Ambiguous Relationships - Youth

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Ambiguous Relationships - Youth, Globalization
 
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Stichproben. Wiener Zeitschrift für kritische Afrikastudien Nr. 14/2008, 8. Jg., 71-96
Ambiguous Relationships:
Youth, Popular Music and Politics in
Contemporary Tanzania
Birgit Englert
Abstract
Bongo Flava music has helped to shape a generational identity of those
Tanzanians who grew up in the era of liberalisation and multi-party
politics. More importantly, this youthful musical genre has helped to
increase the visibility and
voiceability
of youth in the Tanzanian public
and thus at least indirectly encouraged the political participation of
youth in political discourses. In this article I argue that it are not so
much the critical lyrics of some of the songs which have helped achieve
this, than the fact that the successes of Bongo Flava musicians have
conveyed self-consciousness to young people who experience that they
can achieve more than hitherto thought. In this sense Bongo Flava has
helped provide the background for the emergence of young,
charismatic personalities such as Amina Chifupa and Zitto Kabwe who
became Members of Parliament after the elections in 2005. They have
started to challenge the conventional, hierarchical ways of Tanzanian
politics which used to be dominated by the older generation. The
article further outlines how young “underground” musicians perceive
contemporary Tanzanian politics and how this influences their own
strategies in musical production.
Introduction
“Democracy, based on the principle that the majority of the people decide, has
another meaning in [the African] context. Here a minority (above 18 years) of the
population decides for the majority (below 18 years).“
(Peters 2004: 25)
Demographically speaking Africa is a young continent. In Tanzania the
census of 2002 revealed that 63,83 per cent of the population were below the
age of 25, with 19,58 per cent alone betweeen the ages of 15 and 24 (GOT
72
Stichproben
2002: 6). As in other African countries, the young majority in Tanzania has
found itself in a situation of subordination vis-à-vis the political
establishment which predominantely consists of members of the elder
generation. Widespread lack of opportunities for political participation of
the younger generation has characterised the post-colonial period. When
living conditions for the average African worsened considerably since the
economic crisis in the 1980s, young people were among the most affected by
cuts in the education system and the reduction of formal employment
opportunities which were part of the neoliberal reforms prescribed to most
African states by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. (cf.
Abbink 2005: 1, Frederiksen 2000: 9) Between 1995 and 2005 the number of
unemployed youth in all of Africa grew by about a third - a development
which forces more and more young people “to undertake jobs that are
characterized by poor conditions in the informal sector and agriculture.”
(UN 2007: 2) With reference to Tanzania, a country whose total population
was 33,5 million in 2002, Issa Shivji (2007: n.n.) noted recently that „[E]very
year over 800,000 young persons are released on the labour market; hardly
one-tenth of whom find formal jobs. Meanwhile, privatisation and capital-
intensive investments continue throwing out more and more as redundant.”
It is important to note that high unemployment rates among the young
population are not a new phenomenon but were also a problem in (late)
colonial Tanganyika where demographic growth had produced an
increasingly youthful population which poured into the urban centres and
found itself unemployed.
1
(cf. Burton 2006) However, it nevertheless seems
appropriate to state that in contemporary Tanzania, as in many other
African countries, young people take up a greater share of the population
than ever before while they are at the same time more marginalised from
economic opportunities than the generations before them, turning them – in
the words of Christiansen, Utas and Vigh (2006: 9) into “a generation of
people who have been born into social environments in which their
possibilities of living decent lives are negligible and in which many have
found themselves stuck in positions of inadequate life chances and bleak
prospects […].” (cf. Abbink 2005: 7, de Boeck/Honwana 2005: 8)
1
Burton (2006: 3) notes that it would be more accurate to term them “jobless” as they
engaged in the emerging informal economy, an observation which holds also true for
contemporary formally unemployed youth.
Ambiguous Relationships
73
In several African countries the difficult economic circumstances and the
resulting lack of opportunities have contributed to the emergence of more
or less violent cultures of the street. (cf. Biaya 2005) In contemporary
Tanzania however, a youth culture dominated by violence cannot be
observed - another similarity to late-colonial Tanganyika where urban
joblessness equally did not translate into unrest. Burton (2006: 20) explains
this with the expanding informal sector which absorved young who had
poured to the urban centres, a factor which certainly also plays a role in
present-day Tanzania. However, other political and sociological factors
seem to play a role as well. Abbink (2005: 17) emphasises a strong central
state tradition and a society used to plurality of beliefs and ethnic identities
as characteristics which Tanzania shares with countries such as Botswana,
Benin and Ghana where large-scale youth violence has equally been absent
so far. But the absence of youth violence does not mean that youth is not
increasingly becoming a political factor in Tanzania – a point I want to make
in this article. Waller (2006: 88) has suggested a focus on the “field of
leisure” as a good starting point for the analysis of youth experiences in
Africa as this allows for a focus on the spaces which young people create for
themselves. In this article I focus on popular music as one such space where
youths are visible as artists as well as audience.
Bongo Flava – musical expression of a new generation
In the last two decades new forms of popular music emerged in several
African countries which have a distinct generational identity as they were
developed by young people who also form the majority of their audience.
The process of democratisation which started in most African countries in
the 1990s and the accompanying liberalisation of the media provided the
context which allowed for these new musical genres to take off. On the one
hand the liberalisation of the media brought young people in African
countries in increased contact with global developments – a process which
was further intensified through the rapid spread of new information
technologies such as the internet but also mobile phones, especially in the
urban areas. (Mercer 2005) On the other hand the liberalisation provided for
the necessary plurality of media - radio and TV stations as well as
newspapers - which proved crucial for the spread of the new music.
74
Stichproben
Many of the new musical styles that emerged all over Africa have their
origins in HipHop which originated in the USA in the late 1970s (cf. Englert
2004, Raab 2006 for more background on HipHop music and how it spread
to Africa). In different countries HipHop was developed into specific
localised forms of music which became known under various names such as
for example
Senerap
in Senegal,
Hip-Life
in Ghana
2
or
Bongo Flava
in
Tanzania which is in the focus of this article.
Bongo Flava music is an incredibly dynamic phenomenon (Raab 2006: 19, cf.
Perullo/Fenn 2003: 2); the term itself has changed its meaning over the last
ten years.
3
(cf. Suriano 2005: 2) Initially very much modelled on US-
HipHop, Bongo Flava now encompasses a great variety of musical styles
ranging from hardcore-rap to Rhythm and Blues and songs with great
influences from the longstanding Tanzanian music genres
ngoma
,
dansi
and
taarab
. It thus serves as an umbrella for popular Tanzanian music produced
by relatively young musicians who consider themselves as “the new
generation” (
kizazi kipya
).
The enormous popularity of Bongo Flava among Tanzanian youth was
clearly reflected in the survey
4
I conducted among young people aged
approximately 15 to 25 in Morogoro where three-quarters of female and
more than four-fifth of male respondants declared that they liked listening
to Bongo Flava music. The ranks which followed in the popularity scala of
popular music were much more clearly gendered
5
– suggesting that Bongo
2
The term Hip-Life is set together of
HipHop
and
Highlife
, a Ghanaian musical style which
evolved in the first half of the 20
th
century and became very popular among huge parts of
the population but was regarded as old fashioned and “colo” (colonial) by the younger
generations from the 1960s on (see Collins 2002: 63).
3
The expression
Bongo
is derived from
ubongo
, literally meaning brain in Kiswahili. It was
originally a term used with reference to Dar es Salaam, a city where brains were said to be
needed by its inhabitants in order to survive, and later became extended to mean the
whole of Tanzania.
Flava
is derived from the English term “flavour”. (Englert 2003: 75)
4
During my research stay in Morogoro in 2006 I distributed a questionnaire on young
people’s perceptions of music, media and politics in several schools and also among
youths who were employed in the formal or informal sector. In total, the questionnaire in
Swahili was filled in by 300 people aged 15 to 25 years. For more background on the
fieldwork see below.
5
The second most popular music among young women was local gospel music
Injili
,
among male respondants it was
US-HipHop.
Collins (2002: 71) observed a similar gender
split in musical preferences among Ghanain youth where local
Hip-Life
is a male domain
in terms of musicians as well as audience while local gospel is a rather female one.
Ambiguous Relationships
75
Flava can truly be viewed as the music of contemporary Tanzanian youth,
male as female. It has to be noted, however, that on the side of the
musicians, male artists are still dominating the scene even though the
number of female performers has clearly grown and women such as Lady
Dee Jay, Ray C, Sister P or Keisha, to name but a few, have made themselves
a name as Bongo Flava artists in recent years.
Quite a number of scholars have researched into the phenomenon of Bongo
Flava in the past couple of years, most of them focussing on the musical
scene of Tanzania’s largest urban centre Dar-es-Salaam.
6
My main interest in
Bongo Flava regards the role this music plays for average Tanzanian youths,
and if, and how, it impacts on their political attitudes, believes and actions.
In my research I therefore focus on the aims and motivations of young
artists who write and compose Bongo Flava songs in the smaller towns of
the country. This article is based on material from Morogoro, a town in
Eastern Tanzania with about 250,000 inhabitants. During two stays in 2006
and 2007, I enquired into the strategies of those Bongo Flava artists who
think of themselves as
maandagraundi
7
– a name which those who have not
yet experienced success on a larger scale apply to themselves. The study
combines methods belonging to the qualitative spectrum such as semi-
structured interviews and participant observation
8
and quantitative
methods such as a questionnaire which was however situated within the
qualitative research design.
Similarily Frederiksen (2000: 5), in her case study on Nairobi, found that while
Soukous
and
Reggae
were very popular with young men, gospel and rhythm and blues were
preferred by young women.
6
Cf. Remes (1999), Haas/Gesthuizen (2002), Mangesho (2003), Perullo (2003, 2005, 2007),
Perullo/Fenn (2003), Englert (2004), Bancet (2007), Suriano (2005, 2007), Saavedra Casco
(2006), Stroeken (2005a, 2005b), Reuster-Jahn (2006, 2007), Reuster-Jahn/Kießling (2006),
Roch/Hacke (2006), Raab (2006), Lukalo (2008).
7
The term is derived from the English term “underground”. It is important to note that
“underground” in the context of Bongo Flava music refers to a socio-economic category
and does not carry the Western connotation of “alternative” music styles. (Englert 2003:
73).
8
Qualitative interviews were held in 2006 and 2007, mainly with artists but some few
were also held with young people who had great interest in and knowledge of Bongo
Flava. All names of interviewpartners refered to in this text are pseudonyms. Both parts of
my research, the qualitative as well as the quantitative one, have benefited to a great
extent from the help provided by Abdul Moreto and Azizi Matiga.
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