Random thoughts...

My pen drive has literally changed my life. Why didn’t I twig to this little do-hickey before? No more scuttling home with my laptop clutched under my arm, giving the hairy eyeball to anyone my paranoid brain suspects as a thief. Really, everyone should have one of these.

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I bought a book in Zanzibar, but have read it roughly 23 times now, so I’ve begun reading the guidebooks cover to cover. According to the alarmist folks at Lonely Planet, Internet costs between $8 and $13 US an hour in Malawi. Please tell me this is a typo. (I suppose it goes without saying: you’ll not be hearing from me when I’m in Malawi.)

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I admit I’ve never really been plugged in; I say things like plugged in, for example. There are reams of movies I’ve never seen, bands I’ve never heard of, whole genres and movements of literature and pop culture that I’ve yet to experience.

Africa is only furthering my cultural retardation.

On Saturday I popped some new batteries into my wee shortwave and found an English-language radio station that played several hours of reggae (which I hate, due to its affiliation with the Rastafarian movement and my rather pathological hatred of virtually every Rasta I’ve met) but it was mitigated by the news every hour on the hour. (Ah, the Beeb. How I miss the trumpets blasting at the beginning of “Focus on Africa.”)

Even though it’s mid-January, the station aired a pre-Christmas American Top 40 countdown on the top 100 songs, hosted by Ryan Seacrest, who was that boy with the bad highlights from American Idol last time I checked. Did Dick Clarke die?

Anyway, Ryan had the lowdown on the “hook up” between someone named Bowwow and Sierra and the dirt on whether Ryan broke up with Ashlee or whether she dumped him. Who are these people and why don’t they have last names, or even proper first names? At one point he introduced a song by some woman who is a pioneer in the “Crunk and B” movement, a woman who has a much-anticipated second album coming out. At the risk of sounding like my mother, what is Crunk?

Approximately 78 of the top 100 American songs (two belonged to Avril Lavigne, so maybe I should say North American) of last year were completely new to me, and totally annoying. What has happened to the music industry that 50 Cent is considered good? The sad thing about it, to me, is that this continent is being inundated with American poppy, rappy, crunky crap. The kids dress like Eminem, in baggy jeans, twisted baseball caps, oversized T-shirts. Some wear band-aids like Nelly. All the 50 Cent styles that don’t sell across the pond end up in market stalls here, so every fifth kid has 50 Cent’s ugly, bullet-riddled mug on their T-shirts. And the radio stations fill up hours with bad music, when their own musicians are producing far superior sounds and starving while they do it.

After Emily left to go back to Ghana, I did a story on a music school on Zanzibar island whose sole purpose is to save the island’s unique music, a style known as taarab, which has never been transcribed to sheet music and was in serious trouble, since there were virtually no kids interested in learning it and few musicians still playing it. (SEE STORY BELOW) I spent an afternoon at the school, sitting in on a drum lesson while a violin lesson went on right outside. I had the presence of mind to bring my recording equipment, so I could go away and appreciate how amazing the violinist was, how complicated the percussion was. All across Africa there is amazing music, some of it an acquired taste, but all of it complex and socially important, with messages and heritage and roots. This is dying, killed slowly but surely by stupid rap “songs” about spending 50-Gs on the timepiece? As they say on the West Side, “Oh why?!”

***

In the continuing East v. West debate:

• The food over here is soooooo bland. I miss spicy peanut sauce. Even a little “tasty shitor” would be good right now.
• People the continent over say “sorry!” when you trip, stub your toe or otherwise hurt yourself. (Smashed my elbow on the bus window the other day, hard enough to draw blood, and everyone around me was like, “Gasp! Sorry!”)
• Nose picking seems not to be quite as socially acceptable as it is in Ghana, yet still not quite the taboo it is at home.
• I heard someone hiss to get a waiter’s attention today, but the woman seemed rather ill-mannered and uncouth, so the jury’s still out on whether East Africans hiss like West Africans do.
• The ice cream boys announce their presence with a bicycle horn in Ghana; the Tanzania ice cream men – rarely boys – have an electronic thing that goes off and sounds like a siren.
• The incessant horn honking of the West Side Taxi Drivers is replaced with the incessant car alarm triggering of the East African Idiot Car Owner. Jury’s still out on what’s worse. (Can you tell I’m sitting in on legal proceedings? Everything comes down to what the jury thinks.) On the one hand, at least in West Africa it’s just the taxi drivers, but in West Africa roughly four of every five cars on the road is a taxi. That’s gotta be about equal to how many East African cars are equipped with an alarm.
• No one is impressed with my limited Swahili like they are with my limited Twi.

Arts
Zanzibar reclaims its rich musical tradition; Once beloved by sultans, taarab nearly vanished Women, youths and foreigners are reviving genre
Karen Palmer
SPECIAL TO THE STAR
1142 words
28 January 2006
The Toronto Star
H04

Stone Town, ZANZIBAR To see Zainabu Athmani on this island's narrow, winding streets is to see a diminutive woman wrapped head to toe in a brilliant orange buibui.

To see the 27-year-old behind the closed doors of the Dhow Countries Music Academy is to see that those scarves hid a shoulder-baring tank top, huge hoop earrings, bleached jeans and black platform boots. To see her wail away on a three-piece drum kit is to know there is nothing diminutive about her.

And to hear her talk about a musical future teaching children to play the traditional instruments she has come to love is to know that Zanzibar's unique musical style - on the brink of extinction as little as three years ago - is undergoing a renaissance at the hands of the island's women and unemployed youth.

"We need to give our culture, our traditional culture, from our school," she said in halting English. "I (would) like to teach little children drums. I'm going to be a strong woman."

"Some of them are playing instruments that have never been played by a woman before," said school administrator Kheri A. Yussuf, adding that about a third of the school's 100 students are female, mostly in their late 20s like Athmani.

"The idea of musical education in Zanzibar is very new. Some parents are not sure it's very useful to their kids," Yussuf said.

Zanzibar, a conservative Muslim island with medieval architecture and white sandy beaches, is a 90-minute ferry ride from the eastern coast of Tanzania. Its musical heritage was shaped by the cultures that visited its shores back in the days when it boasted legendary markets for both spices and slaves.

The roots of the area's traditional taarab music can be traced to the late 1800s, when Zanzibar's ruling sultan imported an Egyptian taarab group, then sent a local musician to Egypt to learn the musical style. When the musician returned, he established a club to teach and share the music.

But the island was also influenced by the musical styles of the visiting traders and explorers from India, Europe and the Middle East, resulting in a taarab with a slight Hindi flavour and a huge African percussion section.

Done well, Zanzibari taarab features huge orchestras offering a harmonious mix of violins, fretless lutes known as ouds, the accordion, a recorder, dozens of drums, a zither and, over it all, a voice singing an epic love story.

Taarab done not so well, however, comes across as depressingly screechy and shrill, with a voice that assaults the ear with its warbling and wavering.

In either case, it rarely appeals to teenagers more comfortable with rap and hip hop.

"It's the kind of music where you sit and listen and ... how can I say this? You sit and listen and you respect it," said Kwame Mchauru of Busara Productions, a non-governmental organization devoted to preserving the island's music.

"You can see in (the players') faces some of the sadness and that reflects on the audience. They start to think, 'Maybe we should go to the disco.'

"They want fun and excitement. It's hard for them to inspire other young people."

Mchauru pinpoints the beginning of taarab's demise in Zanzibar to the advent of breakdancing. When tapes and videos of the Western craze began appearing on the island, Zanzibari kids lapped it up.

"They were excited they could actually take part," Mchauru said. "People wanted something more exciting, they wanted to try new flavours."

Plus, the Western videos showed fancy homes, expensive cars and flashy clothes - things any teenager might covet. "They wanted to be that, they wanted to have that," Mchauru said.

So taarab music, once the preferred entertainment of sultans, faded quietly. The number of taarab orchestras dwindled and at one point the island had only one trained oud player left.

Since taarab was a largely oral tradition, passed on from player to player and rarely transcribed to sheet music, it was in serious danger of dying out.

"Mostly people abandoned their music purely because of economic reasons, because they couldn't make money making this kind of music."

While West Africans were busy cementing a solid musical reputation with the genres of mbalanx and highlife, East Africans were struggling to support a signature musical style and seemed content to import pop tunes from the West or copy the brash dance music of their central African neighbours.

For a time, it seemed the only people willing to sit through a taarab performance were tourists eager to soak up a slice of Zanzibar's unique culture.

"They demand it and they pay well for it," said Yusuf Mahmoud, executive director of Busara Productions. "It's like every place wants us to perform."

Tourist interest became so strong that traditional musicians found themselves once again in demand. In fact, over this past holiday season, there were too few musicians to go around, Yussuf said.

Foreigners also seem to be leading the campaign to save Zanzibar's unique style of taarab. A German woman registered the NGO that funds the Dhow Countries Music Academy. The Ford Foundation, UNESCO, the American embassy, a Belgium-based funder and the Norwegian government provide money for the instruments, education for the teachers and equipment needed to transcribe the taarab melodies.

Even Mahmoud is originally from the U.K., although he now makes his home on the island and is a regular headliner at beach parties.

His NGO organizes an annual Swahili music festival that showcases talent from across East Africa. This year's event begins Feb. 13 with bands from Ghana, Burkina Faso, Swaziland and Kenya, as well as three taarab bands, including a group featuring 93-year-old Bi Kidude, a Zanzibari institution.

Taarab's champions figure if they can get Zanzibar's children to listen to and pick up an instrument associated with taarab, they'll soon find themselves playing - and enjoying - the complex music.

It happened to Mchauru, who grew up in southern Tanzania listening to mostly to traditional drumming, but began violin lessons at the music academy when he came to Zanzibar to supervise a hotel kitchen a few years ago.

"It changed my feelings because I enjoyed it," Mchauru said. "It's the music that taught me to explore other musical styles. Every music has its beauty somewhere."

"Our music is recognized the world over and we need to keep it alive," Yussuf adds.

karen palmer for the toronto star Julieta Stephan (left) and Zainabu Athmani practice traditional Zanzibari music with teacher Harry Kombo at the Dhow music academy. | ;