The Author

Shaaban Robert was born at Tanga in the then Deutsch-Ostafrika (German East Africa, later Tanganyika) on 1 January 1909, in a Muslim family. ‘Robert’ was his father's assumed name; his real name was Selemani Ufukwe. After his father's death in 1918, Robert moved to Dar es Salaam to live with his grandfather, where he attended the government primary school between 1922 and 1926, for a total of four years. When he had completed his schooling, he returned to Tanga and was employed as an ‘African Clerk’ in the customs department. He served in government, as a clerk, in various stations and districts, until 1959, when he retired officially and set up a short-lived private publishing company known as Tanga Art and Literature to publish his own books. Robert passed away on 20 June 1962, at Bombo hospital in Tanga, and was buried in his maternal graveyard at Vibambani, Tanga, on 21 June 1962.

Robert was initiated into the oral and classical written literature of his Swahili1 society; he was also taught Islamic knowledge and finally, he studied Western education. These three strands of knowledge and art influenced him in his writings and thoughts.

Shaaban Robert and Kiswahili Literature

Kiswahili literature has a long history, stretching back for more than 500 years. Prior to European colonisation, Kiswahili literature was being written in Arabic script and either disseminated in codex (manuscript) or recited publicly. When the Germans took power in 1885, they replaced the Arabic script with the Roman script in 1889, and the Roman alphabet was introduced in the school system. The Germans were replaced by the British in 1918. The British governed the territory under the auspices of the League of Nations (later, the United Nations) until 1961. The change of script and the new educational system gave rise to newspapers and a new literature written in the Roman script by Tanganyikans. Kiswahili newspapers published poems, short stories, brief autobiographies and biographies and other assorted genres in Roman script. Robert was among the authors who began his writing career by writing for newspapers, especially Mambo Leo, a government magazine that was established by the colonial government in 1923.