Text by Banning Eyre. Photographs by Banning Eyre and Sean Barlow.

Afropop's Sean Barlow and Banning Eyre spent much of February 2004 in South Africa and Tanzania. In coming months, there will be a series of radio programs, website features, interviews, audio slideshows, and exclusive music offerings in the Afropop Music Shop. To start, we look at the Sauti Za Busara Swahili Festival held in Stonetown, Zanzibar, Tanzania, on February 13-15, 2004. Here's the second of our festival reports. If you enjoy it, check out Sauti Za Busara, 2004: Day 1
and also Sauti Za Busara, 2004: Day 3

On Saturday morning, well before the music started at the Sauti Za Busara festival site in the Forodhani Gardens, we took a walking tour of Stonetown. We perused swordfish and spices on sale in the local market, entered a Catholic church built on the site of the old slave market, and bought cassettes from a friendly music vendor with a portable, push-cart music shop. As we threaded our way through the narrow, winding streets that ultimately lead to the towering House of Wonders, where sultans' Rolls Royces and other remnants of Zanzibar's complicated past are on display, our guide Mohammed paused in front of one particularly grand doorway.

"This was the home of Tippu Tip," he told us, "one of Zanzibar's biggest slave merchants." Born Hamed bin Muhammed al-Murjebi, and nicknamed for a bird that shared his signature facial twitch, Tippu Tip was indeed a grand, and dubious, figure of Zanzibar's 19th century history. At the height of his operations in the 1860s, this self-styled slave mogul led caravans of up to 4000 captives from the Tanzanian interior to Zanzibar, and beyond. The explorer Stanley wrote admiringly of Tippu Tip's gift for manipulating Arabs and Africans alike, and the record certainly supports at least the facts--if not the upbeat spirit--of Stanley's account. Our guide pointed out that the house before us actually had underground passages connecting it to the shoreline, where the slaves arrived, and to the old slave market, where they were sold. This hidden infrastructure allowed him to continue trafficking in human beings even after the British finally outlawed slavery in 1873.

As we stood there on the street, a wiry gentleman with a dark beard approached the doorway we were pondering. "I live here now," he said. "Would you like to come in?" We climbed to the third floor of Tippu Tip's spectacular house and enjoyed its unique view of the Stonetown skyline--the beach and harbor in one direction, and the church marking the old slave market in the other. We drank clove tea with our host and his wife, an artist, and marveled at the fact that they alone seemed to share the two upper floors of this vast and almost completely unfurnished space, although nothing about them suggested wealth. Nowhere else in Africa have I ever seen so few people inhabit such a large dwelling. But Zanzibar is a place like nowhere else in Africa.

At the festival site, the day's musical program began with an elegant taarab set from veteran Kenyan vocalist Maulidi Juma and Mombassa Musical Party. The Mombassa taarab sound is said to have the strongest Indian influences of all the East African genre's varieties. Mombassa's large Indian population has kept people there in touch with developments in popular Indian music, notably film songs, whose catchy melodies are echoed in many a Mombassa hit from the 1950s onward. Mombassa Musical Party is actually one of the largest and most respected taarab groups in Kenya, legendary due to their marathon performances at lavish wedding celebrations in the city. Although just a small contingent of five musicians accompanied Maulidi Juma to Zanzibar, the lineup did include two of Mombassa taarab's signature instruments, the droning, organ-like harmonium and the one-of-a-kind taishokoto, a Japanese cross between a banjo and the Japanese koto that traveled to Africa via India.

Maulidi Juma began singing in the 1960s and he cut a serene, grandfatherly presence onstage, moving easily between lilting, rumba-like grooves and Swahili rhythms like chacacha, a lively, triplet feel known to animate Mombassa wedding parties for literally days on end. The group's spokesman and percussionist Omar al-Abdi lamented the fact that the old style of music is dying out fast these days. The work doesn't pay as it used to, so the old orchestras are stripping down to bare-bones lineups. Young players favor keyboards and guitars rather than violins and accordions, let alone harmoniums and taishokotos. Sad as this is, the musicians said, it has to be accepted. Asked the secret of a successful taarab singer, Maulidi Juma said it's all about the emotional involvement of the performer. "If you want to sing," he said, "you have first to entertain yourself. Then the audience they will also be happy. But first yourself, if you are not happy, it's as if you have been forced. If you can't involve yourself in that taarab music, no one can involve you."

As afternoon faded into evening, a crowd of kids--mostly boys--gathered on the stone wall that drops off to the water just near where the evening grill chefs were setting up shop. Directed by one boy standing at the edge, a parade of others took running jumps to make the 25-foot plunge into the sea. These were anything but conventional dives. The goal seemed to be to strike the most dramatic, or even contorted, pose possible in mid air. On another evening, I watched boys doing somersaults and other acrobatic moves on a nearby beach. And during one interlude on the festival stage, a group of local acrobats put on a fantastic display set to pumping East African guitar rumba. There was a common theme in all three displays, a will to fly, to spread ones arms and soar through open air.

Meanwhile, a diverse set of traditional acts took the stages. Nyota Ndogo, a young taarab singer from Mombassa, Kenya, gave a taste of that city's more electronic, modern sound. Then came a group that proved one of the great discoveries of the festival for Afropop Worldwide. Yange Yange Arts is a Wagogo cultural group from the central Tanzanian region around the city of Dodoma. Tanzania has some 120 ethnic groups, none of which accounts for more than a few percent of the overall population, so there is no dominant ethnic culture or sound. That said, the one Tanzanian musical genre to achieve worldwide fame is the distinctly Wagogo music of the late Dr. Hukwe Zawose (1938-2003). Zawose refined Wagogo instruments, particularly the deep-toned, hollow thumb piano called ilimba (or, confusingly, marimba), and the bowed zeze fiddle with its beautiful, otherworldly overtones.

In their spell-binding set, Yange Yange Arts delivered this music in a powerful, multigenerational pageant. A sixteen-year-old boy whirled out energetic, cycling zeze melodies, while a blind, old man croaked in a style of Wagogo singing very close to the most gravelly variety of Tuvan throat singing. Personnel shifted constantly as sound textures changed from chorus to solo voices to joyful ululating, from the rolling triplets of ilimba grooves, to songs featuring all manner of zezes, including one as big as a West African kora.

Yange Yange Arts began with a mission to uplift disabled artists in the Dodoma region. Using both able-bodied and handicapped musicians and dancers, the group adapted music typically associated with circumcision rituals and weddings and styled it for the international stage. They have played arts festivals as far away as Ivory Coast and Holland, and based on what we saw in Zanzibar, they're just getting started. The Stonetown audience had proven difficult to rouse on the first night of the festival, but during Yange Yange Arts' set, for the first time, they really seemed to get excited.

Yange Yange Arts manager and spokesman Desdery Kuzenza thought he knew why. "When you talk about traditional music," he said after the set, "most of those people have some Bantu origins. So we have some ideas of Bantu fusions. Nowadays, people are more influenced by hip-hop culture, and R&B and all that. That's the reason they are a tough audience. They are more influenced by the Western culture. But we are confident in what we are doing. We're doing it deep. It's original. So automatically, these people felt it. It's part of their tradition. It's part of their Bantu side. So they responded to that."

For stagecraft, polish, and sheer musical power, Yange Yange Arts was certainly among the very best traditional groups who performed at the festival. And Afropop Worldwide listeners will be glad to learn that the group passed on to us an 18-track CD of beautiful material that is now available in the Afropop Shop.

The act that came next was decidedly more rough and ready, but in the entire three days, no group won a more enthusiastic response from the audience than Kikundi Cha Dogodogo. Kwame Mchauru of Busara Productions described the music as "ghetto taarab," a new variety within the strongly Africanized genre of taarab known as kidumbak.

As Kikundi's set progressed, the pace mounted and those edgy fiddle melodies scored the air. On close inspection the tone of these instruments became understandable; the bridge on one was made from a hard piece of Styrofoam! Two female dancers began to swivel their hips, and the crowd went wild, whistling and cheering. Girls rose to dance from the seated front section, undulating as if entranced and earning the rapt attention of those around them. In the time-honored taarab tradition, there was a lot of boasting and taunting going on, and when a pudgy young man got up to dance, comically competing with and egging on the group's female dancers, the crowd howled with delight. "Zanzibar is a Muslim country," Mchauru said afterwards, "and when you talk about these private things, like sexuality and stuff--usually, people don't show it. But inside, they feel it, so when you express yourself like that, they just go crazy."

The two violins occasionally launched into wild, trilling melodies and the sanduku thrummed, lashing the dancers, and the crowd, on to new heights of energized delight. "You cannot call this pure African music," said Mchauru. "When Arabs came here, they brought violins, so local African guys like these decided to mix together some taarab and some rhythms of Africa, but it was mostly on the streets, with dancing and going crazy and all that. This was how it started, this kidumbak. These guys just copied it from some other guys, and then somehow twisted it around."

Backstage after the set, one of the Kikundi singers recited the lyrics to a few of the songs. A translator rendered one of these in English as: "For those who have judged me, give them more wisdom. Do not betray me. Don't treat me like an enemy. It is God who gives me wisdom. There will be a day that you are going to cry. But after all, then you are going to be happy for what I am going to do to you. Remember what they have been doing to me. And now, I'm going to do something very good for you. No matter what you are doing, I myself I am going to do better to you. No matter what they are doing, I am going to respond in a positive way."

Meanwhile, on the stage, it was hip-hop time again. Wazenji Kijiwe began with a spirited, tuneful offering of local Zanzibari rap. The group takes its name from their successful 1997 debut single, which they performed. Wazenji Kijiwe is considered the first Zanzibar act to rival the force and presentation of the celebrated Bongo Flava acts who dominate the music scene across the water in Dar Es Salaam.

Next, it was onto a full, hour-long set by one of Tanzania's most intriguing hip-hop acts. X Plastaz come from Arusha in the northern highlands, near the border with Kenya. X Plastaz has been featured on the recent compilation CDs Rough Guide to African Rap
and Global Hip Hop.
The band gets described as "Maasai hip hop" and that is part of the story. But there's more. The group's leader Godson Rutta--a.k.a. G-San--says the group started in 1991 in Arusha. "We were three," he said, "and then in three years, my young brother and sister joined the band. They had their own name as Fortune Tellers. It's a family group. Then later on, we opened up an organization trying to promote and preserve culture, trying to bring the youth together from different tribes. Then we started a project of cultural educational visits. We started going to different villages to do research, and to add something to our music, something that is a bit different, and something that is traditional." That's how they recruited two musically talented brothers from a Maasai village.

So how does preserving traditional culture fit in with hip hop? The show itself provided hints. Some of the group's rappers prowled the stage thrusting their arms forward in transparent imitation of routine American hip hop antics. But among them, the two Maasai brothers adorned in beadwork and bright red robes pogo-sticked around the stage, jumping impossibly high amid the posse of wanna-be Brooklynites. One of them sang and rapped in a high, fluty voice that strongly suggested rural African roots.

Of course, the key to all African rap lies in the lyrics, lost on most foreign listeners. Backstage, one of the Maasai rappers explained that one of his raps advised young men on how deal with the ritual of circumcision, right down to the right way to sit, and how to behave. "The Maasai do it late," added G-San, "when the boys are grown up. They know what is going on in the world, what is pain. If they did it when they were 12 years old, or maybe 15, they could cry, and somebody could say, 'He is crying because he is a kid.' But because you are grown up, 18 years-old, you can't cry at all during the circumcision. Once you show your tears, it's like you've failed."

The mood changed sharply for the late-night set. It began with a soothing interlude marked by jangly cycles of Finnish folk music blended with melodies from a dulcimer-like Swahili instrument and gentle vocals--all the fruit of an unusual collaboration between Arnold Chiwalawala and Polepole Group. That set the stage for the closer, the legendary roots band from Mozambique, Ghorwane. After the cool reception Eric Wainaina had received the night before, another mainland pop band might have had cause to worry, but as it turned out, Ghorwane's earthy, organic sound marked by subtle rhythmic shifts, rich vocal harmonies, and terrific brass section arranging hit the spot with the Stonetown crowd who mostly stayed and danced to the end of Ghorwane's 70-minute set.

This classic roots band is well-loved in world music circles for the sweet, cooking sound heard on their two international releases. They were probably far less known among the local Zanzibaris, so the fact that they won the crowd over so completely was impressive. It turned out this was a delicate moment in Ghorwane's career, which dates back to 1983. The keyboard player, Joäo Carlos Schwalbach, told me that since the band's singer and guitarist Pedro Langa was mysteriously murdered almost two years earlier, Ghorwane had hardly performed in Mozambique. This tragedy echoed an earlier one when one of the group's founders and key composers, Jose "Zeca" Alage, was also murdered in 1993. Joäo reported that the Mozambican press was writing Ghorwane off as all washed up, even cursed. The group was saying nothing, quietly working on a comeback album due for release later this year.

Given that, the set, mostly consisting of songs from their earlier releases, was tight and swinging. The only hint of rustiness was in some occasionally off-key vocals. Pedro Langa's voice is missed. But elsewhere, David Macuácua and Roberto Chitsonzo delivered Ghorwane's trademark, horn-like vocal harmonies, and in all, it was a warm, even ecstatic, ending to an amazing night of music.
For the night owls, the after hours destination of choice was the Dharma Lounge, a pleasant spot on Zanzibar's main shoreline street, just across from the Tembo Hotel. There was even a very pleasant disco, The Garage, in back for those wanting to dance to Bongo Flava and other African sounds, and sip Kilimanjaro beer, joined by members of X Plastaz and Ghorwane. After just such a night, Afropop Worldwide sat down for a long interview with core members of Ghorwane. Stay tuned for more on Ghorwane on our radio program and on the web. Also watch for one more report on the final day of the 2004 Sauti Za Busara festival in Stonetown, Zanzibar.