E-Mail This Article to a Friend The sounds of Zanzibar Discovering the Sauti za Busara Festival BY BANNING EYRE

Most foreign visitors to Tanzania come to see a lion take down a zebra on the Serengeti, not to catch up on the local hip-hop scene or hear the Arab-influenced taarab orchestras on the fabled island of Zanzibar. For this devotee of African cultural tourism, it took the inaugural edition of the Sauti za Busara music festival in Stonetown, Zanzibar, to inspire a trip to East Africa. Sauti za Busara is Swahili for "sounds of wisdom," not the catchiest of marketing phrases by a long shot. But in Zanzibar, the heartland of East Africa’s multi-ethnic Swahili community, and the place where the purest and most poetic Swahili in all of Africa is spoken, it has a certain resonance.

Zanzibar is ringed with white sand beaches and Caribbean blue water. Its people, 90 percent Muslim, blend Arab and African features; they are known for their prowess in music and art, and for some of the most exotic cuisine in Africa. For centuries, Zanzibar was a hub of the Arab slave trade, and sultans there continued to deal in African slaves even after the British outlawed the practice in 1873. Tensions rose steadily during the early 20th-century British Protectorate, and Zanzibar exploded in revolutionary rage in January 1964, when 12,000 Arabs and Indians were killed in a single night. The result was its incorporation into the new nation of Tanzania later that year, and an uneasy marriage has unfolded ever since.

On arriving at the festival, I ran into Roger Armstrong, who was part of England’s GlobeStyle Records when it recorded groundbreaking releases of taarab music in the late 1980s. He was astounded at Stonetown’s transformation. "A festival like this would have been unimaginable in 1988. Tourists didn’t dare come here."

Taarab music mirrors Zanzibar’s complex history. Roughly a century ago, prominent Zanzibari musicians went to study in Cairo and then brought Arab classical music — featuring ouds, violins, kanun (zither), and frame drums — to the island. Over the years, taarab orchestras like the renowned Culture Musical Club presided over the increasing Africanization of the music, adding Swahili vocals, local drums, and so-called ngoma rhythms, and later guitars and keyboards.

All this and more was on display at the festival. A single stage was erected alongside the old stone fort next to the port in Stonetown, a picturesque maze of narrow streets now filled with vendors of wood carvings, colorful paintings, beadwork, and local fabric, also fine restaurants, snorkel-and-dive centers, and countless Internet cafés. The festival site was actually the Forodhani Gardens, an open area shaded by huge, umbrella-like trees. Every night, festival or not, local chefs set up outdoor grills at the water’s edge and cooked marinated fish kebabs, octopus, squid, and other delicacies that sold for next to nothing. As the music played from 4 p.m. to midnight, the sun slowly set beyond a tableau of distant islands, anchored, rusting ships, wooden fishing boats, and the Indian Ocean’s signature craft, wooden dhows, their big, triangular sails billowing in the wind.

The first afternoon saw local taarab ensembles, a set of young rappers pumping out rhythmic Swahili chants over programmed beats, and traditional ngoma percussion and dance ensembles, some in full body paint and feather-and-bead regalia. The night ended with a pumping Afropop set from Kenya’s young Eric Wainaina, who spent six years studying at the Berklee College of Music. Subsequent nights included sets by the Mozambique roots big band Ghorwane, Willom Tight and Tight Family from Zimbabwe, and African Revolution Band, one of the top guitar-rumba acts in Tanzania.

Although the festival was free, it took time for the locals to turn out in force. Maybe it was just a matter of word spreading through the town’s barazas — stone benches along the streets where people sit and exchange news. To judge by the slack-jawed expressions among those who did gather before the stage that first afternoon, people seemed unaccustomed to this sort of public spectacle. "It’s a new festival for Zanzibar," said DJ Yusuf, who moved from England six years ago to help found Busara Productions. "One thing we were determined to do was to try to get a big local audience to come, and by the end, they did turn out in the thousands. Local people felt proud to have their boys up there on stage with the groups from Mozambique and Zimbabwe."

The locals proved a tough audience, though. Eric Wainaina’s cool reception began before the band played a note. Wainaina’s years in Boston left him convinced that the R&B sound that drew him to the US was not his true calling, and that he needed to go back to Kenya to make his career. He’s done well there with his polished, dance-friendly sound and politically engaged lyrics, but nothing prepared him for his first trip to Zanzibar. "The local censorship board came to see the soundcheck," he said after the show. "They asked a couple of questions like what’s the content going to be, and what are people going to be wearing. I have two ladies singing back-up, and they had shirts that sort of ended above their navels. They said that’s a definite no-no, so we had to go out shopping for new shirts."

When Wainaina reached the point in his show where he — like so many African acts — invited people to dance on stage, he had to work hard to get women up there, and those who responded were, as he put it, "evidently not from Zanzibar." The local skepticism toward Wainaina was puzzling when you consider that far more scantily clad women danced at least as suggestively in some of the traditional Tanzanian acts, and that the groups who inspired the most enthusiastic responses from the locals were loaded with sexual innuendo.

High on that list would be 93-year-old Zanzibari musical legend Bikidude, who has sung both taarab and ngoma during her long career. She straddled a long tall drum with her thin, bare legs and sang in a gravelly voice as other women circled around her, sometimes kneeling and lying down on the stage to dramatize her lyrics. "This ngoma is called unyango," she said after one song. "This is for a girl, when it’s time to be a woman." One song warned chickens to watch out for a crow-like bird that preys on young chicks; at one point, it asked, "What do you do with a headless chicken?" Another song asked what it means to be old. "It doesn’t mean when your hair turns gray," Bikidude sang, "or when your teeth are falling out. The important thing is your machine." The crowd roared for this stuff, delighted by the naughty subtext.

There was also a big response to Kikundi Cha Dogodogo, a group whose music was described by Busara’s Kwame Mchauru as "ghetto taarab," a genre formally known as kidumbak. The beat was driving and square, but fat, off-beat bass lines played on a one-string tea-chest bass called sanduku really made it swing. Two screechy violins played cycling melodies together, sometimes veering into wild trills as the dancers launched into gear and the bass began thrumming. "You cannot call this pure African music," said Mchauru. "When Arabs came here, they brought violins, so local African guys like these decided to mix together some taarab and some rhythms of Africa, but it was mostly on the streets, with dancing and going crazy and all that. This was how it started, this kidumbak. These guys just copied it from some other guys and then somehow twisted it around."

As in taarab music, there is a lot of boasting and taunting in kidumbak, and when a pudgy young man got up to dance, comically competing with and egging on the group’s female dancers, the crowd howled with delight. "Zanzibar is a Muslim country," Mchauru said afterward, "and when you talk about these private things, like sexuality and stuff — usually, people don’t show it. But inside, they feel it, so when you express yourself like that, they just go crazy."

In a more sacred vein but no less powerful were an all-male Sufi group called Maulidi Ya Homu Ya Mtendeni, who chanted and moved in beautiful, wave-like synchrony over a hypnotic beat. Word was that they’re among the last interpreters of an ancient Islamic art. DJ Yusuf emphasized that Busara wanted the festival to promote traditional music but not preserve it. "These things have to move and develop and change, and they do, whether we’re involved or not."

Perhaps the most interesting of the rappers and hip-hoppers who performed was a Tanzania-based act called X-Plastaz. Some of the group’s rappers prowled the stage thrusting their arms forward in transparent imitation of routine American hip-hop antics. Among them, two Maasai brothers adorned in beadwork and bright red robes pogo-sticked around the stage, jumping impossibly high amid the posse of wanna-be Brooklynites. The key to all African rap, of course, lies in the lyrics, which are lost on most foreign listeners. Backstage, one of the Maasai rappers explained that one of his raps advised young men on how deal with the ritual of circumcision, right down to the right way to sit, and how to behave. "The Maasai do it late," X-Plastaz’s G-Sann (who is not Maasai) explained, "when the boys are grown up. They know what is going on in the world, what is pain. If they did it when they were 12 years old, or maybe 15, they could cry, and somebody could say, ‘He is crying because he is a kid.’ But because you are grown up, 18 years old, you can’t cry at all during the circumcision. Once you show your tears, it’s like you’ve failed."