Ebrahim Hussein

The Ebrahim Hussein Poetry prize is an honor awarded annually since 2014 to the winner of the poetry contest under the same name. The contest was created by Safarani Seushi as per wish of the late Canadian filmmaker Gerald Belkin (1940-2012). Belkin was in the process of creating this award, to be named after "his friend and renowned filmmaker and playwright, Professor Ebrahim Hussein", when he died. Belkin's goal in establishing this award and prize fund was to foster the careers of Swahili literary authors. The selected poems were published as Diwani ya tunzo ya ushairi ya Ebrahim Hussein (Anthology of Ebrahim Hussein Poetry Prize), in 2017.

The Ebrahim Hussein Endowment for research in African expressive cultures was established in the College of Letters and Science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2003, thanks to the generosity of Robert M. Philipson, alumnus of the College of Letters and Science (PhD’89). The College awards up to $7500 each year to one or more full-time graduate students in L&S to carry out research on African expressive cultures and/or archives outside of the United States. Recent winners of the fellowship include Vincent Ogoti, a Kenyan playwright.

Other plays written by Hussein include Mashetani (1971), an overtly political play, Jogoo Kijijini (1976), an experiment in dramatic performance, and Arusi (1980), in which Hussein expresses disillusionment with the Tanzanian political theory Ujamaa. Short plays of his include Wakati Ukuta (1967).

During the early 1970s, Hussein studied at the Humboldt University in East Berlin and wrote his PhD dissertation "On the development of theatre in East Africa". Starting with Kinjeketile, he also employed elements of epic theatre as developed by German playwright Bertold Brecht. Later, he published Jogoo Kijini and Ngao ya Jadi, two texts for a single actor, where he used Swahili traditions of storytelling (hadithi). Therefore, his plays have been characterized as a "dramaturgy [that] appears to fuse or blend received European models of an intimate theatre with non-Aristotelian and entirely unique techniques of his own."

While Hussein focused on research at the Humboldt University in East Berlin for his PhD thesis from 1970 to 1973, the first scholarly study of his work, Drama and National Culture: a Marxist Study of Ebrahim Hussein by Robert Philipson was published in 1989. Hussein wanted to develop Swahili literature that regarded the crisis of East Africa, specifically in the 1970s. At a conference on the meta-languages of literary studies, he published a study on Greek philosopher Aristotle (1980). Many of his colleagues began studies on his oeuvre after this publication, which focused on Kenyan and Tanzanian literary criticism expressed in Kiswahili.

Ebrahim Hussein (born 1943) is a Tanzanian playwright and poet. His first play, Kinjeketile (1969), written in Swahili, and based on the life of Kinjikitile Ngwale, a leader of the Maji Maji Rebellion, is considered "a landmark of Tanzanian theater." The play soon became one of the standard subjects for exams in Swahili language in Tanzania and Kenya. By 1981, it had been reprinted six times.