Zanzibar!

Prof Mitch Strumpf with other leaders form DCMA

      We left Dar and flew to Zanzibar for the next leg of our trip.  In an earlier post I made reference to a Professor Mitch Strumpf.  He just recently ended his contract at University of Dar and has been hired at an institution in Zanzibar!  It is called the Dhow Countries Music Academy, and it focuses on training young musicians in both western music as well as the genre of Taarab that is prevalent in Zanzibar due to Arab influence.  One of his first projects was to organize a conference of all the music educators in Tanzania to discuss the use of traditional musics in the classroom.  Diane was asked to come present at this conference because the International Library of African Music is constantly looking to develop new educational materials out of the historic recordings of Hugh Tracey.

Prof Frank Gunderson, director of Ethnomusicology at FSU,
did his entire 45 minute talk about the history of Tanzanian
popular music IN SWAHILI.  No translator.  Very well done.

      Upon arrival, we encountered the celebration of Eid (the end of Ramadan) to still be in full swing in Zanzibar.  It can sometimes go on for a couple of days, or occur on different days in different countries.  In Zanzibar, they choose to celebrate it for four days total.  Our cab driver had to park quite a ways away from our lodge due to the traffic.
      The lodge where I stayed is called St. Monica's Lodge.  It is in the heart of a very historic district of Stone Town, which is the town on the island where we stayed.  The lodge itself is a pair of old buildings that were formerly the site of a major slave market in Zanzibar.  The chambers still sit on the bottom floor of one of the lodge complexes.  My friends and I went and explored them the first night we were there.  Pretty crazy!

Welcome to St. Monica's!  The sign for the tours.

Full view of the outside of the St. Monica's Lodge.

The rooms backed up to a joint balcony that
was quite beautiful in the mornings

A photo of the historic Anglican cathedral behind St. Monica's.
It had scaffolding for construction, but still was quite exquisite.
On Sunday, I could hear the choir from outside in the street.

     I had been told that Zanzibar is quite touristy and westernized.  I must say that is was still much different than I expected.  The buildings of Stone Town all looked as though they were built prior to the 20th century.  It's almost like St. Augustine, FL in some ways.  But the buildings are all right next to each other, forming these narrow alleys for roads.  Getting around is so tricky!  I had a decent map and GPS on my phone, but the roads have no names and some roads are not on the map.  Quite an adventure!

Spotted a monkey that had just been for a dip in the channel.

A look out at the waterfront market place in Stone Town.

Lots of pretty colonial style buildings!

We saw a bunch of tourists looking up.  Upon scrutiny, we found
there to be a network of about a dozen hand and foot-sized spiders.
Just in the middle of a popular street-alley.

Powerlines are almost all exposed on these old buildings!
They made for some crazy knots and messes above the alleyways.

Fact:  Freddie Mercury, lead-singer of popular rock band Queen,
was born in Stone Town!  Multiple tourist shops claim to be the site
of his actual home.  The more you know.

Nice shot of what the street-alleys look like in Stone Town!
They are too small for cars, and only some of them are published on maps.
It was pretty fun learning to navigate these.

       The conference went quite well.  I think the educators really had some great conversation about strategies they could use to improve their classroom music lessons.  Unfortunately, all the discussions were in Swahili.  We had a translator sitting by us, but it was still difficult to keep track.  I spent some of the workshop time slots just wandering around Zanzibar with Zack and Jocelyn.  Zanzibar was the last stop the three of us had in common before departing for Zimbabwe and Kenya, so I tried to maximize on our time together.  The next time I'll see them will probably just have to be in Seattle.  But now I have lots of cool people to go see or stay with there!

My final parting with my friends Zack and Jocelyn!
Missing them so much!

Sitting in the back of the conference with our own translator.
That is Diane (left) and Prof Patricia Campbell, director of
Ethnomusicology at Univ of Washington in Seattle.  I've been
traveling with her for the past couple of weeks also.

In between conference sessions, we would step out on
this beautiful balcony that overlooked the water.  Patricia
was just posing too hard to not get photographed!

Per usual, there were lots of coffee breaks.  Here they also served
coffee cake as well as samosas (pictured right).  They are like triangular
egg rolls with ground beef or vegetables in them.  Very good!

This is my friend Gyaviri! He just graduated from U of Dar with
a music degree and is about to go study in Finland
to learn about the role of the arts in social development!
He ran tech stuff at the conference in Dar as well as here in Zanzibar.

      One of the highlights of our time in Zanzibar was that Diane got to present 25 copies of Hugh Tracey's original recordings from there in 1950.  He documented the Taarab music of the time.  The artistic director of DCMA, Motena, listened through some of the recordings in front of the whole conference and spoke about the significance of each.  They were so elated to get these recordings, as it was an era of music and culture in Zanzibar that was relatively undocumented.  This is the real "repatriation" of these archived recordings that is the purpose of our entire trip.  It was quite rewarding for Diane, and got me excited for the repatriation work to come in Kenya!

Diane proudly passing off the copies of Hugh Tracey's Zanzibar
recordings from 1950 to the art directors of DCMA.  Metona, pictured left,
went through multiple recordings, discussing their historical significance
to the genre of Taarab music.

     Speaking of Kenya, I'm here!  We've already completed one week of field work, and I can't wait to talk about it more!  Coming soon!

Single-prop plane selfie!

View of the cockpit from my seat.  The pilot's girlfriend napped
in the copilot seat.  Wish my roommate Kevin Barth was flying me!

Kind of a sweet moment.  Little baby arm landed on my lap
for most of the flight.  The mom sitting next to me was flying
with her three toddler children.  Bless her.

A final parting shot of the boats sitting in the Zanzibar channel.

Kunduchi Beach Break!

   In between our time in Chamwino and going to Zanzibar, my friends and I decided to take a nice respite at the Kunduchi Beach Resort in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania.  It was such a much needed time of relaxation and cleanliness!  That first good shower after the villages was.... SO good.  We ate well, got to be in Dar es Salaam for the celebration of Eid (the end of Ramadan), lounged in the sun, and tried to correct our decisive farmer's tans we acquired while out in the village.  

A faction of the group at dinner one night.  Left to right:
Dr. Patricia Campbell of Univ of Washington, Oscar,
Cindy of Seattle Pacific Univ, myself, and Christopher-
music educator in Seattle, and father of Oscar.

Nice view from the beach!  Kunduchi was like a sultan palace.

Mmhmm.....

I was jogging on the beach and I spotted a cow grazing in
the sand dunes.  Don't see that much in Jacksonville!

I haven't talked about this enough, but this flatbread
is called chapatti.  In other cultures it is called Roti-
like they have at Hawker's restaurant in Jacksonville!
It is SO good, and its a staple.  Here it is pictured with
and omelette inside.  Life is good.

Doing Laundry in the shower, because laundry service
was too expensive.

Julie Schmidt of Portland, OR, Diane, and myself all matched
one day on accident!

Looking out from a balcony or my room or something.  Pretty nice!

Catching a little twin prop plane from Dar across the channel
to Zanzibar!

Chamwino Music Festival!

Ok so I am so far behind, I'm going to be posting some fast-forward style updates with lots of pictures for you all to peruse and see what I've been up to.  I've currently arrived in Kenya and we are about to go out into our first day of ACTUAL FIELDWORK.  But more about that in like two posts from now.  Chamwino Music Festival!

Bowed instruments called azeze.  For sale for like $4.  I didn't buy one.

Drums called muheme.  Also like $2.  Still didn't get one.  I have no room!

Musician girl holding a muheme.

Unnecessary, overweight military official with designer sunglasses.

Kids hanging out in the trees to see the performances.

The Master of Ceremonies for the whole event.

Just a little bit of baby booty.

This little girl asked me to take her picture.

Photo from the parade leading up to the festival.  Taken by Diane.
All the groups were performing at the same time.  It was like a surreal
wall of sound.

Another photo from the parade taken by Diane.  I was off somewhere dancing
with the performers from Songombela

Matt Morin, FSU Grad, prof at Dixie State, performing from his
muheme workshop.  He's the guy whose dissertation I read.

Wide shot of what the festival looked like for the three days of performances.

The Las Vegas Cafe.  Unfortunately it was never open.

The Nyota group.  The guy with the microphone and baboon fur hat
was like the Wagogo equivalent of Jack Black.  He did lots
of somersaults and was always smiling really big.

Wind player from a group that was from Dar.  Not actually Wagogo.
But still kinda cool that he was playing out of his nose.

People in awe of the cool music going on.

Where's Waldo?  He's performing Wagogo ngoma music.

Sitting on the back of a motorcycle, about to ride through the
countryside with all my friends.  We went to a winery in the
middle of nowhere.

Dancing to entertain some kids at the lake.

My friends Lawrence and Laurel.  Laurel is from Seattle.
Lawrence can count to 20 in English.

Hanging out with all the village kids!  Having a good time!

Chamwino: Village Visits

            I left off with my arrival in Chamwino on Sunday, July 22^nd.  I am over a week behind on posts, unfortunately!  But I’ve been moving around a lot, and when I was in Chamwino,  I actually had basically no internet access.  So time to catch you all up, as I sit in my lodge in Zanzibar!

            Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday held some of the most unique experiences I think I will ever have in my whole life.  The reason we were in Chamwino was for a large music festival celebrating the music of the Wagogo people.  Chamwino is a large, centralized village/town filled with lots of Wagogo people.  But it is only since the 1970s that Tanzania has begun to form villages like this.  Formerly all the people of a particular tribe or people-group would just be scattered all over the countryside.  Chamwino was actually one of the first attempts by the government to establish a central village for all the smaller rural clusters to use as a place of convergence.  What this means is that there are still lots of people out in very isolated, rural areas.  These rural people gather each year to present their music performing groups.  But the festival didn’t start until Friday.  As honored guests of Dr. Kedmon Mapana (a Wagogo from this area), we got to go out into the rural villages to preview some of the top groups coming to the festival. 

            In the field of ethnomusicology, the term “context” is brought up a lot.  Ethnomusicologists are very sensitive about music having a specific effect in its original context that may not be replicable in another setting.  That being said, getting to see the music groups perform in their actual hometowns is an incredible privilege that helps us to see a little bit more clearly what this music looks like in its original context.  I must still admit that some of the songs performed are dedicated to specific ceremonies and rites, and their performance for us would thus still fall short of the completely original context.  But being in the village was very special in comparison to seeing them on stage in Chamwino later in the week.

As we arrived, we could hear from inside the car
 the women already playing muheme

            Monday we drove the furthest out.  We at breakfast in the first village we visited after a performance by the musicians of that area.  It was a little strange, but they served us before they served the performers.  This happened constantly during my time in rural Tanzania, but Kedmon insists that this is a part of the culture- it brings the people joy to put us first. 

            The music of the Wagogo people is world famous for its instrumentation and polyphonic singing (more than one voice at a time, in harmony).  Ironically, a word for “music” does not exist in Chigogo, the Gogo language.  Instead they have the term ngoma, which refers to the music, dance, and acting that all goes into each performance. 

The last song incorporated kicking around this handwoven
basket and running around the group.  We all got the
basket kicked to us before we left.

            The first day we saw two different villages’ ngoma.  One of those villages even told us that it was the first time they had ever had a muzungu in their village (white person).   So crazy!  On the first day there were only 8 of us in total, and it felt so special.  We really felt like guests in each village.  At the end of both performances, Kedmon would initiate a song with the people and we would all get up and dance together.  It was unreal.  Kedmon knows these people so well, and they obviously love him and trust him enough to let him bring these crazy muzungu to their village.

 

The instrumentalists of the second village, Songambele.
The group is called Faru, and they were one of my favorites.

A random girl walked up to Kedmon during the performance
and he just scooped her up into his lap.

The Faru group after performing.

A member of Faru that asked me to take her picture.

The first group on Tuesday was the Ndagwa group from
Msangwa village.  This little girl was unreal.

The second day more of our colleagues arrived, and there were about 24 of us.  There was a totally different feel to traveling with a group of this size.  The first day, other villagers still seemed to stare and be in awe, but the second and third day it was even more so.  The interactions in each village were much less personal, but we did still dance at the end of each visit.  This just demonstrates how great Kedmon is- being able to bring us all together so well and put the villagers at ease.  After going to three villages on Tuesday, we also went and visited a church in the nearby city of Dodoma.  There is a kwaya (choir) there that performs both gospel and Gogo music.  Except instead of the traditional instruments, there was keyboard, guitars, and even a trumpet!

The fellas of Ndagwa, dancing with flattened cans filled
with hard beans or maize.  They sound like shakers.

The Muhubiri group performs in Matembe village.  Incredible
mountains behind the villagers watching muzungu watch ngoma.

Diane got a cool shot of the villagers scoping us out.

Lots of the performances were inside village church buildings,
and villagers would line the outside to watch.

These are the most typical houses of the Wagogo people.

My friends goat intestine (left) and
goat stomach.  They taste like regular
goat meat, but the stomach was pretty chewy.

Wednesday we went to one last village to see the famous Nyota group.  They are consistently some of the top performers in the region.  We were not let down by their stellar performance.   I will say that because of the fame of this group, they did not seem quite as warm and inviting as some of the others.  They seem to be aware of the profitable nature of their ngoma, and slightly distrusting.  Kedmon, in his infinite poise, put them at ease, and we still had a great time with the people.  It was in this village that I got to try goat intestine, goat stomach, and ugimbe- the local beer made from honey.

Ugimbe, local beer made from honey.

Large sand washes got at least one of our vans stuck both
ways.  I served on the pushing committee.

Lots of cows and goats would block the dirt roads to villages.

I am so thankful to Dr. Kedmon Mapana for this life-changing experience.  But the week didn’t even end there!  More to come!

Kedmon speaking to Faru before we depart, dancing.