Abdilatif Abdalla

Abdilatif Abdalla (born April 14, 1946 in Mombasa , British Crown Colony, Kenya ) is a Kenyan poet, publicist and university lecturer. Abdalla is considered to be one of the most famous Swahili poets of today, and has been teaching Swahili at Leipzig University since 1995 .

Life

Abdilatif Abdalla was born in Mombasa in 1946, where he grew up with his grandfather Ahmad Basheikh bun Hussein, a poet and teacher. Abdalla attended primary school in Faza, then moved to the British Tutorial College in Mombasa. After finishing school, Abdalla worked as an accountant for the Mombasa City Council from 1963 to 1968.

In the late 1960s, Abdalla was also politically active, including writing and publishing the pamphlet Kenya: Twendapi? (Kenya, where are you?) To the opposition Kenya People's Union ( Kenya's People's Union to support KPU). Abdalla was arrested on December 20, 1968 in the course of a wave of arrests and the break-up of the KPU. Due to conspiracy and sedition , Abdalla was imprisoned for three years, first in the Kamiti Maximum Security Prison near Nairobi, and later in the Shimo la Tewa Prision near Mombasa. During his imprisonment, Abdalla wrote numerous poems that later appeared in the anthology Sauti ya Dhiki .

Abdalla published his anthology after the end of his imprisonment, for which he received the Kenyatta Literature Prize in 1972. In 1972 Abdalla went into exile in Tanzania, where he worked as a researcher at the Institute for Swahili at the University of Dar-es-Salaam . He was also active as a journalist and published the magazine Mulika , in addition, he published numerous poems in Tanzanian newspapers. In 1979 Abdalla moved to London to work for the BBC World Service's Swahili service . Among other things, he wrote and translated news reports, and he also produced and moderated the weekly art and cultural program "Utamaduni". From 1986 to 1994 he also published the magazine Africa Events , an international, daily political and Africa-oriented magazine.

In 1995, Abdalla moved to Leipzig, where he has been teaching Swahili at the Institute for African Studies at the University of Leipzig since then.

Web links

• Abdalla's employee page at the University of Leipzig

Individual evidence

1. ↑ ^{a b c} Ann Biersteker: 'Abdalla, Abdilatif . In: Emmanuel K. Akyeampong and Henry Louis Gates, Jr (Eds.): Dictionary of African Biography . tape 1 . Oxford Press, Oxford 2012, ISBN 978-0-19-538207-5 , pp. 17th f .
2. ↑ ^{a b c d} Abdilatif Abdalla. Institute for African Studies, University of Leipzig, accessed on April 27, 2018 .