tell. The shop assistant quipped: “Our people do not read anymore. Now imagine this. If I am one of those citizens who do not read, what will happen if I become a political leader? Will I suddenly promote reading and buying books?”
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