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Performance and Politics in Tanzania

The Nation on Stage

Indiana University Press

Performing, Transforming, and Reforming Tanzania

A Historical Tale

In writing a history of postcolonial Tanzanian theatre, I could tell a story of how the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank domesticated the fiercely anti-colonial, socialist, pan-Africanist government into a meek capitalist one under the rubric of democratization. I could then trace a similar tale in the history of theatre companies, in which actors and playwrights eagerly joined the struggle to build a socialist nation only to be eventually co-opted by the forces of tourism and development. For evidence, I could point to the multitude of theatre companies that flourished in Dar es Salaam during the socialist era only to crumble under the onslaught of structural adjustment policies. Seamlessness and linearity would unite in a neat package that situates oppressor and oppressed in binarized terms.

The history of postcolonial Tanzanian theatre is, however, a far more convoluted — and considerably more interesting — story of complicity and collaboration. Customary terms such as resistance, appropriation, and co-option do not do justice to the complex paths and detours that these performances carved out. Top-down or grassroots models of nationalism are incommensurate with the example of Tanzanian performance, in which the state, performing artists, and audiences interacted in a dynamic process that I term collaborative nationalism in order to emphasize their various roles as collaborators rather than as hegemonic or resistant forces.

This term is not without its problems since the concept of collaboration implies a sense of equality that might elide the privileged status of the state and its agents. To be sure, the state clearly sought to maintain its upper hand through the passing of a series of regulations that governed the operations of the theatre companies. Also, the companies performed a relentless patriotism through ceaseless praises of government policy, the party, and Nyerere, which indicates a certain level of fear, or at least anxiety, about overstepping these bounds. Nevertheless, the complex, even contradictory nature of these relationships between the state and the theatre companies meant that these boundaries and parameters were fluid and subject to change. In using the term collaborative nationalism, my intent is to emphasize the dynamic nature of Tanzanian national performance in which the state borrowed from popular culture and vice versa in an ongoing cycle of shadowing, adaptation, and, indeed, co-creation.

I also explore the forces of creativity that collaborative nationalism unleashed. Creativity and innovation are widely understood as hallmarks of African popular culture in which global and national dictates are transformed for local consumption. Although I recognize similar forces at play in Tanzanian popular theatre, I found that the networks of complicity called forth additional reserves of creativity. The processes of negotiation demanded new strategies on both sides of the postcolonial equation as they engaged in intricate choreographies of power. Instead of remaining a distant oppressive force, the state actively interacted and engaged with local producers of national performance. Indeed, the state was not limited to conventional nationalist scripts but indulged in some improvisations of its own, as the discussion of sarakasi (acrobatics) reveals. It is not my intention to whitewash creativity as a purely positive term since agents of power can and do employ these forces of creativity to maintain or reestablish systems of dominance. My point is to open up conventional ideas of understanding creativity as a trademark of local agency and excavate the layers of complexity that the term contains.

I also draw upon Joseph Roach's concept of surrogation in order to complicate the standard tale of grassroots creativity and hegemonic coercion. In Cities of the Dead: Circum-Atlantic Performance, he suggests that cultural performances tell stories of "incomplete forgetting" (1996, 7) and that traces of those carefully forgotten histories survive through the medium of performance. In an oft-quoted passage, he writes: "In the life of a community, the process of surrogation does not begin or end but continues as actual or perceived vacancies occur in the network of relations that constitutes the social fabric. Into the cavities created by loss through death or other forms of departure ... survivors attempt to fit satisfactory alternates" (2). His use of the term "survivors" is especially evocative when applied to postcolonial contexts where the social fabric was torn through colonial suppression and/or co-option of indigenous traditions and cultures. In the aftermath of colonialism's "epistemic violence" (Spivak 1985, 130), the survivors include the newly independent state anxiously attempting to prove its legitimacy as well as the newly independent citizens testing the waters of postcolonial national identity. Roach repeatedly calls attention to the power plays of erasure and forgetting unleashed in the processes of surrogation, asking such "obdurate questions" as "Whose forgetting? Whose memory? Whose history?" (1996, 7). In a similar vein, one might ask, why were some productions of Tanzanian nationalism judged satisfactory and others discarded? For whom were they satisfactory? As this historical account reveals, both the state and subjects worked together to produce these alternates in a multi-layered process of collaborative nationalism. Loren Kruger glosses Roach's concept of surrogation as "imposing, transforming, reclaiming the scripts and behaviors of the past in the present" (1999, 10) — a phrase that captures the series of moves and countermoves involved in the shaping and contesting of cultural memories.

The complexities and nuances of this path were not readily evident in the state's initial forays into the production of national culture. My historical narrative begins with Nyerere's inauguration speech in 1962 as the first president of the Republic of Tanzania, a speech that foreshadowed a conventional course of Third World nationalism that depended upon the usual opposition of Western versus African culture. Upon the unveiling of the Arusha Declaration five years later, however, the state embarked upon a more experimental path. Hundreds of cultural troupes began to flourish in factories, branches of the army, and parastatal organizations throughout the country. The state readily borrowed from these local models of national culture and even appropriated some of the more successful examples as surrogate national troupes once the official versions were declared defunct in 1981. Through a complex process of economic and political liberalization in the late 1980s and early 1990s, this plethora gradually consolidated into the triad of Muungano, Mandela, and Tanzania One Theatre, which seized the helm as the vanguards of national culture.

This cyclical process of surrogation culminated in a new version of national culture, a multifaceted creation that embraced the nuances of postcolonial Tanzanian identity. The framework of collaborative nationalism helps to chart a new course that not only complicates conventional concepts of co-option, oppression, and resistance but also seeks to understand the contradictory and ambivalent impulses that pervade the nationalist project.

HESITANT BEGINNINGS

When Julius Kambarage Nyerere assumed the presidency of what was then called Tanganyika in 1962, his inauguration speech adhered to relatively conventional tropes of Third World nationalism. In order to counteract the colonial legacy that defined indigenous culture as "worthless — something of which we should be ashamed, instead of a source of pride" (1967, 186), he pitted dansi, or Western forms of dance, against ngoma in a culture war between traditional Africa and modern Europe:

When we were at school we were taught to sing the songs of the Europeans. How many of us were taught the songs of the Wanyamwezi or of the Wahehe? Many of us have learnt to dance the "rumba" or the "chachacha" to "rock'n'roll" and to "twist." ... But how many of us can dance, or have even heard of, the Gombe Sugu, the Mangala, the Konge, Nyang'umumi, Kiduo or Lele Mama? ... And even though we dance and play the piano, how often does that dancing... really give us the sort of thrill we get from dancing the mganda or the gombe sugu even though the music may be no more than the shaking of pebbles in a tin? It is hard for any man to get much real excitement from dances and music which are not in his own blood. (1967, 186)

This speech is hardly remarkable from the standpoint of postcolonial studies given that newly independent Third World countries often articulated a desire to "reclaim" a glorious precolonial culture. The ubiquity of this rhetoric might explain why Terence O. Ranger dismissed Nyerere's erasure of the complexities of dance traditions such as mganda, which exemplified postcolonial notions of hybridity through its integration of colonial military formations and indigenous musical rhythms, as an "obvious, but superficial, irony" (1975, 122). Much less superficial are the cultural anxieties and ideological agendas that Nyerere's speech contained. Out of the plethora of performance traditions that existed at the time of the speech, which included ngoma, muziki wa dansi, taarab, kwaya, vichekesho, and maigizo. Nyerere singled out ngoma and muziki wa dansi as the sole examples of the entire performance pantheon in a move that bore witness to the controlling tendencies of the newly independent state.

The speech positions colonialism as a monolithic force that inexorably suppresses precolonial traditions. In defining an opposition between the dominant colonizer and the submissive colonized, Nyerere set the stage for a reversal of power in which the state could appropriate that agency and mark out its legitimacy on the world stage. It is noteworthy, for example, that Nyerere's speech thoroughly diminishes the potency of ngoma. In portraying ngoma as a vanished phenomenon, he renders it a passive victim of the colonial onslaught. Granted, his audience consisted of the newly elected Members of Parliament, many of whom represented the educated elite, or "Black Europeans" (wazungu weusi) and therefore were more likely to internalize those colonial attitudes that categorized ngoma as "primitive" or, at best, "precious" (Ranger 1975, 130). Nevertheless, the sweeping terms of his speech erases the thriving popularity of local ngoma among the majority of the Tanzanian population. It is particularly telling that this speech eliminates the role that ngoma played in the nationalist movement that brought him to power. For example, Susan Geiger (1987, 1997) found that coastal Muslim women used the performance networks of ngoma to promote the nationalist movement in the 1950s. Of the four women's musical groups that became directly involved in TANU (Tanzania National Union) politics, one practiced lelemama, which, interestingly enough, is included in Nyerere's list of "forgotten" traditions. Work such as Geiger's raises questions concerning the degree of coincidence that Nyerere's omissions contained.

It also seems significant that the speech excludes the unique role of dansi as a tool in the national struggle by depicting it purely as a sign of colonial oppression. In Ranger's description of the popularity of ballroom dance traditions among the nationalist elite, he remarks, "it was sometimes hard to distinguish between a branch of the African Association [a nationalist organization] and an elite dance club" (Ranger 1975, 96). Although dansi tended to be associated with Christianity on the mainland (126), Laura Fair found that Muslims in Zanzibar not only embraced dansi but also used it as a means of actively promoting the nationalist cause. They played upon the popularity of dansi among the youth in order to lure them to political meetings: "Dancing to foxtrots and wearing fancy gowns provided them with a cover for political education and organizing and a very effective means for attracting younger and less politically minded individuals into their organizations" (1994, 519). This local appropriation and transformation of this emblem of European modernity serves as yet another example of how indigenous and so-called European practices alike were marshaled to serve the nationalist cause. In Nyerere's speech, however, dansi is uniformly portrayed as a tool of the colonialists, a practice that needs to be suppressed in order to allow its weaker opponent of ngoma to survive.

The state, of course, would serve as ngoma's benign protector. In order to counteract the colonial legacy of shame, Nyerere announced the formation of the Ministry of National Culture and Youth: "I have set up this new Ministry to help us regain our pride in our own culture. I want it to seek the best of the traditions and customs of all our tribes and make them part of our national culture" (Nyerere 1967, 187). Nyerere's statement claims a sense of agency for the postcolonial state, one that would single-handedly counteract the psychic violence of colonialism. This institutional agency is readily repeated in narratives of Tanzanian theatre history, which situates his speech as a turning point in the development of Tanzanian national culture. In other words, the speech launched a linear path of nationalist culture in which the newly formed ministry founded a National Dance Troupe in order to fulfill its charge to resuscitate indigenous culture.

The story of this "revival," however, is perhaps more accurately told as one of hesitance and distaste. More in an attempt to imitate the example of the famous Ballet Africaines of Guinea than as a direct result of Nyerere's speech, in 1963, the ministry hired nine local dancers to form a troupe that would provide entertainment at official occasions (Office of Culture 1964d). Three of these dancers were sent to Guinea to study with the Ballet Africaines for six months in an attempt to improve the Tanzanian troupe; however, the lackluster quality of these performances are painfully evident in a ministry official's scrawl in response to a request to have the troupe perform abroad: "I do not consider our group good advertisement for the Republic overseas. Why can't he contact some of the local ngoma troupes?" (Office of Culture 1964b). Although ngoma contained significant potential as a popular national symbol since it was accessible to all Tanzanians regardless of their level of formal education or religion, this thriving tradition was reduced to an object of scorn. Not only were the dancers paid minimal wages, but the ministry's attitude toward them also reeked with condescension.

This attitude stemmed at least partly from a sense of disdain for ngoma itself. In 1969, Minister of Agriculture D. N. M. Bryceson gave a speech in which he denounced those villagers who danced ngoma at the expense of contributing to the building of the country (Uhuru 1969a). The editors of Uhuru endorsed his speech, noting with disapproval the continued tendency for villagers and rural migrants in Dar es Salaam to indulge in weeklong ngoma performances (Uhuru 1969b). Despite the "thrill" to be had in rattling pebbles in a tin, as described in Nyerere's speech, one was apparently not to get carried away and forget to plant his maize. Thirty years later, ngoma continues to invoke scorn from members of the middle and the upper classes, who tended to see these dances as chafu (dirty). Like the colonial state itself, which sought both to suppress these forms as "uncivilized" and to resuscitate them as safe expressions of traditional culture, the founding and development of the National Dance Troupe was riddled with contradictions.

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Excerpted from Performance and Politics in Tanzania by Laura Edmondson. Copyright © 2007 Laura Edmondson. Excerpted by permission of Indiana University Press.
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