Lessons in culture Tanzanian art school teaches traditional music, dance
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Donatella Lorch
New York Times News Service
26 November 1995
The Dallas Morning News
BAGAMOYO, Tanzania - Music class here is in the shade of a tree just a
stone's throw from the Indian Ocean. The dozen students sit on cement
blocks, rocks or rusty chairs, playing their cowhide drums and wooden
marimbas.
In a building nearby, three men practice handstands and dance steps
undisturbed by a couple playing the guitar and rehearsing the same song
over and over. In the thatched-roof theater, mime students perform for
their teacher.
Only 10 students a year are accepted to the three-year program at the
School of Art at Bagamoyo, one of the few national art schools in
sub-Saharan Africa, and one of the few of those devoted expressly to
preserving traditional cultures.
The 30 full-time students who study here, many without previous
artistic training, take courses in traditional music, dance, theater
and acrobatics, as well as costume design, lighting, English and
Swahili.
"Our country is so big that the aim of being here is to learn something
about our other traditions," said Joyce Hagu, 27, a student here who is
a teacher from the northeastern coastal region.
In many ways, the school is the legacy of two decades of socialism and
a government policy aimed at overcoming ethnic divisions and creating a
shared sense of national identity. The dance and art studied here
reflect Tanzania's 120 ethnic groups and many languages.
After graduation, many students want to return to their home regions to
perform or teach. But now, like Tanzania itself, which has just held
its first multiparty elections, the school is trying to redefine its
role and cope financially in a post-socialist state.
Until a couple of years ago, the school's graduates were employed by
the government as performers, but now they are struggling to find jobs
on their own, sometimes in cultural offices or as members of their own
performance groups in a country where traditional music, as opposed to
modern Zairian or Western, is difficult to market to local audiences.
"If a nation does not have a cultural identity, it is a nation without
a spirit," said Penina Mlama, professor of theater and art and the
chief academic officer at the University of Dar es Salaam. "Bagamoyo is
very unique. In Africa you have the problem that artists don't have
schools for practical training."
The school was founded in 1981 at this fishing hamlet about 80 miles
north of the capital, Dar es Salaam. Bagamoyo - the name in Swahili
means "lay down your heart" - was infamous as the assembly point on the
East African mainland for slaves before they were shipped to the slave
market in Zanzibar.
Even before independence from Britain in 1961, traditional art was used
for political mobilization by nationalist groups. By 1967, specific
policies were adopted by the new socialist government to use art as
political propaganda and to suppress ethnic differences.
The School of Art was founded as a training ground for a national
performance troupe, Professor Mlama said. But government policies to
advance a national culture, like the institution of Swahili as a
national language, have also had the effect of effacing many indigenous
traditions, said Rashid Masimbi, the Bagamoyo school's founder and
principal. Students sent away to boarding schools for their secondary
education are cut off from their local ways.
"Fifty percent of the students when they come cannot seriously sing us
a song from home or dance a dance," Mr. Rashid said. The future for the
school and for these young men and women is uncertain at best. In the
past, the government paid 90 percent of the roughly $400 annual tuition
fee. But the new government - the governing party's presidential
candidate, Benjamim Mkapa, sworn in Nov. 23. - inherits empty coffers.
This year, all the school's graduates have had to market themselves.
Some have given up performing and taken ministry office jobs. But the
students at Bagamoyo say the future does not intimidate them. At a
music class continually interrupted by laughter and teasing, they
rehearsed a southern coastal song of celebration and then picked a
particular rhythm and began to improvise.
"This makes me feel so joyful," said Victor Mutalemwa, 26, who expects
to return to primary school teaching after graduation. "Here we learn
music from all our traditions. We learn we are all the same - we are
all Tanzanians."