Find Music from East Africa in the Afropop Shop

The central swath of Africa--from French colonial Brazzaville and Belgian-built Kinshasa in the west, to the Muslim spice island of Zanzibar in the east--contains a daunting array of peoples and cultures. Frenzied, neo-traditional pop from the Baluba of the Kasai regions at the center of the continent could not be more different from the serene, Arab- and Asian-tinged taarab ensembles and orchestras of Kenya's port city, Mombasa. But the Congo's rumba sound has touched all the people of this region, and beyond.

Kenya and Tanzania, the principle producers of pop music in East Africa, have enjoyed more varied political fortunes since independence. In Kenya, following the brutal British suppression of the Mau Mau uprising in the mid-'50s, Jomo Kenyatta took power and ran a tight, pro-western, but decidedly non-democratic one-party state until his death in 1978. His successor, the current president Daniel Arap Moi, has spoken of turning the country into a non-ethnic, open democracy, but so far hasn't lived up to his rhetoric. First a German and then a British colony, Tanzania came together under the idealistic, socialist leadership of Julius Nyerere from 1961-85. Though he worked to counter the ethnicity-based politics that plagued other new Africa nations, and received help from a number of countries, Nyerere's economic policies bred poverty and debt. Today, Zanzibar and the rest of Tanzania live under separate governments, moving slowly, but peacefully toward becoming more democratic societies.

Contributed by: Banning Eyre