Conference Abstracts
28. Ivaska, Andrew; Concordia University, Canada:
"Contesting Postcolonial “National Culture”
in a Cosmopolitan Dar es Salaam: The Short Life of a Tanzanian Ban
on “Soul”
In the early postcolonial period, Dar es Salaam witnessed
the development of new cultural practices around “global”
mass-cultural forms, including mini-skirts, “soul” music,
wigs, and beauty contests. The popularity of the practices, debates
and controversies surrounding these forms grew up against the background
of struggles accompanying important shifts in the social landscape
of Tanzania’s capital: the changing nature of public space
in a rapidly expanding Dar es Salaam, women’s work and mobility
in the city, the state’s increasing control of paths to resources
and power, and crises of masculinity and youth in an era of urban
joblessness. These developments coincided with the growing profile
of the Tanzanian state’s national cultural project, which
featured a series of bans on (at various times) wigs, cosmetics,
mini-skirts, tight trousers, bell-bottoms, beauty contests, soul
music and “Afro” hairstyles as forms antithetical to
“national culture” and embodying a dangerous “urban
decadence.” Igniting extraordinary and wide-ranging debates
that spilled beyond the national cultural question, these contests
over culture saw young people making claims to “modern”
lives in the city that clashed with the state’s increasing
emphasis in the late 1960s and early 1970s on rural hard work as
the path to “modern development” and the appropriate
scene for the performance of Tanzanian citizenship.
In this context, this paper focuses particularly on the debate surrounding
a 1969 ban on “soul” music in Dar es Salaam. Embedded
in multiple agendas and rhetorics, this debate involved not only
state officials, young Tanzanians distressed at the ban, and “concerned”
residents of the capital, but also African-Americans living in and
passing through Dar es Salaam. Situating this episode in the contexts
of the national cultural project, the gendered concerns about young
women in the city that accompanied it, and Dar es Salaam’s
position as a nodal point along global networks of cosmopolitan
style, I take two tacks in analyzing the debate. First of all, I
consider the state’s curious ambivalence with regard to Afro-American
culture and the ways in which young urbanites’ performed attachments
to non-national icons like James Brown competed with official attempts
to “nationalize” urban identities in a capital city
seen as a problematic cultural space. Secondly, in exploring the
ban’s emergence in connections to concerns about “schoolgirls”
in Dar es Salaam nightclubs, I suggest that the national-cultural
focus of much of the debate was a vehicle for underlying anxieties
around sexuality, urban space, and women’s mobility in the
capital. These anxieties, I contend, made up an abiding, underlying
force behind not only the ban on soul music, but the longer series
of “decency” campaigns of which it was a part. Throughout
the paper, I attempt to elaborate on this late-1960s moment in Dar
es Salaam as one which saw the postcolonial state continuing a colonial
practice of constructing the city as a threatening, decadent and
feminized space – an effort which the capital’s cosmopolitan
cultural terrain made increasingly difficult and contested.
This paper is based upon a variety of primary source material, including
government and party documents, letters-to-the-editor, oral interviews,
and political cartoons.
Back
|
