Ebrahim Hussein is the best known Swahili playwright, and Tanzania's most complex literary personality. Known first and foremost as a dramatist, he is also a theorist whose dissertation on the theatre in Tanzania remains the standard reference work. His plays are a corpus of theatrical material with great significance to an understanding of Tanzania's political and social development in relation to the Swahili/Islamic coastal culture, of which he is a part. Alain Ricard is Research Professor of the CRNS of the African Studies Centre of the University of Bordeaux. In this sympathetic study of the man and the author, he corrects the neglect, by those writing in French and English, of the study of Tanzanian literature in general, and Hussein's work in particular.