Mzee Waziri Omari Nyange: a story of intervention in Tanzanian nation-building with guitar music, sung Swahili poems and healing

Abstract

Drawing on private papers and interviews conducted between 2009 and 2015, this article analyses the Swahili lyrics (mashairi) of three of the twelve songs or sung poems composed between the mid-2000s and 2015 by Mzee Waziri Omari Nyange (born 1936), a Muslim man of peasant origins who was once a solo guitarist with the renowned Cuban Marimba Jazz Band, a craftsperson and a herbalist. He is still active as a healer, promoter of Tanzanian culture and composer of didactic lyrics accompanied by tunes for guitar music (muziki wa dansi). Two of the three unrecorded and typewritten compositions presented here are on HIV/AIDS; one is on witchcraft. Lyrics largely conform to longstanding Swahili/Islamic moral principles and converge with the government's ideology. But they also at times depart from them and present innovative views. Notwithstanding their restricted audience or lack thereof, these compositions serve to illustrate that Mzee Nyange's concerns with individual and national well-being are intertwined. By showing some of the ways in which one outstanding individual of humble social level has been keenly participating in the process of guiding the community in hidden ways, this article claims that Mzee Nyange's life history and artistic production can shed light on the everyday process of self-making and nation-building in Tanzania.

Keywords:

• Tanzania
• Swahili music
• non-elite intellectuals
• self-making and nation-building
• African healing

Acknowledgements

I wish to thank Mzee Nyange for sharing his time, ideas and private collection with me, and for granting me permission to use his songs; Liz Gunner for her invaluable advice; Karin Barber, Andrew Coulson and two JACS anonymous readers for their comments on earlier versions of this paper; and T.M. Mboya, A.T. Ambala and Anita Urasa for revising my English rendering of the Swahili lyrics. All the final translations and ideas remain my own.

Funding

Fieldwork carried out in 2014 and 2015 is based on the research supported wholly by the National Research Foundation (NRF) of South Africa [grant number 90767]. Research conducted in 2009 was made possible by a SPARC grant from the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. My use of the term ‘intellectual’ follows Feierman's (1990, 17–27) argument and definition of peasant intellectuals.

2. A discussion of my interaction with Mzee Nyange, what he chooses to say and to what extent information given is ‘true’, is well beyond the scope of this article. For reflections on the quality and reliability of oral testimonies, see Portelli (1991). For the need to combine ‘rigour, empathy and engagement with received truths’, see Wright (2002, 17).

3. In the colonial period, Buguruni was a remote farming village (Brennan, Burton, and Lawi 2007).

4. For Swahili newspaper poetry published in the colonial period, see Bromber (2007) and Suriano (2011a, 2011b).

5. The meaning of utamaduni (refinement and civilization) in originally not dissimilar from ustaarabu (civilization, culture, education). Both terms are associated with urban life and point to local Arabo-centric ideas of civilization. After independence utamaduni took the overtone of local, ‘authentic’ Tanzanian culture, as opposed to western culture. Utamaduni (in the form of ‘traditional’ dances, language and crafts) was to be preserved and revived (cf. Askew 2002).

6. A full account of the aims and activities of this cultural association will be addressed elsewhere.

7. This was a time when the Tanzanian currency was overvalued and the external debt stood at over three billion US dollars. The most basic goods were unavailable, including foodstuff and sanitary ware.

8. The term ‘sterile’ is borrowed from Ralph Austen, in reference to Karin Barber's chapter in her 2006 edited collection. In reference to the literary production of Nigerian literate S.A. Adenle discussed by Barber, Austen (2008, 144) states that ‘the lack of dialogue with an intellectual peer community renders the resulting books not only unmarketable but also textually sterile'.

9. Underlined in the original typewritten text.

10. Mwenzenu (I, one of you) is by no means a new idea, but is related to the longstanding notion of an imagined circle of writers (see Suriano 2011a). It resonates with similar ideas held in Northern Nigeria (Furniss 2006, 416). Since this song does not have a public, here the notion of ‘we’ is a very abstract one.

11. I translate the term mapenzi (love; including physical love) as ‘intimacy’ (see Hunter 2010). Mzee Nyange uses the more explicit term ngono (sex) only in one composition.

12. In a study on contemporary KwaZulu-Natal, Hunter (2010, 3) claims that intimacy (a term which encompasses fertility, love, marriage and genital pleasure) and reduced marriage rates are intertwined with the shifting political economy.

13. Although Mzee Nyange uses western medications when needed, and ‘Africans have long recognized that common physical ailments and injuries could be treated with medicines alone and without appeal to one's ancestors or accusations of witchcraft’ (Flint 2008, 65), his idea that AIDS might result from God's punishment for human sins deserves further analysis. For a recent study that places Tanzanian traditional medicine and biomedicine under the same ethnographic lens, see Langwick (2011).

14. For state attempts to ensure the ‘efficacy’ and safety of traditional treatments in Tanzania, and for the extent to which healers turn inequalities to their advantage, see Langwick (2011). For issues of power and control in contemporary Mozambique, see Trentini (2012). For the recent (2003) Memorandum of Understanding for the legal recognition of the hundreds of thousands of healers operating in South Africa, and for the links between local medicine and colonialism, see Flint (2008).

15. For South African church leaders as figures of peace and for the connection between healing and power, see Gunner (2004, 1–54); also see Comaroff (1985); for a general history of the church in Africa see Marshall (2009); for African churches in Nigeria, see Hastings (199 6) and Peel (200 0).

16. For an examination of the use of the Qu'ran, astrology and numerology by Muslim healers in contemporary southeastern Tanzania, see Langwick (2011).

17. This distinction was reinforced by anti-witchcraft legislation in colonial Tanganyika (Langwick 2011). Likewise, the isiZulu word izinyanga (herbalists) differs from izangoma (diviners) and ubuthakathi (witchcraft). For an analysis of today's popular usage of these terms in South Africa, see Flint (2008), Flint and Parle (2008, 320, endnote 4).