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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