Claudia Böhme
Institut für Ethnologie und Afrikastudien
Universität Mainz

Visualizing the Occult: Screening Witchcraft, Vampires and Water Spirits: Popular Swahili Video Production in Tanzania At the end of the 20th century the video boom from West Africa has reached the East African Coast and makes the “Video Revolution” an African Phenomena. Beginning with filmed theatre plays from a handful of theatre groups one finds today a growing number of films with a diversity of genre and topics on the market in Dar es Salaam.
Produced independently by filmmakers and small film companies the movies are post produced and distributed by Indian Companies like GMC or Wananchi Video Production. Copied on VHS or VCDs the films are sold in small video stores in Kariakoo or rented in other parts of the city and watched at home.

This paper shows that the Swahili Videos are today an integral part of the Popular Culture on the Swahili Coast. Swahili in Tanzania, as Hausa, Yoruba and Igbo in Nigeria is aiding the high popularity of these films. The genre and topics in the movies are as manifold as the affectations of their viewers. Beside heartbreaking soaps, music films and whodunits the movies that deal with witchcraft, vampires or spirits and other occult powers are the most popular and best sold in town. To fight the evil spirits the consultation of an mganga, the traditional healer is necessary. Equipped with calabashes, mirrors or “African TVs” they make their clients see. The magic powers and the fight between the healers and their evil antagonists are achieved by the video maker’s initiation of all kinds of special effects like blue lightning, flashes or fireballs.

In looking at films like Shumileta, where a vampire women coming from the underworld of water spirits seeks a human lover or Nsyuka, a blood-sucking monster who is taking revenge, this paper tries to make understand the attraction and fascination these films have for their viewers. In visualizing these believes and practices these movies articulate common East African discourses about witchcraft and vampirism. The paper further interrogates the inter-textual and inter-medial relations to Hollywood, Nigerian productions or Popular Theatre and Literature from East Africa.

Compared to the Nigerian or Ghanaian Films the Tanzanian Videos haven’t so far drawn any attention from the scientific community. In trying to fill this gap I have written my M.A. thesis on the Swahili movie Girlfriend in 2004. The paper relates to the research project “Popular Culture as an Interface between the Global and the Local: Music, Moving Images, and Text Production in East Africa” at the University of Mainz at the Department of Cultural Anthropology.
---

Clarissa Dittemer
Afrikanistik I
Bayreuth University

Poetry in the “Third Space”: The Multi-Dimensionality and Creativity of Muhamadi Kijuma’s Poetry Muhammad bin Abubakr bin Omar al-Bakarii (commonly called Muhamadi Kijuma) was a renowned calligrapher, poet, musician, dancer and interpreter of old Swahili poetry who spent most of his life on Lamu where he also died in 1945. In his work but also in his working relationships he often crossed borders: he was hired as a palace musician by the Zanzibarian Sultan, he scribed and composed on commission of local people and Muslim authorities in Lamu– but was also estimated by the missionaries and the Western scholars working on Swahili language and literature. Kijuma acted as cultural broker who made the culture and especially its embedded poetry understandable and appreciable to Westerners who in return taught him about Western history and culture. Kijuma had before studied under the most renowned authorities in Lamu – coming close to an ideal of an educated eloquent, versatile mungwana, a noble man.

However Kijuma was not only a celebrated figure. He is still often characterized as a headstrong person who did not care too much about powers – local or colonial, religious or secular. He was more than once criticized by the Muslim authorities who tried to prevent him from organizing dubious dancing and poetry festivities. Furthermore his interest in Christian theology and his final baptism menaced his status as a respected member in Lamu society. But his affiliation still did not lose its ambiguity: he got buried according to Muslim rites.

Kijuma let the liminal life of someone who shifts between different worlds in the search for different perspectives that might even be contradictory and do not sum up to an unequivocal unity. It is very hard to categorize him – even though different scholars who worked on him have always tried to do so. Ambiguity seems to be the most essential feature of his personality. He lived in the “in-between”, the third space: the space between Islam and Christianity, between tradition and transition, between the Westerners and the local people – sometimes driven to one side, sometimes to the other. As an artist he explored his various formations and backgrounds as a source of inspiration and creativity that could lead beyond established conventions.

In my paper I am trying to trace the “in-between” in Kijuma’s poetry that mirrors the “movement of ideas” on the East African Coast at a time of fundamental change. Far from looking at the history of big events I am trying to throw a glimpse back into the dynamic biography and works of a poet who based his work creatively on different local and global frames of references. I want to conclude my paper with some reflections on the consequences that the outlined findings and proposals may have on the concept of “popular culture” in general and its methodology in particular.
---

Andrew Eisenberg
Dept. of Music (Ethnomusicology)
Columbia University

Swahili Taarab and the Resonance of Hindi Film Tunes on the Kenyan Coast While largely ignored in the ethnomusicological literature, the use of Hindi film tunes in Swahili taarab music offers key insights into the complex nature of ethnic identification on the Kenyan coast. Listening to the physical and conceptual resonances of Hindi melodies in “Swahili” mouths, ears, and places, I assess the play of mimesis and stylization in the lives and performances of “Indian taarab” artists in “uswahili” (the intersection of “Swahili style” and “Swahili place”). I demonstrate how the meaning of Indian taarab is to be found more in the embodied act of mimesis than the act of “appropriation” as such.
---


Mahiri Mwita
Princeton University

Decoding taboo-language to effect critical interaction in popular theatre-against-AIDS performances in Nakuru and Mombasa. One of the setbacks of the anti-AIDS campaign in many African communities is cultural values that prohibit talk about sex whether in public or privately. In this context sex-talk is regarded as a taboo subject irrespective of the specific function it may be serving; for example even when the purpose is to inculcate values to the young generation. This cultural component is therefore one of the inscriptions contained in the community’s language, because language serves as their medium of cultural expression. In this sense, language functions to encode and decode what and how people preserve, perpetuate and express their cultural values through what is/is not taboo to speak about. This paper examines how the popular theatre performances targeting behavior change against AIDS work with the poetic license provided by the popular theatrical space to manipulate taboo language in order to impact the anti-AIDS message. Through the theories of theatricality and theatrical semiotics, the study discusses how theatricality and the liberty associated with the stage serves as a platform on which the actor can stand to critique a peoples’ values, including daring to manipulate the community’ speech codes to provoke critical interaction on taboo subjects like sex and AIDS.
---


Dillon Mahoney
Anthropology
Rutgers University

Kenya’s Culture Industry: the Modernity of ‘Curio’ Art in Mombasa Both within Kenya and internationally, Kenya’s curio industry represents and produces symbols and ideas of Kenya and Kenyan nationalism and transnationalism, whether Kenyans personally identify with or consume these products or not. This paper uses the example of the Kenyan curio industry in Mombasa as an important sector of popular cultural production, consumption, and identity negotiation. The various types of art produced through this industry include crafts and mass-produced “authentic,” “tribal,” or “ethnic” art such as “Kisii” soapstone, “Akamba” woodcarving, or “Maasai” beadwork. While there is potential for industries of cultural production to provide artists with a voice and freedom of expression, I demonstrate that in the case of Kenya’s curio industry, the identities being negotiated and produced are characterized by internal contradictions as a result of 1) external market demands for a particular experience of Kenya and 2) irregular state regulations of small-scale enterprises, particular those operating in the shadow of the Kenyan tourism industry.

While tourists desire a “traditional,” “tribal,” or game park experience of Kenya, most small scale Kenyan businesspeople working around tourism strive to be “modern” in their economic goals, ideals, and their use and grasp of information and communication technologies. The changes and forces affecting Mombasa’s curio producers, traders, and exporters provide an exemplary context for demonstrating the ability of contemporary Africans to draw on a range of cultural, political, and economic meanings of both “modern” and “traditional” in developing contemporary conceptions of cultural and political modernity. When ethnic relations do emerge among art traders, they are usually as economic networks, left as a convenient fallback for small-scale traders following inconsistent state regulation and political violence. As I describe, most traders personally desired to downplay individual ethnic identity, promoting instead ethnic diversity within the workplace and a Kenyan or East African identity for legitimizing one’s socio-economic status in Mombasa.
---


Wangui Maina
Independent scholar
and
Florence Sipalla
African Literature
University of the Witswatersrand

'Chukua Control’ Marrying Popular Youth Culture with HIV/AIDS campaigns The Kenyan cultural scene has been vibrant in the recent past with the rising popularity of homegrown performing art productions in the music and audiovisual industry. This has led to the visibility of local ‘pop stars’ in the print and electronic media that is accessible and popular with the young generation.

It has been established that the youth are a section of society that is infected/affected by the HIV/AIDS pandemic. Young Kenyans are increasingly getting to buy into local productions, supporting the local music industry especially, taking great pride in what is produced by their peers. As NGOs and other stakeholders’ battle to get the message of HIV/AIDS across to this group, they identified a niche, working with local pop stars. The NGO’s have incorporated the young role models to spearhead their campaigns.

This paper endeavors to highlight the significance of the use of local ‘pop stars’ the poster campaigns to encourage voluntary counseling and testing in the local media. For purposes of this paper, we use the newspaper posters as primary texts and make reference to the billboards and television advertisements in a bid to show how popular youth culture has been employed as a vehicle for HIV/AIDS activism in Kenya.
---


Caleb Okumu Chrispo
Department of Creative and Performing Arts
Maseno University

Kiswahili Popular Music Culture: The Contribution of the East African Coast to Contemporary Kenyan Music Kenyan Kiswahili popular music is reputed to have originated from the East African Coast. The emergence of Beni as a genre of popular music has been traced to the coast of East Africa. Beni forms the earliest semblance to contemporary Kenyan popular Kiswahili music. The origins and development of this genre of popular music culture gave rise to a distinctively Kenyan popular guitar music with Swahili lyrics. This paper will engage in the discourse of analyzing the social conditions of the early popular music scene from the perspectives of a legend in the era, Paul Mazera Mwachupa and lay bare the existing conditions during the formative years of the genre. From the discourse the social condition of the early 1940s and 1950s will be analysed with the contemporary and an insight into the comprehension of the culture of popular music in East Africa will be exposed.
---


Maria Suriano
‘L’Orientale’ University, Naples, Italy

Kula Raha na Kujenga Taifa: Leisure, popular culture, and nationalism in late colonial Tanganyika. The case of Mwanza and Dar es Salaam This paper argues that in Tanganyika, during the struggle for independence, popular culture became highly politicized. Not by accident, a strong core of Tanganyika African National Union (TANU) leaders and activists was made of musicians, poets, and dancers. Before TANU was established, among “the founder members of the African Association were men who had earlier taken a leading role in the Beni associations.” In Mombasa as well, women’s dance societies have been a sort of ‘training’ for political activities. TANU supporters contributed to a strategic and conscious spreading of the message of independence, utilizing their already existing social networks.

This paper aims to contribute to a deeper understanding of the relationship between leisure, popular culture, and nationalist consciousness in two different contexts, namely Dar es Salaam and Mwanza, a town which has been quite neglected by historians. It examines how Africans created through popular culture (dansi, ngoma, taarab, football, and drinking in African clubs, or vilabu vya pombe), their outlets to preserve and expand their autonomy and change their identities, furthermore a means to demand national independence.

Colonial authorities and missionaries, in Tanganyika as well as in other countries, were concerned about defining the boundaries of ‘appropriate’ and ‘inappropriate’ forms of recreation. After the Second World War welfare centres were established in both coastal and up-country Tanganyikan towns. They were supposed to provide former askari, 'detribalised' African workers and town dwellers with educational and 'constructive' recreational activities. Contrary to colonial expectations, during the 1950s ‘western style’ dances (but dansi was influenced by Cuban rhythms, more than by ‘western’ music) became the most popular activities in these centres, which were renamed community centres. What E.S. Atieno Odhiambo, referring to Kenya, has called “the seduction of ‘modernity’” can be found in the same years in Tanganyika’s muziki wa dansi.

Among sports, football was seen by administrators as a means of reinforcing British hegemony by inculcating respect for the values of European time and discipline. For young African men, however, it was used also as a way of undermining the existing social and political order. People interviewed relate that even bars were places where serious issues were discussed and TANU cards were obtained.
---


Thomas Wolf
Consultant, Social and Political Research Unit of the Steadman Group

Coastal Culture or Kenyan Culture: Reflections on Results of Several Recent Public Opinion Surveys This paper examines several sets of results from recent public opinion surveys to address the question as to how distinctive are Coastal Kenyans from other citizens of the country. To do this, it highlights certain key demographic variables as well as attitudes and views on selected economic, political and cultural issues.

The purposes of the paper are as follows:

1. To suggest the relationship between certain demographic factors and such views.
2. To indicate the range of variation regarding certain demographic factors and views within this population itself that (that should serve as a caution against sweeping generalizations).
3. To indicate the opportunities that surveys of a similar nature can offer for those pursuing a wide variety of research interests.
4. To suggest the limitations of such a research tool, and the advantages that can be gained by supplementing it with other methodologies.

More generally, with regard to the above, it is suggested that aside from the actual content of such past (or possible future) surveys as applied to this part of Kenya, the increasingly frequent dissemination of such results by local media is providing the basis for conversational-exchanges as well as pronouncements in more formal (i.e., political rallies) settings. Such dissemination, and the resulting exchanges, is also likely engendering two simultaneous notions: one of regional (if not ethno-cultural distinctiveness), the other of national homogeneity (or at least integration).

As such, how such surveys are understood, including the motives attributed to those who undertake them, is itself an increasingly element of ‘popular political culture’ across the country, including the Coast.
---