HIP HOP HISTORY IN TANZANIA
[Hip Hop] goes back to 1984 actually. Fresh X and Conway Francis were able to get recordings from the United States and Europe. Before that, he was a socialist country, and it was very difficult to get any materials from outside the country, including VCRs, television sets, cassette recorders, and records. The only way to be able to get things was if you had family abroad. Well Fresh Z and Conway Francis both came from fairly well-off families. They live in Oyster Day, which is a well-to-do neighborhood of Dar es Salaam. So they were able to get recordings and watch videos like "Breakin'" Breakin' 2-Electric Boogloo".
Fresh X was sort of an anomaly because he started rapping in Swahili almost immediately and composing some of his own songs. People who followed him mimicked American music. It had a short life at that time. Break dancing was really the hot thing…. They performed all over the city, again mainly to wealthy kids.
[The scene] changed around 1990. More people started hear the music, cassette tapes started coming in. It was easy to record the music and pass it around. Then competition started happening… People became more notorious with the music… In 1991, there was a competition called "Yo Rap Bonanza" at the New Africa Hotel in Dar es Salaam. This featured a lot of great musicians: Ningawan, Easy B, D-Robb, KBCY. All these famous Tanzanian artists. In 1991, all groups were performing in English. The big thing was to copy, word for word, the American songs. Using the same music and everything. But then one artist at that competition named Saleh Ajabry performed a song based on "Ice Ice Baby" by Vanilla Ice. But he wrote the lyrics in Swahili, and he wrote it partly about HIV and AIDS. This is 1991! This was a hit, the first single to be released! People were really excited about this. And he won the competition for "Yo Rap Bonanza". So that's really the start of this Swahili-oriented Rap, beginning with Saleh Ajabry. And then all these other rappers, hearing this album now being played on cassette all over Dar es Salaam, are picking up on the message. That's really where it started, the Swahili part about it.
THE SOCIALIST INFLUENCE IN TANZANIA & CENSORSHIP
Socialism lasted from the late 1960s until 1984, strictly speaking, but has remained powerful in the country even today. So that also limited what people could do. There was not a lot of wealth for people to get out of the city and see other things…. Plus, African-American music has had an influence on Tanzanian music for a long time…from 1950s jazz to James Brown in 1960s, soul and R&B in the 70's. Until radio stations and foreign music, all these African American styles were very prominent and a lot of people mimicked them, in the dansi music.
The main radio station in Dar es Salaam is Radio Tanzania. They had many services, channels, at the time, but the Swahili one, the one most people listen to. They banned foreign music completely. It had to be strictly African or Tanzanian content. And once they did that, the music industry grew locally, but it also created a sort of void where they didn't hear foreign music that they were influenced by. So that happened from '71 until--well, it depends how you look at it--1994. That's when independent radio stations came in. The first was Radio 1. They played a lot of hip-hop.
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| Well, the artists] see themselves as poets. They see themselves as a new generation of poets. Tanzania has a long history of poetry, where poetry was published in newspapers and magazines. And the Tarab music and the Dansi music that came afterwards during the '50's, '60's, '70's and '80's also used a lot of poetry, a lot of poetic elements, a lot of rhyming. Swahili is a language that rhymes very easily.
So a lot of youths who heard this music were attracted to it. Listen, this is a music were youth are sharing their ideas. They are creating kind of a community throughout the city, and they're voicing their opinions, and best of all, they are not getting any kind of kickback from it. No one is saying anything bad about them. They are allowed to do this, and they are allowed to voice their opinion. So it was extremely attractive, the fact that you can be poetic, you can gain attention, you can gain a fan base, and you can have a message in your music. And this attracted a lot of youth into the music scene.
Most rappers in Tanzania are very proud of the past. There is an artist called SOgi; DOg Hunter, he has a song called "Dear Nyerere." Mr II was called the 'Nyerere of hip hop'. A lot of these rappers do see socialism and Nyerere as a very good thing. They often look to the past to nationalism and socialism, and they see this as much better than the people who have come after Nyerere. Now remember, they are also making the past look kind of rosy, making it look like it was a great time. Obviously they were a lot of problems during socialist time and they're kind of negating those. Instead, they often just consider the past to be much better. For instance, Professor J. has a song called "Bongo Dar es Salaam" which speaks about this. He says, "the current Bongo is not like it was in 1947." And he doesn't mean the year 1947. That's slang for the past. He's saying that what is happening now in the country is nothing like what was in the past. It was much better back then. So there is still a lot of romantic notions about the past and what it was like, and how much better it was, and how Nyerere was a great president, and socialism could have worked. It just had problems.
Now this music may sound rather Western. If you listen to early Mr II songs, it sounds rather Western. Even in the more contemporary stuff by Johnnie Walker, or Magangwe Mobb, or by Belozi Dola, it may sound very Western to our ears, but there are a lot of elements of it that are very Tanzanian.
Instrumental wise, [the music is] very Western sounding, very American sounding. It sounds like American hip-hop. But in the way those instruments are used, it's very Tanzanian. The music is more laid-back. If you listen to Mr II one of his first songs called "Hali Halisi," the music is very laid-back. It's sits behind to beat a bit, and lets the musician have kind of free space. There aren't really rich harmonies which would be in a lot of other local music. And there's a huge space between of where you hear the vocals and you hear thumping base, or deep drum parts or things like that. But these things sort of makes sense considering the history of Tanzanian music. There are a lot of elements in ngoma where you hear the same sort of thing. Space between the music and the person who is singing, or in this case rapping. There is a heavy focus on drums and percussion, just the same way in rap music. And they're sort of a laid-back feeling, even if it's upbeat. This is a very Tanzanian sound
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