Sukuma Labor Songs From Western Tanzania

This volume is an interpretive analysis of a collection of 335 song texts treated as primary historical sources. The collection highlights the cultural practices that link music with labor in Sukuma communities in northwestern Tanzania.

This volume is an interpretive analysis of a collection of 335 song texts treated as primary historical sources. The collection highlights the cultural practices that link music with labor in Sukuma communities in northwestern Tanzania. These linkages are evident in the music of the elephant, snake, and porcupine hunting associations that flourished in the precolonial epoch, in the nineteenth-century regional and long-distance porter associations, and in the farmer associations that have proliferated since the beginning of the twentieth century. Acting primarily as an interpretive editor, the author collaborated with several Tanzanian scholars and translators towards fine-tuning the translation of these texts into English, and gathered testimonies in order to create succinct interpretive statements about the songs.

The Oxford Handbook of Musical Repatriation is a significant edited volume that critically explores issues surrounding musical repatriation, chiefly of recordings from audiovisual archives. The Handbook provides a dynamic and richly layered collection of stories and critical questions for anyone engaged or interested in repatriation or archival work. Repatriation often is overtly guided by an ethical mandate to "return" something to where it belongs, by such means as working to provide reconnection and Indigenous control and access to cultural materials. Essential as these mandates can be, this remarkable volume reveals dimensions to repatriation beyond those which can be understood as simple acts of "giving back" or returning an archive to its "homeland." Musical repatriation can entail subjective negotiations involving living subjects, intangible elements of cultural heritage, and complex histories, situated in intersecting webs of power relations and manifold other contexts. The forty-eight expert authors of this book's thirty-eight chapters engage with multifaceted aspects of musical repatriation, situating it as a concept encompassing widely ranging modes of cultural work that can be both profoundly interdisciplinary and embedded at the core of ethnographic and historical scholarship. These authors explore a rich variety of these processes' many streams, making the volume a compelling space for critical analysis of musical repatriation and its wider significance. The Handbook presents these chapters in a way that offers numerous emergent perspectives, depending on one's chosen trajectory through the volume. From retracing the paths of archived collections to exploring memory, performance, research goals, institutional power, curation, preservation, pedagogy and method, media and transmission, digital rights and access, policy and privilege, intellectual property, ideology, and the evolving institutional norms that have marked the preservation and ownership of musical archives-The Oxford Handbook of Musical Repatriation addresses these key topics and more in a deep, richly detailed, and diverse exploration.

The first historical account of the dramatic growth of Christianity in Western Tanzania during the twentieth century and of the role of former slaves in this process. Examining the intersection of post-slavery and evangelism, this book shows the ways that former slaves from a variety of linguistic and cultural backgrounds came together to create new communities in the Christian missions of western Tanzania. It shows how converts adapted to Christianity and, at the same time, shaped it through their translations of the Bible and other religious texts into the Kinyamwezi language, integrating concepts from their own cultures and experiences of slavery. Working as teachers, pastors, and catechists, former slaves and their descendants laid the basis for the growth of African Christianity in the region, and the book pays particular attention to women's agency in creating spaces for negotiating kinship ties and mutual relations with the wider communities. It also delves into the range of missionary sources to show the experience of lay Christians who opposed religious authority in Catholic and Moravian missions, examining the division caused by catechists' demands for equality of status, recognition, and appropriate pay in the context of ujamaa and the turmoil brought about by the revival movement. Through narratives of religious experience from multiple missions and village outstations, the book shows how former slaves created a Kinyamwezi-speaking Christian culture, taking inspiration both from European missionaries and neighbouring African villagers, and became part of evolving rural communities in the inter-war period, enabling their descendants to achieve a significant degree of social mobility.

Why do traditions disappear? How is the disappearance of tradition also a vehicle for social change and re-inventions of practices and new traditions? Using case studies from one Sukuma area along the southern shores of Lake Victoria in Tanzania, global processes of how religions work in practice are analysed by focusing on rainmaking, witchcraft and Christianity. Traditionally, Sukuma society was culturally and cosmologically structured around the chief, the ancestors and rainmaking. Everything was dependent upon the rain. Rainmaking as a ritual practice has disappeared and ancestral propitiations are declining, while, at the same time, Christianity is spreading and witchcraft and witch killings are increasing. Although Christianity as a religion may provide answers and hopes for life after death, the religion provides few solutions in the here and now when it comes to poverty and suffering; problems and challenges that have to be solved. Witchcraft, on the other hand, does, or is believed to do so – and the increase in witchcraft is analysed in relation to the impacts of more than a century of globalisation from the missionaries and colonizers onwards. With the declining ancestral tradition, witchcraft and Christianity as religious practices supplement each other in the ways they are believed to work in providing answers, solutions or divine interferences in different realms; this world and the Otherworld. Offering an approach going beyond structural functionalism on different premises, the book’s focus on religion at work will facilitate new understandings of how to study religion as it is perceived and believed in practice.

A performance culture of illness and wellness In southern Uganda, ritual healing traditions called kusamira and nswezi rely on music to treat sickness and maintain well-being. Peter J. Hoesing blends ethnomusicological fieldwork with analysis to examine how kusamira and nswezi performance socializes dynamic processes of illness, wellness, and health. People participate in these traditions for reasons that range from preserving ideas to generating strategies that allow them to navigate changing circumstances. Indeed, the performance of kusamira and nswezi reproduces ideas that remain relevant for succeeding generations. Hoesing shows the potential of this social reproduction of well-being to shape development in a region where over 80 percent of the population relies on traditional healers for primary health care. Comprehensive and vivid with eyewitness detail, Kusamira Music in Uganda offers insight into important healing traditions and the overlaps between expressive culture and healing practices, the human and other-than-human, and Uganda's past and future.

In The African Imagination in Music, noted music scholar Kofi Agawy offers a fresh introduction to the vast, immensely rich and diverse set of repertoires that comprise the sound worlds of Sub-Saharan African music. Agawu introduces readers to the basic elements of African music and to the values upon which they are built. He then explores the key dimensions and resources of African music, including the place of music in society, musical instruments, the relationship between language and music, rhythm, melody, form, harmony and finally, appropriations of African music by musicians around the world. Written in an accessible styles, The African Imagination in Music is poised to renew interest in Black African music, and to engender discussion of its creative underpinnings by Africanists, ethnomusicologists, music theorists and musicologists. -- from back cover.

Muhidin Maalim Gurumo and Hassan Rehani Bitchuka are two of Tanzania’s most well-known singers in the popular music genre known as muziki wa dansi (literally, 'music for dancing'), a variation of the Cuban-based rhumba idiom that has been enormously impactful throughout central, eastern, and western Africa in the contemporary era. This interview-based dual biography investigates the lives and careers of these two men from an ethnomusicological and historical perspective. Gurumo had a career spanning fifty years before his death in 2014. Bitchuka has been singing professionally for forty-five years. The two singers, affectionately called mapacha (“the twins”) by their colleagues, worked together as partners for thirty years from 1973-2003. This study situates these exemplary individuals as creative agents in a local cultural context, showcasing interviews, narratives, and nostalgic reminiscences about musical life lived under Colonialism, state Socialism, and current politics in the global neoliberal democratic milieu. The book adds to a growing body of work about popular music in Dar es Salaam and shines a light on these artists’ creative processes, the choices they have made regarding rare resources, their styles and efficacy in conflict resolution, and their own memories regarding the musical art they have created.

Written by one of the best-known academic writers on African music, On African Music is a collection of seven essays addressing various techniques, influences, and scholarly approaches to African music. After a concise introduction spelling out the rationale for the book, successive chapters develop answers to questions such as: How does a "minimalist impulse" animate creativity in Africa, and does "Western minimalism" differ from "African minimalism"? How do we explain the prevalence of iconic effects in African expressive forms? How has (European) tonality functioned as a "colonizing force" in African music? Why is the (written) art music of the continent talked about so little when it has been in existence since the middle of the nineteenth century? How might the discipline of music theory be rejuvenated by "aid" from Africa? What are the strengths and limitations of ethnotheory as a methodology? Who is who in theorizations of African rhythm, and how might we explain the shape of the existing archive? This book thus deals with analytical and interpretive issues, the politics of scholarship, and salient features of African music. Laced with provocative viewpoints on each page, On African Music should appeal not only to readers curious about the structural underpinnings of African music but also to those who wish to reflect critically and philosophically on how we study and write about the music of the continent, how we might approach its global status with a firm understanding from the inside, and what our priorities might be in promoting an empowering cosmopolitan discourse.

Song Walking explores the politics of land, its position in memories, and its foundation in changing land-use practices in western Maputaland, a borderland region situated at the juncture of South Africa, Mozambique, and Swaziland. Angela Impey investigates contrasting accounts of this little-known geopolitical triangle, offsetting textual histories with the memories of a group of elderly women whose songs and everyday practices narrativize a century of borderland dynamics. Drawing evidence from women’s walking songs (amaculo manihamba)—once performed while traversing vast distances to the accompaniment of the European mouth-harp (isitweletwele)—she uncovers the manifold impacts of internationally-driven transboundary environmental conservation on land, livelihoods, and local senses of place. This book links ethnomusicological research to larger themes of international development, environmental conservation, gender, and local economic access to resources. By demonstrating that development processes are essentially cultural processes and revealing how music fits within this frame, Song Walking testifies to the affective, spatial, and economic dimensions of place, while contributing to a more inclusive and culturally apposite alignment between land and environmental policies and local needs and practices.