[1] Hussein's work stands in a literary tradition expressed in the national language Swahili following the country's independence from the United Kingdom in 1961.
The decision for Swahili as the national language of Tanzania in 1964 favoured an independent drama literature that took a middle way between the traditions of the Swahili-speaking peoples of the coast and Zanzibar and the conventions of the European theatre.
[3] Hussein himself translated Kinjeketile into English, and published by Oxford University Press in Dar es Salaam, the play became also known abroad.
Hussein also wrote poetry in free verse, a new poetical form for Swahili literature that was also widely read in the schools and universities of East Africa.
His works written in a poetic and, at the same time, modern language became a model for the socialist cultural policy of Tanzania, even if they contained ambiguous heroes, who sometimes doubt their actions.
One significant moment is when the village is celebrating after Sesota's death; names of a variety of famous African writers and artists are listed.
[6] Not least because of his political statement about the history of the Maji-Maji uprising, Hussein's play Kinjeketile became one of the standard Swahili texts in Tanzanian and Kenyan schools and was reprinted several times.
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.
After Wole Soyinka and Athol Fugard, he is the most interesting and talented dramatist that Africa has produced, but his name is rarely mentioned in European studies on African literature.
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.
The college awards up to $7,500 each year to one or more full-time graduate students in there to carry out research on African expressive cultures and/or archives outside of the United States.