In Growing up with Tanzania. Karim Hirji, a renowned Professor of Medical Statistics and Fellow of the Tanzania Academy of Science, presents a multi-faceted, evocative portrait of his joyous but conflicted passage to adulthood during colonial and early-Uhuru Tanzania. His smooth style engages the reader with absorbing true tales, cultural currents, critical commentary and progressive possibilities. By vibrantly contrasting the hope-filled sixties with the cynical modern era, he also lays bare the paradoxes of personal life and society, past and present.
Karim F Hirji holds BSc (First Class, Mathematics and Education, University of Dar es Salaam, 1971), MSc (Operations Research, University of London, 1972), and SM and DSc (Biostatistics, Harvard University, 1982 and 1986) degrees, and has taught at the University of Dar es Salaam, the National Institute of Transport, and the University of California at Los Angeles. Once a visiting professor at the University of California, San Francisco, he has taught short courses at the University of Bergen and the University of Oslo.
He has published many papers and book chapters in the areas of statistical methodology, applied biomedical research, the history and practice of education in Tanzania, and written numerous essays, commentaries and book reviews on varied topics for the mass media and popular magazines.
He is the author of Exact Analysis of Discrete Data (Chapman and Hall/CRC Press, Boca Raton, 2005) and Statistics in the Media: Learning from Practice (Media Council of Tanzania, Dar es Salaam, 2012). He also edited and is the main author of Cheche: Reminiscences of a Radical Magazine (Mkuki na Nyota Publishers, Dar es Salaam, 2010).
He retired from his position of Professor of Medical Statistics at the Muhimbili University of Health and Allied Sciences in 2012. Currently a Fellow of the Tanzania Academy of Sciences, he walks, talks, reads, writes and dreams in the friendly but congested, fume-filled, expensive environs of Dar es Salaam. He may be contacted at kfhirji@aol.com.
via African Books Collective: Growing Up With Tanzania.
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Comparative literary review of two short story collections, set in the Ismaili community of Dar es Salaam
Ismailimail 
Sounds great – his career, but unfortunately we cannot judge about the book from this. I think of the three East African countries – Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania – where Asians lived, we know the least about their lives in Tanzania and it is good to see this publication may fill a gap. We hear a lot about Uganda Asians (mostly Ismailis) coming to Canada with the expulsion in 1972. Tanzania Asians (mostly Ismailis) had preceded them following the nationalization measures of President Nyerere. From what we can glean from the paragraph, Prof Aziz quite likely addresses those early-Uhuru times. I look forward to reading the book.
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