Afropop Worldwide

"Live From Bongoland: The History of Tanzania's Music Economy" would have been impossible without the extensive and innovative research done by Alex Perullo. An associate professor of Anthropology and African Studies at Bryant University, Alex is one of the world's foremost experts in the popular music of Tanzania. He has also written and published on artist's rights and copyright in a broader African context, notably " Artistic Rights: Copyright Law for East African Musicians, Artists, Writers, and Other Authors," one of the few practical guides written for musicians. Alex is also the author of "Live from Dar Es Salaam," one of the best books written about East African music, and one that formed much of the backbone for "Live from Bongoland." Afropop producer Sam Backer spoke to Alex in Middletown, Connecticut, in February 2014.

Sam Backer: To start with, how did you first get involved in Tanzanian music?

Alex Perullo: Well, I knew that I was interested in East Africa. And at the time, you heard all of these great things about Nairobi and Kenya, and its booming economy, but in terms of music, it turns out that most people didn’t go out late at night to see music because it wasn’t safe. So I tried to look for record companies. I tried to look for anything related to the music business, but it just wasn’t there. I happened to arrive-this is the late 1990s- at a time when music just wasn’t booming in Kenya. It had declined dramatically. They used to have all of these international record companies there-EMI and Decca-but they were gone. The local music industry was struggling.

So I took a bus and traveled to Tanzania-first to Arusha and then further down to Dar es Salaam. And in Dar, in the first week I was there, I saw a dozen shows. It was hopping. The whole city was hopping. There was so much live music. And I knew then that I needed to turn my attention towards Tanzania. That was in 1998, and I continued to return for the next 15 years.

And that live music scene has remained unchanged since?

In Tanzania, the live music has only grown since the late 1990s. And it’s partially because the city is safe, but it’s also partially because of a long history of using live music as a way to entertain people when there were so few other options available. For instance, there was no TV in Tanzania until the mid 1990s. You could not watch television unless you were very wealthy and had a video cassette player or a satellite. Otherwise there was nothing to watch. There were radio shows, but there was only one government run radio station, which had several channels, but it was one government station. Because of all that, people wanted to go out and see live music, theatre-those types of things. Now there are over 100 clubs in Dar es Salaam that have live music every night of the week except for Monday. Any night that you want to hear live music you can. And it’s a very exciting dynamic, period, right now. If there’s one thing that needs to be emphasized, it’s how important the live music scene is in Dar es Salaam.

And that’s continued despite the proliferation of recorded music in the past 20 years?

Yes, for many reasons. For one, you have to get into the whole history of what recorded music is used for there, which is different than how we understand recorded music in some ways. The consumption of recorded music in Tanzania has always been somewhat contentious because there isn’t a group of people who go out and regularly buy albums every week to hear the latest hits or line up for the latest album to come out. That trend, that tradition that we have in the United States, for instance, is not as common there. Yes, there are a few artists who can release albums and have people lining up to see them. But generally speaking, most people record and release albums so they are first heard on radio to entice people to the clubs, to the shows, or to other venues, to festivals. So recorded music functions as a form of publicity. I think it’s become more that way here now, but that’s always been the way it is in Tanzania.

You will find people who buy music, of course. Albums are sold; music is downloaded from online, and now the common trend is to go with a memory card and download a whole bunch of music from computers on the streets. People do consume music in the way we know and understand. But for most artists, their main intention is to gain exposure to get publicity-so, sell albums: yes, but in order to get publicity for live shows. And so, because of the increased production of music in studios across the country, it has led to increasing attention to the live shows. There are o many more artists producing and recording music and so there are more artists performing at the same time.

Across the city, there’s so much happening; it’s such an exciting place to be if you know where to look. There are new clubs forming all the time; of course, there are some closing all the time, but I don’t know of an American city that can compare to the dynamic and thriving scene that is in a place like Dar es Salaam. In Tanziana, you can hear everything- there is a huge range of artists that perform, from American style R'n'B and rap to contemporary dansi styles to taarab to mchiriku; there are all these styles of music all over the city going on at the same time, and you can literally drive from show to show to show and see 10 shows in one night of all different varieties of music, starting at about 8 o’clock and ending at about 3-4 in the morning.

Let's start to tell this story from the beginning- which I guess starts while the British still controlled what was then called Tanganyika

A lot of popular music in Tanzania began through a convergence of Western and traditional music. This is typical in many African countries-Ghana, Kenya, Congo-where artists would start hearing western styles such as jazz, became very fascinated by them, and then try to copy what they were hearing. In the pre-independence period, which is pre-1961 in Tanzania, there were a lot of records imported from overseas, from American country music to American jazz music to classical music to ballroom dance music.

In fact, a lot of early artists were recruited to perform in ballroom dance bands. That’s how they learned some of the western styles. And that ballroom dance style became known as dansi, which is-or was- the most popular style of music through the independence period. So, dansi started as ballroom dance, and then artists would leave those ballroom dances and go back, and start performing traditional music, mixing the ballroom dance sound- the chachacha, the waltz- with traditional music, and this began to form the popular style known as dansi.That began in the 1920s.

There were also GV records that were imported, which were very very popular. GV records were Cuban and Latin American songs, particularly Cuban son music, that were released in Africa on this GV imprint. The records were extraordinarily popular in the 1940 and 1950s throughout the African continent. And it led to this boom in music that sounded like Cuban son. So artists were copying the same rhythms from the Cuban son records; they were even copying the same lyrics.

One of the most famous artists who copied the GV sounds was Salum Abdallah. He was born in 1928 in Morogoro, Tanzania. His father was… pretty tough and he did not want Salum to become a musician. But Salum was so fascinated, and so in love with these GV songs and albums that he decided he wanted to become a musician. So one day, he decides to go to the port in Mombassa[Kenya] and try to catch a boat to head all the way to Cuba-that was his goal, to head to Cuba. He didn’t make it because the war had broken out-WWII-and he couldn’t get anywhere out of Tanzania, or Kenya, or East Africa for that matter.

So he goes back home to Morogoro. And in Morogoro, he’s still itching to buy instruments, so that he can start a band. So he sells one of his father’s houses- unbeknownst to his father. Unfortunately, we don’t know what the reaction of Salum’s father was. I can imagine he wasn’t quite happy. But anyway, Salum takes all these instruments and forms a band. And the first band was called La Poloma, which was taken from a GV recording, and after that, he formed the Cuban Marimba Band, obviously in recognition of the influence of Cuban music.

And if you listen to those early recordings, you can hear the clave rhythm from the GV recordings; you can hear some of the same percussion sounds; you can even hear some of the same instrumentation, but it’s all done in a very Tanzanian way, with traditional rhythms underneath. And you have this mix of Cuban and traditional Tanzanian rhythms together. Salum Abdallah became very popular. His recordings became very well known, and he influenced a lot of other artists to try that same style of music.

Where did Salum record?

I don’t think I know the answer to that question, because he recorded in so many different locations. He recorded a lot in Nairobi-I know that-but I don’t know what studio he recorded in. There were a lot of studios, a lot of small record companies in Kenya, so most artist would travel to Kenya to record, either for a major record label, which didn’t exist until the 1970s, or these smaller records that were very prominent.

Even at that early point in the 1940's, 1950's, there weren’t many studios or labels in Tanzania?

During the 1940-50s there was no recording studio in Tanzania, except for one, which belonged to the state run radio station, which was Radio Tanzania Dar es Salaam, initially called the Tanganyikan broadcasting corporation. During the 1940s and 1950, it was run by a British ex-pat, with some Tanzanian staff. They had a mobile unit that recorded music, or you could also record in the studio there. But in Tanzania (or Tanganyika), there was very little recording done. Most of it was done in Nairobi, or in Mombassa, or somewhere in between those two places in Kenya.

Do you know why that regional focus of Kenyan recording studios happened so early?

Well there weren’t that many. I don’t want to give the impression that there was a booming economy of music in Kenya. These were small-scale, primarily local traders, who saw that there was a market for this kind of music. In the 1930s, Columbia Records went to East Africa to record. They set up an office in Zanzibar, and recorded in Dar es Salaam, and in other places. And Hugh Tracy went recorded in East Africa during the 1940s as well. And I think that the popularity of the was so great that it influenced a lot of traders to start their own small-scale studios to record local music.

And that’s where we start to see this trend of small-scale studios appearing in Kenya. Was there a reason that it was Kenya over Tanzania? Probably the traders were importing more music, had better access to technology, equipment. Most Tanzanians imported from Kenya, and Kenya imported from oversees, and that’s how the importation system worked in the 1940s and '50s. And yes, there was a port in Dar and yes, things were imported, but records, for instance, almost always came through Kenya first, and a lot of other technology also came through Kenya first.

So in the '40s and '50s, where are groups playing? What kind of venues exist during this period?

In the 1940s and 50s, there were just a few establishments-official establishments at least- for live music. These official establishments were social and cultural halls set up by the British for live music. There weren’t many established places for people to perform during the 1940s and 50s. There were many places where people did perform, so they might find a church or a theatre that wasn’t being used and rent it out--a hotel floor, some open space where they could hold a show. They would do that quite often. More often than that there would be a single venue that would have regular shows every night of the week. But there were social halls and other cultural institutions in Dar that had music on occasion. It wasn’t as common as what it became in the 1960s. The real change came later.

After independence, in 1961, there was a concern among members of government that they had all these young people migrating to Dar or to other major cities, and what are we going to do with them all? There was a concern--a legitimate concern--that these young people were going to do damage to the city, that they were going to do all these horrible things, that they were going to drink too much, were not going to be productive members of society. So the idea that began to emerge in the 1960s was to build these locations where young people--particularly young men--could go hear live music in a confined, controlled space without causing disturbances to the neighborhood around them.

So the government actively started to build these social halls, these facilities--some had existed in the colonial periods and were just repurposed for the newly independent country, and some were newly built. Some of the more famous ones, such as the one known as the DDC social hall in Kariakoo, Dar, were built in the 1970s. And live bands started to fill them. And the way it worked was that the government sponsored a lot of the live bands in the country; they actually paid them to perform. They were parastatals.

There were many branches of the government that owned bands or had bands or paid bands to be a part of them. For instance, there was DDC [Transportation and Taxi Services,] which had a social hall, and also had a band with them, called DDC Milimani Park. This band was their band, essentially. DDC paid for this band salaries, gave them money to have transportation, to have health care, to have all of these elements--they were state employees. And many state organizations had bands affiliated with them--from the police to the military to the DDC--all these branches of government.

It's kind of hard to imagine all of the best bands in a country being government employees. Could you talk about the impact that this system had on the music being made?

It’s hard to grasp the situation because there are so many dynamics going on at the same time. So we have live music starting to grow because now we have excitement--there’s this vibrancy. In the 1960s, people were so excited. Independence had come; people were really ready for this change, and they wanted to explore that change through music. So a lot of bands started to form; instruments started to be imported at an increasing rate, and more records were coming in. Studios started to emerge in other countries at this time, such as Kenya, which had also gained independence during this period.

There was a dynamic movement of artists all through the region. Tanzanian artists wouldn’t just stay in Tanzania. They would perform in Mombassa or Nairobi in Kenya, they'd perform in Uganda. Congolese artists would come all the way to Dar Es Salaam to perform, as well as to perform throughout East Africa. Borders were not strict borders; they were porous and people moved through them. Because of that excitement, because of independence, because of live music, more clubs started to form, more government agencies started to form bands, and people began to be really excited by live music.

And in Dar alone, a number of clubs start to emerge. Now most of these bands were controlled by the government, but there were also independent bands, starting in the '60s and '70s. A lot of these independent bands came from the Congo or were Conoglese bands that formed in Tanzania. And it would have been a bit awkward for a Tanzanian agency--a government agency--to have musicians who were Congolese on their payroll. It did happen, but it wasn’t as common as Congolese bands forming their own independent networks of musicians. Maquis Original was one of the most famous ones; Orchestra Safari Sounds with Ndala Kasheba was another. These were two of the most popular bands in Tanzania during the 1960s and 70s and they were both independent. Two of the other very popular bands were Mlimani Park and Juwata Jazz--both of those were under government agencies. So we have an independent scene, and we have at the same time these dependent bands.

A lot of these bands would sing pro-government, pro-nationalist songs. But in all the interviews I did with artists--from independent bands to bands of government agencies—universally, they said that we sang these songs because this was the nationalist period; we were excited; we wanted this country to grow. Looking from the outside, we tend to see these songs from the 1960s and 70s as very pro-nationalist--the government must have co-opted them and told them to sing these songs. But for most musicians, this is what they wanted to sing about. We were told, as musicians, that we can benefit the country, and we believed it. We believed that if we sang, 'you need to gain literacy; you need to go to school and get an education; you need to eat well,” which is a very famous song called “Chakula Bora (Good Food)” by Mbaraka Mwinshehe. These were the kinds of songs that were coming out--very pro-nationalist, pro-government, pro-country, pro-Tanzania songs, but people wanted to sing them. Yes, there were love songs--plenty of them--but there are also these very nationalist songs coming out from both independent and government-run bands.

When you say the bands were independent, were the bands still owned by businessmen?

When Taarab started to emerge in Tanga, a city to the north of Dar es Salaam, there were managers who would control the bands. They owned the copyrights and the recordings and the songs; they managed the bands so they could make all the money and profit from live music. In many dansi bands that same format existed. Where there was a manager who ran the band, he owned the instruments--typically he, almost never a she--he owned the instruments, he controlled the band, he gave out the payroll, he made all the money, and he decided how much you would be paid.

I know that this system also encouraged a great deal of movement between bands.

Yes. Because of this system, a lot of artists changed bands; they wouldn’t stay in a band for more than a year or two--“Oh, you’re not paying me enough. I know that I’m one of the more popular musicians in this band. I deserve to be paid more.” So they would leave. And as I started to chart this movement of bands starting in the 1960s, it was amazing to follow how one artist could be in 20 different bands in a period of ten years. That wasn’t unusual. Because you kept thinking as an artist, “I should be paid more.” And because of that, you always contested this management of your band. You decided to leave, and you would go find other work. Sometimes it wouldn’t work out--another band wouldn’t hire you, and you would go and find completely different work unrelated to music. Some artists told me that they worked in garages!

That suggests that there was a very different role or status for musicians--they were these public figures that people know, but they are also salaried employees.

It’s actually very complicated to understand the situation of musicians. If you look at the top musicians in the United States, they are often revered for their popularity, for how famous they are. They can sell out live shows; on the streets, people want their autographs. In Tanzania, it wasn’t like that until recently. These artists are public figures; their songs are very popular and people love them, but those same artists can easily walk on the street and shop in the same market that you do. They are really everyday sorts of people. A musician, until very recently, was never thought of as higher status or different status, just because they were more famous. But their music--because they were on radio, and because they did perform in front of audiences--what they said in their songs did matter, and it did influence a lot of people. People did follow the messages. It didn’t matter that they were government employees; so many people were government employees when the country turned towards socialism in the 1960s. It was more about, “Are you speaking to us? Are you speaking to our issues?” And if you did, then you could really gain a lot of recognition. There were stars to some bands. Ndala Kasheba was a star for OSS; King Kiki was a star for Maquis Original. The difference was that once you left the stage, that sense of difference and stardom just didn’t last. That just didn’t exist in the same way.

Was part of that lack because the top musicians didn't have the wealth that accompanies stardom in the west?

That’s a good question. Artists who were in government bands were paid a salary by the government, but their salaries weren’t great. Artists were not wealthy by any means, but they were well taken care of in most bands. They lived fine. And it’s interesting, if you look at the breakdown of budgets for these bands--there were budgets for buying beer at clubs, so you’d go, you’d perform a show with your band, and as part of your tab, you’d have all these beers and that would come out of your salary, but you didn’t care because everything was being paid for. Some bands were having housing paid for them. And really, what else did you need? You had food and drink all day, transportation taken care of, housing, health care-- it’s all good! So if you didn’t save money or live lavishly, most musicians felt pretty well taken care of.

It may seem like a contradiction that some musicians switched bands so frequently when, at the same time, they were well taken care of. But there was a sense that if you were a star, if you were the musician drawing audiences to your shows, if you were the one composing lyrics to a lot of the songs, then you deserved a better salary. And if you weren’t going to get it, there was another band more than happy to take you. And you’d negotiate that; you’d go to the other band and say, “I want to play.” Or sometimes the manager of the other band would come and say, “We really want you to perform with us,” and you’d have people switch that way. So there was always a way to improve on your situation, even though the situation wasn’t so bad for some artists in these government bands.

It’s a very different understanding of what a band is then. It’s almost like a baseball team. Do you think that changed the distinctiveness of the bands, if they were always switching members with each other?

This ability to switch bands was actually a very effective way to keep the music interesting. A lot of these groups – Milimani Park formed in 1979. They still perform today. This other band, Juwata Jazz, formed as Nuta Jazz, and they’re still around today as a band called Msondo Ngoma. These bands have a long history, tet they continue to play some of the same songs that were popular in the past. What’s exciting about switching is--just imagine two very popular bands--say, The Beatles and The Rolling Stones--switching members. And having, say, one artist from The Beatles playing with The Rolling Stones, and one of the Rolling Stones playing with The Beatles. This would have been kind of controversial because they have very different styles, but you can also imagine that it would have brought a very different sound to some of the same old songs, and some of the future songs coming out.

So I think it was actually a way to keep the music exciting and dynamic. Bands were together for a long time- you needed to have new interesting music. And, of course, some of these bands were so competitive; it was almost like you went to the enemy. So an analogy of baseball teams is actually useful here because some of the bands were the Yankees and some of the bands were the Red Sox, and you would have a member of the Yankees go play with the Red Sox and vice versa, and everyone’s like, “I hate that musician. How could he switch allegiances to this band? I only like this one band. How could he switch to this other band now? I hate that musician.” That was actually common; that happened a lot. People took music very seriously--particularly between these bands Milimani Park and Ottu Jazz.

Ottu Jazz and Milimani Park were rivals--they competed continually in the public eye for audiences and popularity, and some of the stories that bands told me about were--you’d get on a bus and you’d have a fan from the opposing band would come on and threaten you and say, “We’re going to destroy you at these shows and live concerts and we’re better than you,” and they took it seriously. It was what you rooted for, in the same way that fans root for teams here in the United States. There weren’t that many dynamic sports teams in the 1970s and 1980s, but there were bands and the bands were very popular, very controversial. They had their stars; they were exiting. You went to the shows and they were vibrant, and you knew that this song was more popular than the other band’s songs. It was just a thriving time for live music, and that competitiveness remains part of popular music in the country.

A major part of this whole scene was the radio. Can we talk about that?

During the colonial period, which is pre-1961, the British started a radio station in Dar es Salaam called the Tanganyikan Broadcasting Corporation. This went on the air in July 1951. This radio station mostly played music for British ex-patriots, British individuals, who lived in Tanzania at that time--so Western-style music, news reels from overseas. But they also discovered that there was a local audience who wanted to hear some music as well, so some of that station started to transform into recording and documenting local music. They built a recording studio—very small, rudimentary--and had a mobile unit in the late 1950s that went out and recorded traditional music.

These were very popular elements of the broadcasting corporation. After 1961, it technically remained an independent entity, but the government was very wary of this. They knew that radio was hugely popular, and they wanted to be sure that they could control the content of the radio. So they started to influence the content by saying, “You can play these types of things” or “You can announce these kinds of things, but we really want you to say more about this”--nationalist issues, pro government prop-type issues. And eventually, it got to the point where the government said, “OK, we can no longer allow this to be independent. We need to take over the radio station,” and so they did. They took it over and renamed it Radio Tanzania Dar es Salaam—RTD, as it’s known. RTD was an incredibly popular and prolific radio station. It was the only radio station broadcasting in T for many many years. There was one other radio station in Arusha, which was run by a church, but depending on whom you talk to, either the government shut it down or it continued to operate sort of under the radar for many years. But at any rate, most people in the country only had access to what was being played on RTD.

And you could get it all over the country?

You could get it all over the country. It took some time to get it to the point where they could broadcast throughout the whole entire country. In fact, I don’t think there actually were country-wide broadcasts until the 1990s. It took a long time.

It was broadcast in Zanzibar also?

It wasn’t broadcast in Zanzibar, but the broadcast was received in Zanzibar. Zanzibar had their own broadcasting company, and they actually had television in the 1980s, so they did things a bit different than mainland T did. There were six services at one point for RTD, and they broadcast in English; they broadcast in Kiswahili; they broadcast music; they broadcast news--all sorts of things. There were education programs. So you could learn to speak English on an education program; you could learn farming; you could learn to farm peanuts; there was theatre. And literally, everyone tuned in to at least one of these stations across the country if you could get reception. There is some evidence that some radio came into the country through shortwave, but for most people, the main radio was RTD. There was also radio coming in from other countries if you could receive it, but RDT was the only legitimately operating radio station in T from 1960 until 1994.

And how widespread were radios at that point?

Even today, what’s interesting is that radios in urban areas were very prominent. It was very common for people to have access to radios because they were fairly accessible as a form of technology. If you wanted to hear the latest news, hear information, this was your only outlet to what was happening--not only internationally, but also nationally. So a lot of people tried to buy radios. I know in the early period, when they first started the radio station, 40,000 radios were sold in one year, and this in the 1950s. So there were a lot of radios sold even in that early period. In the 1960s, 70s, more radios were purchased.

Part of the issues with the growth in the early period was that people had to pay a tax on radios, like people pay a tax on radio in England. But that has disappeared.

Can you talk about how music intersected with the radio?

In the independence period, the RTD started to record, or continue to record as it had in the past. So this mobile unit that they had would drive around the country recording traditional music. And they would also invite artists and bands to record at the station. The station was very well run--the recording studio at the radio station--very professional, you’d have to sign up. You’d have to do an audition or the engineers would come and hear you play live. They wanted to be sure that you were together, that you performed well, that the song was quality enough. And then you had to submit your lyrics. Now we get into the socialist period. The people at the station would censor things that they disagreed with. So, if they didn’t like the way you worded something, they would cross it off and offer an alternative. Bands would sometimes be able to offer their own alternative, but usually would just accept what the censors would take out. And the things that the censors would take out aren’t always what you would think. Bands weren’t singing about “we need to destroy the government.” Those weren’t songs being sung. There wasn’t a song about having a coup or anything. There were songs about social issues, like pregnancy: “I’m not married to this women, and she’s become pregnant.”

But they did censor, it did happen, and bands were often frustrated by some of the censorship that did occur. So, you would submit your lyrics; the radio station would take out what they didn’t like in the lyrics, and then you’d come in and perform. And how it worked was that it was a mono recording studio, but very well run, very high quality recordings. You would sign the rights away to the recording, so the radio station would essentially own these recordings, but only to be used for broadcast. You’d get into the studio; you’d get into the studio, play a few warm up songs, and then you’d record. And these songs that were recorded from the mid-1960s all the way into the 1990s are some of the best recordings that exist from this period of Tanzanian music. Yes, bands recorded in Kenya, and yes, bands went and recorded down in Zambia or South Africa. But these recordings are still some of the best in this classic period of Tanzanian music, whether it was ngoma, dansi, taarab, or what have you. So, bands would put up with the fact that they had to censor lyrics or change things around because they really wanted that high quality recording to go out on the only radio station in the country. If you don’t play at RTD, and you don’t record there, you aren’t going to gain a huge following for your music, so you had to get into this studio to record. So, in that way, RTD had a lot of power--they controlled recording; they controlled radio, and they used it in very interesting ways to popularize certain sounds. They wanted music to be very pro-Tanzanian, not just lyrically, but also musically. They wanted sounds that sounded Tanzanian; they wanted music that sounded Tanzanian, so they searched out groups that would have a more Tanzanian, rather than Western sound. There were a lot of bands in the 70s that did cover songs or performed like, say, James Brown or The Beatles, and they even renamed themselves in ways that sounded like they were members of these British bands or American bands, but the radio station very rarely recorded those artists, and so we lose this whole period of music--we lose that part of it--because the radio station didn’t record it. We don’t’ have documentation that they even recorded at all-- some bands. They would have these bands playing, but not recording as much.

Can you give some examples of the bands who got censored?

There is a resurgence of recordings of these old recordings because now they’re sold online for a lot of money. On EBay you can find these 45s from the 70s, and they sell for 30, 40, 50 dollars, which for us, who study this music, is a fortune, because when I first started coming to Kenya, I bought hundreds of 45s for a few dollars. People were getting rid of them; no one cared about these recordings from the past because they were records, and who care about that stuff? But now there’s this whole movement of people, who try to collect these things, and find them and then sell them or then broadcast them on digital online radio shows. The initial collecting started mostly from England, the United States--going in and buying records, and then putting them up online for people to listen to. There are some record labels now, in Kenya, re-releasing these recordings, although it’s a bit unclear whether they have permission to re-release these recordings.

There has always been copyright in East Africa, but all of these countries had to update their copyright laws starting in the 1990s, according to world trade organization agreements. And artists are really excited about this because they believe that they can make some money from their recordings, that now they can profit, with royalties, from their music. Now, thanks to these re-releases, these recordings, legitimately, are popular--this music is internationally popular--enough so that some artists could be getting some royalties from these recordings, but there’s almost no evidence that artists are getting any royalty from any recording that’s been re-released. And it’s easy to get away with. Just as piracy is so easy with American music, just imagine how easy it is with East African music? You can basically sell whatever you want these days, and who is going to stop you? There isn’t an arm of the copyright or law that is strong enough to hinder these recordings from being sold. It’s just not possible. So, the downside is that these artists, who have found new fame and popularity from these recordings, are getting almost no money from the international sale of their recordings.

And the difference is that previously, when artists had records that sold for no money, they were getting live shows. But these artists are unlikely to tour.

The artists that are being released on these records internationally tend to be older musicians, who don’t have as much of a following these days. They’re still popular, and I don’t want to say that they can’t sell out a show in Dar, but these aren’t the hip young artists, who can play every night of the week and make money. These are artists, who have a following of older audiences, who don’t go out every night of the week to go see live music. And, as a result, these artists can’t benefit from the live music as much as the younger artists can, so they can’t get either publicity or money from these live recordings.

Sure, bands could go elsewhere to record, but there wasn’t ready access. Does that change the compositional process? Were people writing as many songs? Does it change the compositional process if you don’t need to produce new material regularly.

In the 1970s and 1980s in Tanzania, you wouldn’t need to compose as many songs as you do now in the contemporary period, as you might in other African countries. I don’t want to suggest that there weren’t a lot of songs being composed. Any time there was a national or social issue that needed to be addressed, the band would compose a song for it. It doesn’t mean that anyone recorded those songs. It also doesn’t mean that the song was played for more than a couple weeks. Sometimes, you would compose a song simply to address a popular social issue that had just come about. Maybe an election was coming up, or someone had gotten hurt in an incident and you wanted to talk about it, or maybe people really wanted to know more about something, and you would compose a song. So, it was common for artists to compose songs regularly and perform them live, but then they would sort of disappear. The band wouldn’t perform them again; they wouldn’t record the songs again. So, how many songs would a composer in a band write? And this gets a bit touchy. There is a very well known artist, who claims to have composed 60,000 songs since the 1960s. Now, it’s very unlikely that he composed 60,000 songs, but there is this sort of assumption that “we composed 1000s of songs in the 50 year period that we played music,” and there’s no way to be sure that he’s not right. Could you theoretically have composed a song every week for an audience? Yes. Is that likely? No. But the potential is there. There are a lot of artists who did compose a lot of songs, who never made it to record or vinyl during the 70s or 80s.

What, during this period, is the relationship between Tanzanian music and bands and the music scene in Kenya or the Congo? I know bands from the Congo would come to Dar, but what was the presence of Tanzanian music in the broader East African context?

During the 1960s and 1970s, and even into the 1980s--this classic period of dansi music--artists circulated quite freely, and several T artists were quite popular. Burako Manchahe [?], perhaps the most famous artist of T origin, who is popular throughout East Africa was able to perform in many countries. In fact, he performed in many other parts of Africa and around the world because he was so popular. His recordings, even today, continue to sell well. Artists like Burako Manchehe [?] and Salum Abdallah gained wide recognition throughout the region, just as Kenyan artists gained popularity in T. There were fewer Ugandan artists, who gained such popularity. And of course there were the Congolese, the most dominant of all of them. So, while Tanzania had a foothold throughout the popular music of this part of the continent--eastern and southern Africa-- the Congolese were really the dominant ones. Congolese artists like Franco or Tabu Ley were very well known in T, K, U, and if an artist like Franco performed in East Africa, huge artists would attend the show. No T artist could generate that much attention, as say a Congolese artist. And Burako Manchese [?] was perhaps the most popular of them all.

Did the access of these artists to recording facilities help facilitate their popularity--the fact that you could buy a Tabu Ley record?

Yes. The fact that there were such great recording studios in the Congo helped promote those artists internationally and nationally to places like Tanzania. The difference, though, was that even though Congo had a great recording system, they had many different recording studios in the Congo and they were quite good, high quality sound--the difference was that these artists were creating a new sound, at least to the ears of many people in East Africa, and it as a sound that a lot of people loved. You could dance to it; it was exciting; it sort of mixed the popular styles that everyone was fascinated by and did it in a really dynamic way, and the fascination, which stretched all the way through West Africa and East Africa and South Africa, was really in the number of artists, who were producing this music and the quality--they were so good! The singers were so fantastic, the harmonies were beautiful, the multi-layered guitar parts were all fascinating. The break in the music, the sebene, that Tanzanians copied, was also a key part because you could hear the lyrics first and then have a dance portion next. And all the qualities in this music--these aesthetic qualities--really resonated in East Africa. And that helped the Congoleses become really prominent. But when the Congo also started to have problems after independence--when Mobutu came to power in the 1960s, after the fall of Patrice Lumumba--that’s also when a lot of artists started to migrate to Tanzania, that’s when recording, which was still fantastic in the Congo, started to be better, say, in Nairobi because you didn’t need to worry about this dictator coming in and disagreeing with what you were saying, or corruption, or all these other issues that were starting to emerge in the Congo. There was a huge migration, which I actually call the largest artists’ migration of any period, where Congolese artists started to move out of the Congo into Tanzania, into Kenya, into Zambia, and it really helped push East African music into a new level because they had skills performing live, skills in the studio, and they had this sound that everyone loved. So, when they arrived in Tanzania, they were very popular. And the Congolese, for their part, loved Tanzania--easy place to stay. You had to learn Swahili, but many of them already spoke Swahili from eastern Congo. Friendly people--many of them married Tanzanians--and had a general acceptance for their music. So, why move anywhere else? Kenya was more difficult--a lot of crime, a lot of difficulty making it in the music scene. Uganda just didn’t have as vibrant a music scene at that time. So Tanzania really represented what many Congolese were looking for. Although some like Fan Fan, a very famous guitarist, ended up leaving Tanzania because he thought it wasn’t enough. There were a lot of artists who ended up leaving Tanzania to go find better opportunities elsewhere.

Can you talk about the difference between rumba and dansi?

The differences between classic dansi, which is really from the1960s to the mid-1980s, and Congolese music or music in Zaire aren’t as many as you might hope for. For one, the differences are that it’s a little more relaxed in Tanzania, but a more subtle and important differentiation between Congolese music and Tanzanian dansi music is the rhythms. In Tanzanian music, there is a reliance on Tanzanian traditional ngoma rhythms. So, bands will actually name themselves after traditional rhythms. Mlimani Park Orchestra’s nickname is Sikinde because that is the traditional ngoma rhythm that they’ve borrowed from--the sikinde sound. Take Msondo Ngoma, the name for Nuta Jazz Band--these names resonate with audiences because they’re taken from traditional ngoma, the traditional sounds heard in the country. So, underneath the music--what supports it--are these rhythms that many audiences can immediately tune in to—“Oh, I know that rhythm from that ethnic group from the country,” and that’s what connects to the audience. For someone on the outside, those rhythms are harder to hear, and in more contemporary music, they’ve lost that flavor--those traditional rhythms don’t emerge as much or as naturally as they did in the past, but it was a key part of classic Tanzanian music to have traditional rhythms. So you have traditional rhythms, you have that laid back feel- Dar is a very laid back city, so you had to kind of relax everyone, and that was a key part of the dansi sound. In addition to that, the Swahili lyrics added their own feel. It’s a different sound in Swahili than in say Lingala, which is what a lot of the Congolese music is sung in, or in French. The sound is a bit warmer sometimes, it’s more of a closer-to-the-ear sound, so it felt different to listen to Swahili sounds. The rhyming scheme was different. Where you emphasize guitar parts to connect the rhyming schemes in Swahili, it’s different than in the Congolese music. These aesthetic differences didn’t hide the fact that most Tanzanian bands were trying to emphasize the sound of the Congolese artists. They were intentionally, purposefully, trying to sound like the Congolese groups. And for their part, the Congolese artists did listen to the Tanzanian artists, and did pull some of the same sounds, melodies and rhythms, from Tanzanian music as well.

Could you play the Milimani park rhythm?

No, and I’ll tell you why. Part of my contention with these rhythms is, there is this rhythm (sings rhythm) which underlies much of the music; what different bands say is that they take that rhythm and they emphasize different feels by adding in the traditional sound. Here’s my problem though- when I’m hearing the traditional sound, and looking at the contemporary stuff, I’m not seeing them match up. And I think a lot being said about traditional music is a bit of nationalistic pride. It’s true, it’s there, and what I said is still accurate, they’re taking from traditional music, but it’s not in the way that I’m going to listen to the traditional song they took the music from and hear it. You wont.

Milimani Park did legitimately mix rhythms quite often. You just won’t hear a direct correlation between the traditional rhythm and the rhythm that appears in the recordings.

Okay, so in the 80s, it all goes to shit.

Yeah. Well, I do want to start back on one issue here, to get to the 1980s. After independence, most African countries, their economies started to boom. The 1960s was a good decade for many African countries, that story’s not always told, for a number reasons. The economies were doing well, many places were building schools, they were building hospitals, they were building all sorts of facilities, there was excitement for the country, “we’re newly independent.” That moves into the 1970s, and then a series of problems started to occur, from the price of natural resources starting to go up, such as oil. The price of oil doubles during the 1970s. That makes the costs of things in places like Tanzania very high. In Tanzania, because they had moved to socialism in the 1960s, that also means that importation of things through the government became more problematic during the 1970s. So all sorts of things were converging in the 1970s to make life a bit more difficult. In 1979 there was a spike in the price of oil, and by 1980, the cost of living, of buying rice or basic necessities like soap became extraordinarily problematic in Dar, really across Tanzania, as well as other countries. Zambia faced similar problems, Uganda, somewhat Kenya. So you have these countries facing these huge economic burdens, and they don’t know what to do. We don’t have the money to pay for the basic necessities that people need, people can’t get their basic staples on an everyday basis. By 1984, the Tanzanian government had decided to take a loan from the IMF and the World Bank. And what the loan said, was that according to these conditionalities, you have to follow certain protocols. You have to eventually open up your media airwaves, you have to stop censoring things, you have to privatize; in other words you need to move away from socialism. Now that didn’t all happen in 1984, it took a decade at least before these transformations started to occur, but we see in the 1980s the beginnings of what became the new trend in Tanzania, away from socialism, towards free markets. The first president of this newly independent, post-socialist Tanzania, was Ali Hassan Muni, and he took over from 1985 from Julius Nyerere. Nyerere was the first president of Tanzania, he had remained in power from 1961 to 1984. He was very popular, he was called the father of the nation. He really was key in uniting the country together. There’s no ethnic conflict in Tanzania to this day, in part because of Nyereye’s legacy. But socialism as an economic policy had failed in some regards; yes it had promoted many positive features but it had failed in allowing people to get basic needs. So Ali Hassan Muni comes in, and decides to allow anything to happen, he allows businesses to import, he allows people to get by without paying taxes on things, he basically just allowed things to occur. Not officially by the way- there was no speech that he gave that says, “Do whatever you want.” But he became known as a person who would allow you to do a lot. So this began a mentality in Tanzania called “bongo,” which means brains or wisdom. But it’s a slang term for doing anything to get by. You need bongo, you need your wisdom, to get by on a day to day basis. So we see in this 1980s period this growth of people doing anything to get by, whether it’s illegally importing materials, whether it’s selling things on the side, whether it’s having two or three jobs, which was technically illegal during the socialist period. Everything was supposed to be egalitarian, but now you could have some people having more wealth. But by the 1990s, the conditionalities of the World Bank and the IMF were starting to have effect. And the first major one, for the music economy, was the privatization or move towards independent recording studios and radio stations and television stations. There was no television station in Tanzania until 1995, none, zero, never, except for Zanzibar. So this meant that people didn’t have access to a national television. Yes they could have satellite, or they could buy cassette tapes, but most people didn’t have television. Now in 1995, we have television, we have radio stations, and we have a proliferation of recording studios, all starting to happen very, very quickly. The independent stations that emerged were very popular, these stations played Western music, RTD did not play Western music very often. So you had Western music, very popular songs. In fact one of the very first stations that formed did a purchasing spree, they went oversees and just bought all the things they could get from the local store in England. So they were hearing things from 1980s pop music, that hadn’t been heard in Tanzania before. Everyone loved it. MJ was HUGE. Because these were sounds and materials they hadn’t been allowed to hear. Or at least not in an easily accessible way.

So there hadn’t been distribution of Western music through pirate networks?

So, piracy of music started in the late 1980s, and there were two parts. Yes, you could get access to Western music through the piracy of music; and what would happen is that someone would bring an album from overseas, or it would be sent by mail, and then it would end up in the hands of someone who had a multiple cassette deck, and they would copy the album for you, and then you would take it with you, and maybe you could take that tape and make a duplicate recording of it. So yes, pirated recordings were being circulated, but they tended to be among wealthier or more middle class listeners, who had the means to get the albums from oversees and also the means to duplicate the album. It doesn’t become more commonplace with the average listener until the 1990s, this piracy of all these foreign materials. They would advertise in the newspapers by the way, you can see advertisements to get duplicated cassettes of famous albums, of Lionel Ritchie or MJ or what have you. But radio was different, because this meant those songs, in fact, newer songs, we didn’t need to wait for one guy to bring one album in from oversees, now we have radio stations purchasing in bulk a lot of records to play on the air, for anyone to listen to, anyone with a radio.

So going back a bit, when did cassettes first become ubiquitous?

Most people in Tanzania during the 1970s and 1980s did not have access to any machine that could play things back to them. Most people had radios, but most people didn’t have a record player or a cassette tape player, which emerged in the 1980s. You could get access to cassette tapes and cassette players as early as 1982, 83, not every common but they were there, they were around. But generally speaking, the bulk of the population didn’t have access to a record player or a cassette tape player, meaning that even if you released an album on cassette or duplicated an album on cassette, you wouldn’t reach a huge number of people. That all changed by the late 1980s, early 1990s, 91, 92, when a lot of young people started to become interested in hip-hop, for instance, and now, you really wanted to get access to a tape player. This became a hot commodity. You had to get a tape player and you had to get the hottest tapes coming from the United States, the LL Cool J’s or whoever else was popular at the time. So people would search out for cassette tapes and cassettes of internationally popular hip-hop music, and that translated in other genres too, RnB; Kenny Loggins was very popular for a time, Jim Reeves was always popular, but his cassette tapes became popular during this period; James Brown, Lionel Ritchie. All these artists started to find an audience in Tanzania, through a combination of 1980s piracy, 1990s piracy, and by the mid 1990s, through broadcast on these independent radio stations.

So, the popularity of recorded music in Tanzania started primarily through a thirst for international music that you couldn’t hear live.

There were artists who would performed in places like Kenya, international artists. In the 1960s James Brown and Aretha Franklin toured in Kenya. And of course the Congolese artists were more popular, so if you really wanted to hear these artists you could find them. But you weren’t going to see MJ; you weren’t going to see Kenny Loggins; you weren’t going to see any of these artists in Tanzania. But more importantly, because the RTD radio station would not play Western music as a matter of practice (although there was one radio show on one day of the week for a couple of hours where you could hear some of these things) for the most part you had no access to this international music until people started importing them, or more importantly, until independent radio comes around.

I want to go to the 80s and just try to talk about what happens to the network of state supported bands and musicians, and the set up of that system when the economic crisis really hits.

Through the 1970s and 80s, musicians would have their salaries paid for by a government agency, at least those that were affiliated with the government. But by the mid 1980s, that structure started to fall apart, in part because the government agencies didn’t have the funding in order to keep supplying salaries, health care, food and other resources to the bands. Now they kept the bands on, and the band member kept on being affiliated with them, but only because there were no other options. Nobody was making a lot of money from music in the late 1980s. But it was still dynamic, there were still competitions, there were still shows. I don’t want to give the impression that there was a major collapse in music, because there wasn’t, but it did become more of a struggle to afford basic necessities in life, because companies just couldn’t pay as much as they had in the past. So Milimani Park continues to play till today, but it has moved towards being independent. So does Otu jazz, which is now independent Msoma Ngoma.?? So there is this long transition, which took a long time, for these bands to remain active, but to become independent, where the government could no longer support them. But there’s still a military band, there’s still a police band, supported by government funds.

But Milimani Park, Otu Jazz, are the two biggest bands, but what happens to the smaller bands?

What happens to a lot of the smaller bands that were controlled by a government agency such as Vijana Jazz, they would also continue to perform, but the salaries would be low, so some of these artists would start to move to other bands, and the band itself would fall apart, because the musicians wouldn’t be as active. This period is difficult for a lot of these smaller bands to stay solvent. They just couldn’t do it, and because they couldn’t stay solvent, a lot of musicians left and found other work in other areas or other employment, and the band would reform occasionally, but it just wouldn’t be a regular, continually active group. This wasn’t even by the mid 1980s, but more the early to mid 1990s. But bands throughout the 1980s did okay.

There were also competitions in the 1980s, government sponsored competitions, and they were very popular at least until 1990s and you have to remember that if you recorded at RTD, if you won one of these competitions, or had a really successful live performance, you could maintain an audience quite easily, which would continue to generate some money. But keep in mind that because life was so difficult post 1985, a lot of people weren’t going to as many shows. So yes you would have an audience, but they wouldn’t pay as much, and they wouldn’t buy as much drink or food at a show. And so it did become more of a struggle for bands to keep the ticket prices and keep that income coming into the groups.

One of the points that you make in the book is that the government sponsorship of these bands creates this group of professional musicians. And I’m wondering if there is a reduction in professionalism because they started to go take other jobs.

It is important to note that the government sponsorship of bands allowed them to become extremely professional. We often assume that if the government controls something, it must lead to some really problematic forms of corruption, or only singing nationalist songs. But with the government controlling bands, bands and artists could simply compose and perform music, it was really a way to make them more professional. That’s my only job- that’s all I have to do, is to compose and do a good show and make sure that I’m attracting audience members. And because of that, music became a form of employment. If you go back to the 1950s, 1960s, music wasn’t a job. You were not a professional musician, you just couldn’t be because there wasn’t enough money to be made, and because there was a social stigma against music as not being a professional activity. But through government support it became more professional, through the influence of the Congolese artists, it became more professional, all of these hundreds of Congolese artists living and making a living through music made music more professional as well. A combination of government sponsorship and Congolese artists. When the economy started to collapse and the government could no longer support the bands, it didn’t really harm that professionalism necessarily, but it did mean that some artists had to leave to find other jobs. It also meant that some of the best artists migrated to the better bands. So that meant that you might lose some artists, who maybe weren’t good enough quality, sometimes, and they would go find work elsewhere. So what you would have are the remnants of some of the best musicians playing together in some of the best bands. Which may also be way Milimani Park or OUT Jazz or even Vijana Jazz and other groups were so popular, because they had some of the best musicians playing with them. But that’s also true among the independent groups like Maquis Original or OSS, they struggled in that 1980s period, but they were sometimes even more popular that the government-run bands, because they do things the government-run bands couldn’t, sing about other issues, or open up conversations to broader, not just national, but international topics, Congolese issues. Congolese audiences might just want to hear songs in Lingala, again, things that the Tanzanian bands couldn’t do. But as far as professionalism, that helped to generate a sense of professionalism. It was now a profession, and that was not true in the previous periods.

Then the 80s was also when Remmy was most active. Can we talk about him a little bit?

Remmy Ongala was probably the most famous single Tanzanian musician outside of Tanzania. He’s also highly regarded inside of Tanzania by many, although it should be recognized that he is controversial. For a long time the government did not like Remmy in Tanzania, in fact, he received a lot of problems in the country. Remmy is Congolese, born in the Congo, moved to Tanzania in the 1970s or 1980s, and started to play with all these groups until he formed his own band. And Remmy was a staunch supporter of the poor, he would sing songs for the poor about issues of poverty, about struggles of everyday life. I would often meet with Remmy because we got to know each other very well, and he told me that “There’s no point in singing about having nice cars if you yourself don’t have a nice car, or if people in your audience won’t get one. You need to sing about issues that the audience can relate to and understand.” And for Remmy that was issues of poverty, issues of struggling to survive. So when the 1980s problems were there, almost everyone was struggling to survive in some ways, just to get basic necessities. Remmy was singing about those, and he became hugely popular among a large contingent of people. He was also willing to be somewhat critical of the government and stand up to the government in a way that other bands were not. No other band or single artist could be said to have stood up to the government in so many ways as Remmy Ongala. For instance, at a government sponsored event, Remmy tells a story that he was asked to perform to the audience, and Remmy was a staunch supporter of the national government, the CCM, Chama Chama Punduzi, which means revolutionary party, so even though they didn’t like him sometime, he actually supported them. So he was willing to perform at a government sponsored event. But they pulled him aside and said, “Don’t sing this song, Mambo ya soxi, don’t sing it.” It means “things about socks,” which is a reference to condoms. They said, “we don’t want you to sing this song, but sing something else.” So Remmy gets up on stage and sings “Mambo ya soxi.” It was the first thing he sang when he got onstage. So he was willing to stand up to the government, and to say things that he felt were socially important. And the government had a mixed relationship with him. They used him to support the nationalist party, the CCM, but they wouldn’t allow him to become a Tanzanian citizen. I arrived at his house one day in 2001, and that was the day he had gained Tanzanian citizenship. So it took him decades to become officially Tanzanian, so even though the government promoted him as one of the no. 1 stars, and even though the government used him in some ways to promote themselves, the government still didn’t like the idea that this artist, who was still Congolese and singing about controversial issues, could be Tanzanian.

When you say that he was one of the few artists to stand up to the government, it suggests that in the 80s, as problems became more apparent, that censorship became more real.

I actually don’t think that’s true. In the 1980s, the government didn’t start to crack down more often on artists and what they were saying. Artists had for a long time learned to accommodate the wishes of the government, so even if they went into RTD to record, it wasn’t as if they were trying to hide the meanings of lyrics or maybe make something against the government. You wouldn’t do it. If you recorded at radio station or studios in Kenya, you also wouldn’t do it. It just wasn’t very common. Remmy was an exception. There were other artists who did record songs that were controversial against the government or said where we are going is wrong, but there weren’t as many as you would think. And I think that’s for a lot of reasons. For one, there was still a lot of support for people like Nyerere, and there was still a lot of support for the nationalist party, and people couldn’t always figure out who to blame. Is it the nationalist party, is it Nyerere, is it socialism, is it a combination of all these things. But I don’t think that people were really willing to say those things out loud. Remmy Ongala was, a few other artist were as well, but it wasn’t common until the 1990s, and then you have a boom, a huge number of artists willing to say whatever they want about the government, and that’s a trend that continues today. In fact, I would argue that there is a stronger sense of freedom of speech today in Tanzania than in some ways exists in popular music in the United States. And what I mean by that, is today artists can very publicly criticize the president, the president’s son (who’s also in politics) or whoever else, very openly, condemn policies that they’ve made, and reach a huge audience. In ways that I don’t know, or haven’t heard happening as much, say, in the US. Doesn’t mean you can’t do it of course in the US, that’s not my point. But it’s hard to imagine an artist going into a studio for the first time, recording a song anti- government, anti-president, and suddenly making it onto the national airwaves for everyone to hear in the United States. That happens regularly in Tanzanian these days. And it was a path partially opened up by the work of people like Remmy Ongala. It is also a path opened up by international governments saying, “We’re are not going to give you aid unless you create a better sense of freedom of speech.” There is a combination of issues that helped Tanzania become a very open- in some ways, there are caveats to that- but a very open society in terms of lyrical content in music.

Could you talk about one Remmy song besides “Mambo ya soxi”?

One song by Remmy Ongala is “Kilio chasamak,” it means the cries of the fish, and it’s a very famous and popular song. It’s a song about the rights of people who are poor. And what he’s arguing in the song is that everyone deserves to be respected including if you are poor, and what he is trying to argue, what he’s trying to show, is that it’s too easy to ignore the rights of those who are in poverty. Because you don’t see them, you can ignore them, they don’t have a lot of power, either economically or socially, and so you can ignore their rights. But just as you won’t hear the cries of a fish in water, it doesn’t mean that you should ignore the fact that they should be recognized. And that song, “Kilio chasamaki,” is a very important song in proclaiming the rights of the poor, and the needs to recognize the rights of the power. He has other songs like “Kifo,” which means death, and which was sung at his funeral a few years ago. But “Kifo” is also a song about how easily death can come to those who are in poverty, and it’s one of those powerful songs where he openly sings about what an everyday person living in Tanzania, not borne of wealth, can face when they experience things on just an everyday basis, just daily struggles for health, wellbeing, security, those types of things.

How did you meet him?

The first time I met Remmy Ongala, I went to his house. He lived just outside of the downtown, on the outskirts of town a bit. And we arrived at his house, and he has this huge metal gate, and on the front of the gate it says “uba oncoli,” which means dangerous dog, or severe dog- beware of dog, essentially. And it was this somewhat ominous welcome to Remmy Ongala’s home, because he had been this really outspoken, welcoming person for everyone. But he had this kind of gate that had big letters. One of his children came to the door, who was a teenager, and let us in. And Remmy was out so we sat with his wife, who is a British woman, and we sat with her for a while, and then Remmy came back. And Remmy is a very personable figure, he’s very welcoming (that’s why the gate was so ominous), and we sat down and he invited us immediately to eat with him, and we sat down together. He had never met us before. I was a young researcher, told him what I was doing my research on, and we just sat there and talked, as if we had been there before, as if we had been old friends. And every time I came round his house, or saw him perform live, he’d always talk openly with me. And I think there was a general acknowledgement that he was not without controversy. A lot of his former band-mates criticized him, in the way that he paid musicians, in the way he helped support musicians. And some people say that those musicians left his group in part because he wasn’t paying them well. Now, those might just be rumors, but they contradict the warm personality that you would encounter when you met him. He was generally a nice, kind person. And he always helped me with whatever questions that I had. The second time I met him, for instance, I asked him to show me his contracts that he had signed with Polygram in Kenya, and other companies in Tanzania. Now- most artists are a little bit hesitant to show you sensitive contractual information. And he brings out the contract and shows it to me, and I’m looking at it over, trying to understand it. And I ask “Can I make a copy of this?” And he said “Oh yeah- there’s a copying place just around the corner, go ahead.” So I left the place with all these contracts, I made the copies and then I came back. He was just generally a very trusting person in that way. And maybe he saw something in me and he wasn’t as trusting with other people, and that’s possible, but generally we got along quite well, he was a very, very kind person.

So by way of comparison, do you think that you could talk briefly about what the 80s were like in the countries around Tanzania, just how they dealt with the economic problems that beset Tanzania.

It’s a tough time in those countries. In the 1980s you have Moi as president in Kenya. He becomes much more dictatorial in the mid 1980s- he’s not as open to a lot of music, he censors a lot. A lot of artists are releasing subversively these cassettes to kind of distribute their messages, but then they are being confiscated. He’s arresting people… it’s not a time when a lot of artists feel comfortable in Kenya. Performing wise, but also compositionally, and there are many who feel differently about that, but as a general practice it’s a very difficult time. The Congo is similar because of Mobutu, he’s still in power. Life is difficult, a lot of artists have fled to France, or have moved to Tanzania, predominantly. Uganda has the Idi Amin period, which is also problematic, and that’s another reason why Tanzania struggled in the 1980s. Because they were the ones who kicked out Idi Amin, they fought that conflict and sent soldiers and arms and helped kick Idi Amin out, and it meant that they depleted their resources, their savings, on fighting that war. And by 1980 they were cash poor, they didn’t have the resources to buy needed materials or to pay employees, that was actually a big problem. Leadership, is really the short answer.

What is the impact on the music scene in the other East African countries?

Because there were so many conflicts with the government in Kenya, and because there were so many ethnic conflicts in Kenya, Kenya is a country that till this day is divided about ethnicity. Tanzania doesn’t have the same problem, in the same way, but in Kenya you will have conflicts over ethnicity. Some of the elections in the near recent past show that. Those trends emerged in the 1980s much more problematically. Daniel Arac Moi is a very controversial figure…. Bands are uncomfortable performing live, corruption starts emerging, piracy starts emerging, you have a lot of artists losing out on royalties they would have received in the past. The major record labels that are there start to lower their prices to compete with piracy, and when they start to raise their prices again, people who purchase music are furious and refuse to buy those albums, so those companies collapse, which leaves pirates in control of so much of the music scene, and the record labels that did stay really struggled to maintain credibility and maintain sales. Live music was also problematic just because of the dangers of living in Nairobi. There was a nickname for Nairobi called Nai-robbery, which was in essence showing that it was a very dangerous place to live. That reputation has changed quite a bit more recently.

In the Congo similar problems were occurring- not necessarily with crime, but with the oppressive nature of government that made it impossible to make a successful living unless you were really pro government or pro what was happening in the government, so it collapsed what could have been a highly successful music economy. In Ghana, there was another situation in Ghana, where Rawlings comes to power in the 1970s, 1980s, and [instituted a curfew) and artists aren’t allowed out past that time- no one is allowed out past that time, so that collapsed the live music scene and it moved into churches, a trend that continues to this day. But in Tanzania, yes, it was a struggle to live, yes it was difficult to stay in bands, and people really had a hard time getting basic necessities, but live music continued to go on. Not at the rate of the early 1980s, and certainly not at the rate of the 1990s, but you could always go see a show of some of the more prominent bands in the city.

Do you think that part of the survival of live music in Tanzania, is because the live show is so much more important than records, so that the collapse of the record labels- I’m thinking of Nigeria, when those big labels pulled out, it really damaged the music economy. But in Tanzania they had nothing to lose in a certain sense.

Because Tanzania did not have a major record label in the country, and because they didn’t even have independent record labels in the country, when music economies started to collapse, say the major labels pulling out of Kenya or Nigeria, it didn’t have as much of an impact on Tanzania. Music that was recorded was meant for publicity, that music continued to circulate through piracy, in fact it circulated even more widely. Tanzanian pirates who started to emerge in the 1980s circulated Tanzanian music more widely than had ever occurred in any legitimate form. So now, piracy is a form of promotion, artists- yes they lament the piracy of their music- but as promotion, live music goes on, people keep attending shows, it’s all good. So from the standpoint of Tanzanians, the 1980s was a time of proliferation of the live performance into the 1990s, where other economies were collapsing- that’s Ghana, Nigeria, Kenya- live music scenes didn’t exist as much in those countries, but in Tanzania, live music continued.

In 1994, the Tanzanian government passed a new law that allowed for independent radio and television stations to emerge. And this law was quite significant because it meant that for the first time in the post-independence history of the country, you were now allowed to start your own television or radio station. Television did not exist in Tanzania at all in the previous periods. So people could now start watching TV from a local broadcaster. And the first big independent radio or TV station was ITV. They imported a lot of music from oversees, and it became really popular, people were really loving it, these western sounds, and it was dominating the airwaves; it was new and exciting, and they started to drop a lot of that local music. So there was a period in ‘95, ‘96, when local music was hindered in some ways by radio, by these newly independent radio stations. And then came a point when these new stations decided that they needed more content, they needed better content, and what surprised them is that when they got these recordings from local artists, they were really poor. They couldn’t play them at the same time they would play the western hits, because if they did, there would be a jarring change from these high quality, clear recording from CDs to cassette tapes that had sat in the sun too long with warped parts in them. You just couldn’t link them together. So artists were concerned about not getting air time, and DJs were concerned that the quality wasn’t good enough. So from that, there was an increasing desire among artists to find better ways to record, and it just so happened that at this time, (we are talking ‘96, ‘97) a few independent artists started to turn towards recording. They found that they could import recording devices from oversees, and usually they could do it without paying hefty taxes, although sometimes they were paying the same amount in taxes as they did in equipment, so it would be 100 percent markup by the time they imported it.

And so they’d bring this equipment in, and they started recording. And they did it for free initially. “Let’s experiment, we’ll work on making some beats and sounds and you can lay a track over it.” And mostly that was RnB, hip-hop, rap, those genres known locally as bonga flava. Those styles were the ones that generated predominatly music engineers, known locally in Tanzania as producers. So more of recording studios started to form- just five in the first few years, then six, seven. Some engineers had better studio equipment, some had better skills. One had trained in Europe, one had worked with someone in Europe before coming back to Tanzania, but most were just learning on the fly, listening to recordings heard on the radio or CD, then coming up with their own methods for doing the same or similar sounds. There was a lot of copy of production styles.

Can you give some names?

One of the most famous in this period was Master J. He studied in England for a time. Had a roommate or a friend who owned some recording equip, and learned from him before returning to Tanzania. There was P-Funk. He’s changed his name countless times over the years but mostly he’s known as P-Funk. His dad is Dutch, I think, and half Tanzanian, so he goes back and forth quite often. And he was actually trained in a school. But the earliest one, the earliest studio that was formed was part of a Catholic, Jesuit facility, called the Don Bosco School or House depending on what part of it it was. And they had a Don Bosco Studio. And so all of these studios existed and were there. And first rappers started to record, then RnB artists, zouk artists, all these different styles. And now you have independent radios, independent studios, but those things weren’t working to help the dance bands, the taarab bands. They weren’t recording them yet. So at one point, Master J in particular set up a studio to record those dance bands. And other producers did the same. And this meant that now you had high quality recordings of those artists- new recordings, and those would air on RTV. Because, keep in mind, RTD was not going to let their recordings to be aired on other radio stations, and that was the only other recording studio in the country. So bands could keep recording there, but if you wanted to be on the hot, independent radio stations, you needed another avenue. And that avenue was bridged by these independent producers coming in and really experimenting with sound. Some of them are really talented, and when you walk into their studios and see them working, its fascinating to see how they put together, with really rudimentary equipment, amazing, technically convincing songs that really fit into the mix with what else is being played on the radio. It’s a challenge. Some now are working with things like pro-tools and computers, a lot of them record on keyboards and use drum kits. But it’s almost as if the producers- remember, Tanzanians call them producers, but they’re actually engineers in the American vernacular- they sit in the studio, they have to know how to use computers, mixing boards, all the technology and wiring, they need to know how to play instruments, they need to know how to compose. An RnB artist comes into the studio, they don’t know how to play an instrument, it’s up to the engineer or producer to actually lay the full foundation of these songs down, that’s the producers job. And they’re given so little credit in some regards for the amount of composition that they do, that it’s really disheartening. Because they are a catalyst for producing hits.

So I don’t want to say that it’s a wholesale adoption, but it seems like it’s an adoption of the American hip-hip model of production.

It is, although even in the American hip-hop scene, I don’t think it’s always one person that’s just creating all the sounds. They might borrow sounds from other people, or they might have a performer lay down a track. Yes, they are very skilled at manipulating sounds and playing the keyboard, but they don’t need to play bass, guitar, drums. That isn’t as common here. And they really need to know multiple genres of music. Hip-hop engineers in the US might just do hip-hop. But in Tanzania, you might do hip-hop, RnB, zouk, dansi, taarab. You can do anything. Anyone comes your way, you have to have the skillset to produce them.

And that acceleration of studios has continued to the present day?

With a few studios emerging in the 1990s, it started to proliferate in the late 1990s as people got excited about this idea of using technology to make your own sounds. It was tough though. Because where do you start buying your equipment? You need to buy it overseas, which means you often have to know someone who has either traveled or is traveling overseas. Or you just need to get lucky and find someone who is selling equipment locally, which occasionally happens. By the mid 2000’s, there are over one hundred independent recording studios in Dar alone. Remember, that’s moving from one government-run recording studio before 1994. From 1995-2005, you have the proliferation to over one hundred. And that’s only professional studios, not counting the small studios in peoples homes that are also proliferating, perhaps in the several hundreds, and those we know about as well, but they tend not to work very commercially. They record at home, more like a home studio, and they don’t sell the music always.

What happens to these recordings then?

a- (on the tape with marlon.) (9:44) ???

It’s fascinating to hear that there’s room for more music. I grew up and you grew up in essentially a music-saturated market. You can listen to more music, but there isn’t going to be a radical expansion of the amount of music that is consumed. But hearing about it going from one recording studio to three-hundred, and then to have those bands working in the city, means that there are more people making more money and more people going to more shows.

There has been an expansion of popular music, of music generally across the African continent. Now you have music scenes in Nigeria, Kenya, Tanzania just booming, almost oozing with so much music, but I would hesitate to say that not all artists are doing well. Because even if you have a hit song, that song might not generate enough money for you to maintain yourself as a musician. You might have to drop music and go somewhere else. We see that happening a lot, the same way we see that happening in the United States. So it’s not a surefire thing to be a musician. Yes, there’s a lot of music being recorded but it’s a challenge. I will say that a lot of these artists who are recording are also excited about this expansion. It’s sort of being given s new life to record, to be on air. It’s exciting! We have, in Tanzania alone, almost 33 percent of the population under the age of 24. That’s a huge number of people who are young, and they all desire media outlets to find out about what’s happening internationally, but also they want music that reflects what their interest are. So you have popular artists like Diamond, who is the most popular artist in East Africa. He is sort of an RnB style singer, and he sings about love and those topics, but he is very well known, generating about $3,000 per show, that’s a lot for East Africa, and he’ll do that several times a week, and he can earn $20,000 a month, just by performing live. And, more importantly, for audiences seeing something like that, to see someone they respect on TV, in music videos, it’s exciting. If there is one thing that is new and exciting about African economies these days, it’s the music videos. They’re so well shot and highly produced, and gorgeous to look at when you see them in their original form, the ones you see online have been degraded a bit. But the originals are just- they’re like music, they’re really well shot and well produced. So when you see one of your own neighbors, from your own communities, someone from your town or country, up on TV in these music videos, up on stage with these fancy costumes and fancy lights, on records, performing all across East Africa, it’s really powerful to a lot of audiences. So where indie radio focused mostly on foreign music in the initial years, there has been a transformation in some stations, in focusing in part on local music. Now some of that transformation has been done by force, some radios stations said “We need to play more local music,” but it’s also been by desire of local audiences, to hear music that speaks to them. And there is a criticism, a lot of people levy it at RnB and rap artists, they’re just copying the West, they’re trying to be American, they’re trying to be European. But I think they’re missing the underlying importance of these artists, because they’re doing something that is really a catalyst for young people to understand what’s happening in their world, and they’re doing it in a way that connects to the other sounds that they’re hearing. The local artists are almost intermediaries, between what they hear from the western world and what they hear locally. It’s kind of a way to have these worlds, the international and the local, merge with these stars. Like Diamond, or Professor J, or Inspector Harun, who has come out with a new hit, just all these people, there’s a lengthy list. And they all have new and interesting things to say. And that’s one of the great things, no matter what you have to say, you can find a radio station that will play you, you will find a recording studio to record at. There are outlets for you.

Can you talk a little about the process by which the Tanzanian groups transformed their sound to sit on the radio. In your book, you wrote that a lot of the stations had mandated quotas of African music, so they would play Congolese music. So what did they local artists change aesthetically?

Well that depends on the genre. Let’s talk about dansi. Dansi bands, to get on the radio, had to increase the quality of the studios, that was one. A lot of times, dansi bands recorded on really cheap instruments or inexpensive amps, and that wouldn’t work on recordings. So they really needed to go to to the right studios, and do better recordings with better sounds, better harmonies. And what producers would try to do- they would try to figure out what it was that excited audiences to see a band live, and they would try to replicate that in the studio, and that was one element. How do you make these more popular than the Congolese songs on the radio? Let’s make them sound a bit like a live show, but with better sound. That way, listeners can here all the parts, the lyrics and the instrumentation, but they can hear the spacing, that space between the different singers that just occurs naturally, acoustically in a live show. And they really worked on that, how to place singers in rooms, or how to acoustically make it so that in recordings, you can really identify the main singers either or different singers, or how they overlapped together. They also changed some of the sound a bit. Keyboards became more dominant in a lot of bands because they could replace the saxaphone and trumpets that had dominated dansi for a long time. The keyboard became that vehicle through which you could have accurate, reliable sound on every recording, on every live show, that wasn’t as reliable with the horn section for various reasons. The third was to really make the rhythm, to make the sound, either a bit more simplied or a bit more poppy. Because you want to attract some of the same listeners who were interested in the Western songs, but to hear the popness, the openness of the Western song, they wanted to hear that in local music as well. Then a fourth, which is mostly common in RnB singing, a bit in gospel and a bit in other genres, but mostly in RnB and rap, and that is auto-tuning. And there’s a very common practice these days to fixing singers voices through auto-tuning to the point that they no longer hide it, they just jack up the auto-tune, and you can hear this modulation in the voice through the auto-tune; that’s become a prevalent aesthetic more recently. But this all starts in the studios, all these practices are engineers working hard to make a hit in the radio. They’re consciously listening to the radio all the time, listening to Western music all the time, and they’re taking that and trying to apply that in some way to bands and artists who come in, and they’re really working to make that happen.

So that’s a huge change in Tanzanian music, because instead of the band making records to attract people to the live show, and the live sound being the testing ground, I imagine they’re changing their live sound to replicate the records.

Yes. Particularly for bongo flava. But you’re right about what you said initially. Most artists, historically, would have to come up with a hit song in a live venue before they recorded it. Now most bands go into the studio with what they think is a hit song, record it, and then air it, and then play it live. It happens in reverse. Because you want to generate a bigger audience by having the song on the radio before you perform. And yes, in live shows, artists do change the way they perform based on recordings. In bongo flava, genres like rap and RnB, they rely on the recordings for their performances. They put the CD in, it plays a backing track, they rap and sing over it; that’s very common. In Ghana, they just play the backing track and lip-synch over it. But bands themselves, they do change the sound a bit to come up with something cleaner. There’s been an increased effort to buy better equipment, to have better equipment at live shows, to have better PA systems, to have lighting systems. One thing that’s been completely missing from all this discussion is dancing: Dancing is a significant part of live music in all Tanzania. It doesn’t matter whether it’s a dance show or a rap show or a taarab show, you have to both get people to dance, then depending on the type of group you are, you either need to dance or have dancers who are part of the show. And some groups in the dansi genre, all these dansi bands have multiple dancers, 15-20 dancers that do heavily choreographed routines that are just fantastic. And those dancers work exclusively- That’s their job, to work on coming up with the best choreography for this week’s show. Each week they change the choreography. It’s never the same- Yes, similar elements each week, but they keep varying it, keep changing it. And people try to get into the bands to be dancers, but it’s a real challenge, because you have to be very good, and if you come they’ll say “Do this move, do this move, do this move,” and if you can’t do those moves, forget it, you’re out, there are other people lined up to be dancers. And if you can do that, you aren’t going to be doing well. You need to get people to dance.

What is doing well?

Well, I’ll answer this question in two ways. Music is doing well, but artists are not doing well, with the exception of a few. Musicians like Diamond, they make a lot of money from their shows. There are a few other people like that in this bongo flava genre. A band like African Stars, who is a well-known, highly regarded local band. They are well managed, well produced, they have good quality songs, they make T-shirts, they have fan clubs, they have all types of things going on with them. It doesn’t mean that you as an artist will be wealthy, but you can probably buy some better clothes, get good food on the table, live in a better place. But it’s really the bongo flava artists who drive nice cars, buy homes for themselves and their families, travel internationally, go to shows internationally. But it isn’t all of them- only a handful. So music is doing well, a few artists are doing well, most artists themselves are struggling. Particularly older artists, there’s no pensions for older artists. Healthcare is abominable for most artists. They can’t get access to doctors or prescription drugs. So there is a real struggle on a day to day basis with older artists or people who made their career on music, once you reach a certain age, and people won’t go see your live shows anymore, what do you do. You’ve depended your whole life on this, but there isn’t anything else to fall back on.

That’s really interesting. So… If I’m a successful bongo flava musician- not a superstar but successful- what does my day look like?

If you are a successful bongo flava artist, you tend to be managed by a number of people. For instance, you may have a clothing line affiliated with you, and you might sell clothes in a store, or you may have a designer label, so you may meet with those people in part of the day. You might do an interview in local newspapers, you might shoot videos for part of your day. Each day, you spend the day meeting with all sorts of people who are helping to create you as a brand, helping to brand who you are, and market you to a broader audience. And these days, to do that, you need to have more resources. You can’t just perform music. So you might go to the recording studio and lay down a track, you might go the radio show to do an interview, you might do a soundcheck at a big show you have coming up. You might also be flying to another country to go to a concert and perform. That’s very common these days, to perform throughout the region and internationally. You might meet with people who want to do some other form of marketing like a sponsor. For instance, a cellphone company wants to put you up in an advertisement, you might go and shoot the ad; they want you to do a promotion on TV, you might go on TV. There is very little that you wont be part of if you’re trying to publicize yourself and create a consumable identity, that people want to see and hear on a daily basis. And if you drive through cities like Dar, you will see gigantic billboards with artists all over the city, and usually the artists you see are some of the most popular artists of the time. So it could be a Kodita Koba, a very famous taarab singer, or it could be Ay, who is a very famous RnB, rap artist. Or it could be somebody else, but the point is that you need that sponsorship to help fuel your popularity, but also to benefit financially. So an artist, in a given day, could meet with any of those people. They could go to the copyright artist to deal with a copyright issue; they register their work. It’s usually nonstop, what they’re involved with.

How often would you perform in a week?

Bongo flava artist, dansi artits, mchiriku artists, they all perform at different rates. Dansi groups, that is from the old style dansi to the more contemporary, Congolese influenced dansi, perform 4,5,6,7 times a week. That doesn’t mean every day, but sometimes they do two shows in a single day, a Saturday afternoon show and an evening show, a Sunday morning, Sunday evening show. So they perform a lot. Practice Tuesday, Wednesday that sort of thing. They usually have Mondays off, there’s not much happening live music-wise on Monday. Bongo flava artists like to perform less to try to get larger audiences at the shows they do perform. While someone like Diamond might perform a lot of shows, they’re traveling great distances to perform a lot of shows, but he may only perform once every 6 months in Dar. I don’t know that for sure with Diamond, but they don’t tend to perform very often in the same location if they can help it, because it will dilute their ability to attract large audiences. With taarab they’re performing regularly as well, 5,6 times a week, but a bit less than dansi.

Then mchiriku- It’s a genre of music that started in the 1980s, very much affiliated with the poorer areas of the city. They use a Casio keyboard as their main sound. Doesn’t matter if half the keys are broken, as long as it creates some sound, you can get the beginnings of mchiriku. You have traditional drumming percussion instruments. You usually have a stool that one for the performers sits on and hits so you get one of those high pitched, strong percussion sounds; you often have dancers at the show, you often have a tambourine, then you have dancers and singers. And this is mchiriku, and it’s a very popular style of music, particularly among the urban poor in Dar. And there are mchiriku shows going on every night of the week, usually Friday, Saturday and Sunday that you find mchiriku. But they’re very popular among a certain clientele. They’re hard to find, so even when I say that there are several hundred clubs in Dar, these are not included; mchiriku doesn’t perform in clubs. They perform in people’s homes, in open spaces, wherever they can find a place to play. And they use really rudimentary amplifiers and equipment.

And that started in the 80s?

The early 80s, when the Casio keyboards really started to come in. And they look for the same Casio keyboards, you know the one that have the “Haha” sound on it? That keyboard, that DX7 or whatever they were. That’s what they search for, and they keep repairing the old ones because they can. A lot of the bands, like the one I worked with a lot, which was called Mvita Dancing Troupe, a father started it and a son took it over when the father decided he didn’t want to do it anymore. And so you keep it within the family for several generations potentially.

And do they make records?

They do, and they do sell some, but it’s not a big market, and there are only some groups that I’ve seen go to the point of recording. Most just rely on live music. But they’re really good- Not only are they good to listen to, they’re fun, they’re energetic, they’re lively. There is a bit too much overt sexuality for most Western audiences: There’s a lot of sexualized dancing, but the lyrics are very powerful, very meaningful, about what is going on in the poor areas of the country. And I think western audiences like it because it’s so different from the other music that they’re used to hearing from the same region.

In you book you said that it had been more popular in the early 90’s and then fell…

It’s back up again. Since the book came up. That’s the thing with popular music. Mchiriku really grew in popularity through the 1990s, and then had a major drop off point at the same time that record sales boomed for other types of music, and it may have gone down because it didn’t have that marketable end of recorded music. But even though it went down in the popular imagination, people were still going to mchiriku shows quite often. If you want to hire a band, you’re not hiring one of the big bands, you’re hiring an mchiriku group. If you’re getting married and you want a band? You hire these guys. Not for the wedding of course, but for the bachelor party equivalent- They’re called kitchen parties for women, those type of things.

Jagwa music has gotten press.

Yes. They’re very good. Jagwa music is a band produced by Werner Graebner, who’s produced many records from East Africa. And the group is a popular mchiriku group that has now toured in many parts of the world, and has a significant following. I don’t want to say use, but it’s significant for the type of music it is?. And I think they’ve cut out some of the overt sexuality, but it is still true to what happens at a lot of mchiriku shows, but the difference is that they’re performing on stages, and at mchiriku shows they usually sit somewhere, the corner of a house, plug into some outlet somewhere and they play, it’s not usually on a stage like that. Jagwa’s great; there are other bands that are great too, but that’s a good version of the music.

This period of the 90s and when records start to sell.??? When does that happen? When do records really start to sell?

Albums started to sell, partially through piracy, and partially through radio. But when copyright law emerged in 1999, it created an increased impetus for artists to record. So now you have them put better work into their recordings, which creates bigger demands for the recordings, because they’re better, they sound better. And they’re releasing some of their hits before they perform them, changing some of the patterns. But anyways, copyright law is introduced in 1999. There had been a boom in interest in Tanzanian music because of piracy. The people who had distributed music through the 1990s had created an enormous network of influence throughout eastern Africa: Malawi, Zambia, Kenya, Uganda. It was all Tanzanian distributors who moved music- I mean moved hundreds and hundreds of artists through different regions. I should say thousands, thousands of cassettes of artists would be sent to Kenya, thousands more being sent to Uganda. And we know this because in raids of certain places we find boxes with thousands of copies of a single album being moved to another country. So, let’s say you are in Uganda and you release an album. A person in Uganda will send the album to the distributor, illegally of course. They will then copy, and move that product back. So what this did was to record the legitimate recording industry in a number of countries, but it also created this bigger demand for music. As an artist, more people were interested in music than before. So people did not purchase albums as a matter of practice. But now through piracy, you start to purchase albums. They’re cheap, they’re readily available, and I can collect some music that I really like. I can play it at home, I can play it at school, I can play it at some other place. And now we are starting to build some momentum for a commercialized recording industry. But that was through piracy, and so artists still knew they weren’t making money from this, and weren’t really convinced that piracy would help them benefit musically. Piracy was more like a tool for publicity, but it wasn’t always seen that way, it was also seen as a huge detraction from the amount of money an artist could make. Now, when the 1999 copyright law came out, there was a real crackdown on the piracy of Tanzanian music. Now, forget about Western music, you pirated that stuff like crazy. You just didn’t care. You just pirated, pirated, pirated. In fact, Congolese artists who came to Tanzania were always amazed by the number of their albums that they saw on the streets. But the Tanzanian artists did try to push for increased legislation and increased enforcement of copyright law, and they put increased interest on their own recording, because those same distributors who pirated music would also pay royalties now to each artist, through these agreements that started to emerge from 2001-2-3-4. And these agreements essentially were: “I will copy your albums for you, and I will stamp with my stamp and you will stamp with your stamp, and then I will pay you a royalty on every one of these cassettes that were sold.” And this was so artists could assure- If I didn’t see both stamps, this could be a potential pirated album. And it also meant that the distributor had to pay for every single one of those tapes that were duplicated. So artists started to make some money, they were paid an initial upfront fee- A couple thousand shillings, maybe a couple hundred bucks eventually, and then, overtime, they’d make a second payment if more albums were made. But with artists who sold 50, 75, 1000 copies, they were making a decent amount of money from their album sales, and this is from 2001 to 2008. So artists, mostly bongo flava artists, could make a good living just from the sale of their albums. That all changed with digital files.

It’s important to note that artists did not make a lot of money from albums from independence in 1961 until 2001, because albums were used as a form of publicity, particularly in Tanzania. Now you would make some money say, from recording in Nairobi, in which case you received a royalty. Remi Ongala, for instance, received a royalty for his albums. He also recorded oversees, and he received royalty for that. So you could receive royalties outside the market in Tanzania, but for those based in Tanzania, the money was minimal, if anything, from any album they made. It was all publicity. Piracy came about, continued the trend, but artists were mad because they considered that even worse than a form of publicity, because they felt they were being ripped off, because the distributors were making so much money. So finally, in 2001, right after the copyright law had passed, artists started to make a little bit, bongo flava artists particularly, started to make some money, to earn something. Dansi bands also started to earn some money. Suddenly, you started to see a financial reward for your album, something that had never really existed in any tangible form. There was one exception: When international record companies recorded in Tanzania, they would pay royalties. And for some artists, that was the first time they saw royalties. For instance, Globestyle, when they record in Zanzibar, they distributed royalties on the street to people, that was one of the first time they saw royalty payments. Now it’s the 2000s, people are making money; 2008 comes about, and more young people are consuming music through their cellphones or through their computers. I don’t mean downloading from online, I mean they are sending songs to each other, or more commonly, they’re taking memory cards from their cellphones or other ones, going to the market places, inserting the card into a computer, and downloading hours ands hours worth of music for a couple of thousand shillings. 10 dollars, 20 dollars. You insert that in your cellphone, and you have essentially a digital music player through which you can listen to hours and hours of digital music, and none of which is paying royalties back to the artist for the albums that have been recorded. So from 2008 (which is kind of an arbitrary date) to now, album sales have plummeted, CD sales have plummeted, and more and more people are relying on memory cards, cellphones, these technologies to listen to and consume music.

Now there is another benefit to copyright law, that artists get royalties from the airing of their music on radio stations and hotels and bars, this public performance royalty, but in Tanzania, it has had many problems with corruption, and not many people feel like they are getting their just due through the payment of their royalties. So album sales drop, music is being consumed at an equally high level, but artists are not benefiting from that. So to make up for that loss in sales, they go to other avenues, marketing themselves, being an actor in films, receiving sponsorships, selling clothes, selling shoes, selling Tshirts, whatever, but trying to explore as many avenues as possible.

So money has just been pulled out of the ecosystem.

From what everyone has told me, and it’s hard to get statistical data, but in surveys that I’ve done, no one is making money from album sales, or even from the royalties that are supposed to be paid from the copyright society of Tanzania.

Can we talk about the establishment of a network of pirates in the 1980s, and how that ties in? This is fascinating to me, that during the socialist era, when, as you said, most people didn’t have playback devices, the idea of music as something that you buy and store in your collection. And I’m wondering how that was established?

Throughout Tanzania’s history, music was never consumed in the same way that we might understand it, say, in the United States. People did not buy several albums, several cassettes, and then store them in their house, and then pick from them and listen to them. What usually happened was that you would have a couple albums that you really liked, you played them until they broke, then you tossed them out. And if you wanted to hear them again, you would buy it again. You wouldn’t maintain a record collection. That wasn’t true for Indian Tanzanians- they sometimes had record collections. Or the British ex-pats, they did have record collections. But for most Tanzanians, you just wouldn’t have a collection of music or recorded materials. When piracy started to emerge, it became much easier to purchase a wide variety of music. I don’t want to say that you would suddenly find a house filled with thousands of records, that’s not something that happened. But you did have people who would have dozens of dozens of albums. And it would sort of show off a piece of their identity. “Oh I have that album. I definitely have that album. It’s a good one, isn’t it?” And then you might be able to bring it to a friend’s house and listen to it, and that exchange and the movement of music through the albums themselves became more prevalent, and that’s for a number of reasons. That’s because the albums were more easily accessible through the piracy of the music, but also the technology, the cassette decks, their prices had come down enough by the late 1980s, 1990s, that people could purchase these more widely. They were very commonly held in people’s homes, just like record players were commonly held in the previous period.

When piracy started to grow, and when people started to see this market, it was the same time that the second president of Tanzania came, Ali Hassan Muni, the person who just allowed anything to go, anything to happen. And piracy was one of those things that was allowed to go on. The same people who became involved in piracy were the ones who had established significant networks of exchange through a number of places, because they were traders in all sorts of goods and resources, and had been for generations. They were usually- although not exclusively- people who had come from India to live in Tanzania. They were officially Tanzanian, and had started these trading business long ago, and were distributing music and selling music in the past, but now went a different route, and decided that they were going to duplicate. And if you ever walked into the rooms where these guys were copying, you would see hundreds and hundreds of cassette decks duplicating music. And that’s what they used as their base to duplicate music and distribute out to all these networks. And they would have networks everywhere. They would have families in India sending over the big hits from the Mumbai film industry, the biggest Bollywood hits. They would have someone in Canada sending over the biggest hits from the US and North America, or someone in England. They would receive those cassettes, duplicate them, send it out. Then they also had contacts in Malawi, Zambia, Kenya, Uganda, sending popular music from those areas, which they would then duplicate, and send back out. So they became a central point through which to distribute all sorts of music. And that’s also what made music more consumable. It wasn’t just that you could find one major album, you could find dozens of major albums that were popular all over the world. People that showed me their music collections- I’d walk into people’s houses and they’d show me. And sometimes it’d be all American country music, particularly the Kenny Loggins, the Jim Reeves, that we’d talk about before. And Lionel Ritchie, who would fit in their too. Somehow, the Lionel Ritchie and the Reeves- they all went together. And so music fans would show me these collections, but there would be no Tanzanian music. Or you would walk into another music fan’s house, and you’d look at his music collections, and it would be all local music. You got to develop your own identity for what you saw as important through your own music collection. But that all emerged through, in part, through piracy.

So was it a relatively rapid development?

No. It wasn’t a relatively rapid development. Part of it was through the influence of hip-hop, and through the idea that we need to listen to as many songs and different beats as we can, so we need a collection, a representation of the best artists. The Eric B and Rakim, the Ice-T the Doctor Dre’s; all those different artists. You needed to have a representation, so you’d keep a collection. So through piracy, through the influence of hip-hop, those things merged, but it took time. What’s amazing these days is that through the digital distribution of music, legal or illegal, is that now you can have access to an even larger market of music. But there is one interesting thing: some people will maintain their collections either through several memory cards, or a hardrive full of music, but there is a legacy of the past, where people will take a memory card, listen to everything that’s on it, take it back to the market, erase it, and load it with all new songs. They have no record of the previous songs that they listened to, and that’s fine. So I don’t want to say that everyone in Tanzania collects music- absolutely not. There are some who consume music in the exact same way. Which is: it’s a temporary part of my life in this moment, and once that’s over, I get rid of it, and get new material, and that’s common too. Both of those trends are happening at the same time.

So the commodification. It’s still a different form of commodification.

Yeah. It’s a different form. It’s more ephemeral, and less permanent.

So these pirates, when they distribute Tanzanian music, in terms of making Tanzania a central point for East African music, you said that they actually distributed Tanzanian music further through East Africa. What was the impact of that wider distribution on the Tanzanian artists themselves?

So, we should say that piracy isn’t as prevalent now, as it was with tape. The piracy now is more the school kids, mostly school kids who collect all this music, and then they put it on their computers, and then people come by and download it and that’s a network that’s emerged. I would say that there are two things: if you ask any Tanzanian artist about piracy during this period when tapes and CD were being pirated, they will ultimately say that they lost tremendous amounts of royalties, that it hurt their careers, that it was detrimental to their livelihood. And all of which can be argued to be true. But there is another side to the story in which piracy helped to promote their careers to a much wider audience, it helped to make them more popular. For a few artists, though not everyone, this meant that they had a resurgence of careers in places that they didn’t have before. To give an example, taarab music, mostly considered to be a coastal form of music: Zanzibar, Tanga, Dar, these areas are thought to the hubs of taarab. During the heyday of music piracy, the late 90s, maybe a bit of the 2000s, taarab began to be popular in many other areas of the country, including Dodoma. Dodoma is the capital of the country, it’s in the central region, and if you go there, it’s sort of this dusty town that doesn’t have too much. But if you walked in there in 2000, looking for cassettes, you would be able to find almost anything of taarab music. Why? It didn’t make any sense. It was a coastal genre of music that had never been consumed by this population on the same level in the past, but now was being widely consumed, and was considered the most popular. I interviewed many music sellers who said “I sell more taarab than anything else,” and this was in part, yes, radio played a small role, but given that at the time taarab was a very minor piece of radio airplay, it would very rarely air because the songs are 15-20 minutes. This [new popularity in Dodoma] was because of piracy. The ability of these pirates to quickly distribute this music, for people to hear this music on the streets through these carts being pushed around to sell music, and suddenly deciding, “We’re interested in this music, I’m going to buy this.” And now it became popular. So for some groups, they could now play live shows in regions where they were not able to play 2 or 3 years earlier. That wasn’t true for all artists, but yes, you could get a larger market for performance than you could before.

Switching gears. Talent contests are huge, right? Could you speak about them?

There are talent contests, and there are TV shows geared as talent shows, a little like the American Idol talent shows. There are those, there are radio talent shows, there are also the Tanzanian music awards, known as the Killys, named after Kilamanjaro beer, which is one of the main sponsors, and has been. That’s been around for a few years, promoting the best male artist, the best female artist, the best RnB artist. But as far as talent shows, those happen quite often on TV and you will see…There have been some that say, “Anyone in the country wants to come down and perform. You’ll perform in the studio, we’ll put you live on the air, and if you win the competition you will get a certain amount of money.” All the same things that we associate with the American Idol-style shows, but I must say that some of them started before American Idol. So those are popular, those competitions, and people like them. Because sometimes you find these artists who nobody has ever heard of before, who’re really quite good, and they show up on TV for the first time. So even though those are popular, I need to emphasize this again, music videos are far and away the most popular vehicle and mode of entertainment related to music outside of live shows. More than listening to radio, I can almost argue that- it’s a dangerous point to argue given how popular radio is- but people will literally spend their weekend watching music video shows to watch the latest hits and songs appearing. More so than they’ll focus on the radio. Radio’s always on, yes, but they’ll tune in to very specific programs to be sure that they catch the latest hits. And, more importantly, to gain an international audience, you need a good music video. So they put these things up on East Africa Tube or YouTube, so people in Europe and the United States and other African countries can find these songs, but only if you have a good music video. And there’s one company called Next Level- they produce these fantastic, beautifully shot videos. It’s this one guy, Adam Juma, who’s just fantastic, and he shoots these videos and if you look at them, they’re not only just like films, but it looks like they are produced in another part of the world because they’re so well done, but it’s Tanzanian, and they’re doing an amazing job with these videos. So I’d say that even more than talent shows, music videos should probably be highlighted.

S (18:19) ????

What a lot of artists lament is that, because of the dominance of rap and RnB in the last 15 years, there are far fewer people who can play instruments, and there is a real concern among the older generation that this means there are going to be people in the next generation who can’t play instruments in live shows, because the skills won’t be there. What used to happen is that artists who were interested in becoming performers would go to a rehearsal, watch the performers, ask to be part of the band, study with musicians as apprentices for a while, and then finally make it into a live show. But a whole generation of people skipped that, because they went straight to rap and RnB. And there is a fear among older generations that the generation that skipped that won’t be able to teach the next generation how to perform on live instruments, and all of a sudden you will lose out on that skill set that was so common among so many musicians. I don’t think that worry has born out in practice, to be honest, because there are so many people playing dance band genres and popular dance genres, and so many people in rap and RnB, it’s almost as if two worlds have blossomed at the same time. So, although it is a legitimate fear, I do see that there are a number of young musicians performing and practicing, so that might be unfounded, but it is a concern, and it something that a lot of elder musicians are concerned about. There is a lot of concern about the future- when you are no longer a big hit-maker, what do you do for a profession, what do you with your life? There are no pensions, there’s no healthcare, there aren’t doctors who will reliably see you, there’s not enough money for medication. So some singers like Guramo, a very famous singer who retired recently at the age of 73, lamented the fact the he just has his house, he doesn’t have the financial wealth to sustain himself and his family. That’s a concern. There’s another concern, that a lot of music continues to be sold internationally, but artists aren’t making a profit from these albums. The popularity of classic dansi records throughout the Western world hasn’t fueled more income for Tanzanian artists. So there is a concern that copyright will continue to be ignored, that there will continue to be problems with the copyright industry.

Can you talk a bit about how the structures of the socialist music may have allowed for the development of this booming music scene, when the economy comes back in the early 90s, in ways that other countries that didn’t have these state supported music scenes maybe weren’t able to?

There were three reasons why socialism helped to build such a successful music economy in Tanzania. One is that it helped the professionalization of music: If artists knew they could rely on a salary each week, health care, transportation, all those basics, they wouldn’t have to find other work, or worry about their daily lives. That was significant and important. The second was the importance of live music venues. If you build more venues, more bands are going to try to play at those venues, and you’ll increase the desire by people to see and hear live music. And third is a bit subtler, and it’ll seem like I’m being humorous, but I’m not: The fact there was no TV, that by the regulation of the Tanzanian government, there was no TV allowed, and there were no independent stations allowed, TI had be 100 percent Tanzanian music, meant that there was a significant strength and power and interest in local music, both in live music and that which appeared on the radio. And I think those three reasons…and you can say other reasons as well: Building the Bagamodo School of Arts, or making sure that people understood and appreciated the importance of music. With all of those elements, it helped to build a stable foundation through which the contemporary economy could be built on, and it was built on those structures. Live music, the importance of Tanzanian music…and another aspect actually was the importance of decency: Don’t swear, there’s no violence, there are none of those issues that happen in Western music. Those are removed because the govt. had long banned anything like that in song. And rap artists have continued that- they don’t talk about violence in their songs, they don’t swear on their albums, although that has emerged somewhat, so that creates this kind of music that can be consumed by anyone. No matter what age you are- there doesn’t have to be a parental sticker saying that this has sensitive lyrics or violent lyrics. On the other hand, I will add that music videos are highly sexualized. And there was a ban by the Tanzanian government at one point to try to limit that same practice in live shows. It has been moderately successful, but it hasn’t touched music videos. And there is a bigger issue of misogyny within those music videos, that there is a real detrimental, almost at some level abusive view of women that appears in those music videos. And that is a big issue, and that’s something that several nonprofits are trying to fight. There are people fighting this, including some female artists, who are coming out with powerful songs to sing about the importance of women in music, and in society more generally.

Also, and maybe you can say whether this is true or not, maybe it’s just the lack of violence?

Well, there is a lack of violence. But I’m a bit hesitant to say this anymore. When I wrote this book, I would have absolutely told you that Tanzania is one of the safest countries on the continent. And perhaps it still is. You can walk through any of the areas of the city at any time of day and still feel pretty safe. But it is changing. There are more instances of violence. Dar is now about 4.5 million people, and unemployment amoung the youth is quite high, and violence is starting to grow; there are more muggings, more theft, including this new trend which is to drive by on the road, see someone with a pocket book or purse, and then grab the purse. And if the person doesn’t let go, they get dragged behind the car, and several people have died that way. And that wouldn’t have happened just a few years ago. There have been two grenade attacks in opposition party gatherings in Arusha. No one knows where the grenades came from, no one knows who threw them. The nationalist party said it was the opposition party, the opposition party said it was the nationalist party, and these are just creating tensions that didn’t exist before. These aren’t ethnic tensions, but these are tensions about just getting the basic necessities for daily life. But it should still be reiterated that it is still safer than most African countries to this day.

Who pays for the videos?

They are expensive. The music videos in Tanzania- if you go to Next Level-the one I mentioned before, you are paying thousands of dollars to have that video made. If you are paying that much money, it’s more than likely that you are connected, to one of these connections of radio DJs and announcers, or someone else who has other significant influence in the music business. In radio, there are certain DJs and announcers who form a collective. To be an artist who is aired on these stations, you have to pay that collective. We called it payola in the US, and it was banned, but they’ve created that practice in Tanzania. You have to pay to get on the air, and their fees are quite high. And that collective also pays other radio stations to not play anyone who is not affiliated with their collective, so they can prevent you as an artist from airing on another radio station. They are very powerful, these groups. Those groups can manage artists. So these are radio DJs, who basically allow you to get played on the air or don’t, but who also take you on as an artist that they’ll work with, and they’ll manage your career. Part of that is to use the funds collected by that organization to pay for these music videos, which cost thousands of dollars, in the hopes that they can market you in live shows, and clothing lines or whatever else, and generate revenue from those other streams as well. So it’s another form of publicity, again, because videos are so popular in the country.

When did those start to emerge?

Well, the first videos started in 1998, 1997. As soon as independent television came out, there was an immediate recognition that we need to record videos, but they were so bad, in those first years, even in the local conception of videos. I think the change happened around 2005, where the music videos using SLR cameras, digital SLR cameras, where you can blur the backgrounds and create these fantastic, movie-style shots. And the quality just starts to go up dramatically. And they now have a category in the Tanzanian music awards for best video, and the one that won last year, or 2012, was an artist who was recorded by Next Level. But if you watch this video, it’s this woman wearing a bikini, but it looks like just underwear, and she parades down these stairs, and it’s a terrible depiction of Tanzania, but it’s the one that won.

There’s a lot of anger about the power that those DJs and announcers have over the music economy.