Said Ahmed Mohamed (1947-)

Said Ahmed Mohamed (1947-Present) is a Zanzibar-born poet, playwright and novelist with 67 titles to his name. He joined Dar es salaam university for his B.A in Kiswahili and English literature where for his excellent performance went on to Karl Marx university, now Leipzig university, in Germany for further studies in 1985. He later became the director of TAKILUKI (the institute of Kiswahili studies and research in Zanzibar), under the Ministry of education. He taught in various universities in Nairobi, Kenya and then Osaka, Japan, where he earned his PhD, and ended his career in the university of Bayreuth Germany where he taught since 1992 until his recent retirement. It was as a novelist where he made the most significant contribution to Kiswahili literature. In 1976 when he burst into the literary scene with his first novel Asali Chungu (Bitter Honey) which he penned on observing the wretched states of most African nations after independence, and now he has 67 published works; novels, short stories, poetry and literary criticism. His recent works include Babu Alipofufuka, When Granddad Resurrected (2001), Dunia Yao, Their World (2006), Nyuso za Mwanamke, The Faces of a Woman (2010), Atamlilia Nani, Who Will Weep for Him (2009). He contends to have had the most staying power in Kenyan classrooms with his texts Kitumbua Kimeingia Mchanga, Amezidi and Utengano (Severance) which were all compulsory texts. His novels are social works focusing on the sociopolitical environment of modern Tanzania, particularly his native Zanzibar. Mohamed believes that a writer cannot be nonpartisan under the circumstances of African societies at the present time. His commitment, as it emerges from his works, is quite explicit, and is expressed in a number of pet themes: the exploitative and immoral nature of the bourgeoisie, his censure of Islam as a prop of the feudal-capitalist system, the betrayal of the dream of uhuru(freedom), failure of the socialist experiment in Tanzania, and the need for a social revolution. A translation of his Amezidi (1995) rendered as ‘He’s Far Too Much’ was published in 2013 by Sheep Meadow Press.