[1] Haji Gora began composing works in the 1950s, before Zanzibar gained independence and unified with Tanganyika to form present-day Tanzania.
[1][3][4] His father was Gora Haji, a respected sea captain and fisherman, and his mother was Mize Mjumbe Juma, a homemaker.
[1][3] When he was four, he moved from Tumbatu to live in Mkunazini, a neighborhood of Stone Town, the historic center of the capital city in Zanzibar.
[3] Another was the rhythms of Ngoma ya Kibati music, which features quick, improvised dialogue set to drums with singing and dancing.
[3] He was trained as a fisherman by his uncles, and earned his living at various times by working as a sailor on cargo dhows, shipping cloves, and as a porter on the docks.
[3] The lyrics combined "romantic sentimentality with his keen interest in politics and philosophy", and were mostly written as three-line split verse with end-rhymes.
[4] Haji Gora also attained fame in mashairi ya malumbano, a weekly verbal battle unique to the Swahili coast.
[3] He became famous after the publication of a collection of his poems Kimbunga: Tungo za Visiwani (The Hurricane) in 1994, under the encouragement of a few professors at the State University of Zanzibar.
[4] The collection contained a glossary from Ki-Tumbatu and Ki-Unguja vernacular to standard Swahili to help readers understand the poems outside their local context.
[2] Recordings for Shuwari, a collection of poems meant to be performed, were done by the author and his disciple and successor Ali Haji Gora in Zanzibar in 2016; they were released in 2019.
[4] Haji Gora's poetic language had traits prevalent in Swahili poetry of his time, like the use of rare or archaic words, and certain syntactic conventions like noun-possessive contractions (like siku yake turned to sikuye) and the deletion of the subject marker.
[4] His verse often had an "obsessive rhythm" created from identical refrains, word duplication, sound repetition (alliteration and homophony).
[4] Haji Gora composed the majority of poems in his collection Shuwari in this form, and it remains the most popular genre of Swahili poetry in general.
[3] With his removal from the city that fed his creativity, his mental state started to deteriorate and he wasn't allowed to write by his family, who asked him to rest instead.