Bagamoyo: Police Violence

In our last two posts we’ve tried to describe the heady atmosphere of Bagamoyo, a small windswept town on the Indian Ocean that is home to many of Tanzania’s most talented artists. Sadly, all is not as calm, creative and carefree as it seems.

When we were last there we met a young man with several gaping wounds on his shins.
Shocked that no one else seemed alarmed by the bright red holes in his legs, we asked him what had happened.

Apparently he was in a minor car accident on one of Bagamoyo’s sandy roads. According to him, it was clearly the other driver’s fault, but he quickly realized that the offender was paying the cops to get off without a penalty. When he pleaded with the cops not to let the offender go, tempers flared and a fight broke out. The young man was subdued, arrested, and taken to the police station, while the other man drove away.

At the station he was taken into a room and beaten by several policemen with heavy clubs. Six weeks later, when we took this picture, his wounds still had not closed. Apologies if the picture is too intense, but we feel we should report on what we experience and let you, our readers, do the interpreting. Although we’re trying to focus on the positives about Africa on this blog, we don’t want to do so at the expense of reality.

After the attack he was released, whereupon he went to the hospital. The hospital couldn’t do anything for him – every time they bandaged the wounds, the gauze came off within hours due to a combination of the heavy bleeding and the hot weather. So one of his friends, an old Italian man who runs a hostel near the beach, treated him with an antiseptic cream that turned his wounds a cough medicine red.

I grew up in a world sheltered from violence of this kind. At the sight of his wounds I became nauseas. I tried to imagine how I would have felt, what I would have done, had it been me curled up in that jail cell trying to escape the blows of the notched ebony clubs.

I’m tempted to say that this violent episode isn’t even that “severe” compared to the rape epidemic in the DRC or the murder of half a million Iraqis, but who can quantify the psychological effects of physical violence? The fact is that this young man’s psyche has been permanently altered and he no longer feels safe in his own town.

Yes, violence and oppression are facts of life in communities all over the world, and police violence certainly occurs with more frequency than is reported. The young man in this story had actually witnessed a police beating in Sweden prior to becoming a victim himself. He usually splits time between Canada and Bagamoyo, living in each place for half a year, but he now says he won’t come back to Tanzania for a long time. He’s currently looking for a human rights lawyer who will take on his case, but even if he finds one, it’ll be his word against the machine.

Bagamoyo’s Artists

Each time we are in Bagamoyo we take ngoma lessons. Ngoma is a Kiswahili word that encompasses drumming, dance and traditional music. Ally Zakoo and Shabani Mbatta (whose father is a teacher at the College of Arts) know ngoma inside out – they were born in Bagamoyo and have been playing the traditional music of Tanzania their whole lives. Now in their mid-twenties, they have set up a drum and dance workshop to teach cultural history and social issues to local schoolchildren.

Ally and Shabani play with incredible skill and pure joy, and they make their own drums; we play amidst piles of coconut wood shavings in the shade of a mango tree. On our last trip to Bagamoyo, Anette and her brother André played every day and gave excellent performances at the end of each lesson. After three days with these master teachers (who don’t have teaching degrees, mind you, just an infectious passion for what they do) André went from total beginner to confident drummer.

Vitali Maembe is a different kind of ngoma artist. A unique singer-songwriter in his early thirties, he writes socially conscious songs dealing with corruption, political violence, poverty and AIDS, among many other themes. A radio station in Dar “lost” his album after the firing of President Kikwete’s cabinet, and at a recent performance attended by several government ministers the microphone was taken away from him when he began singing ‘Afrika Shilingi Tano,’ a song enumerating the reasons Africa is perpetually drenched in blood.

In one part of the song, Vitali describes a conversation between Chinua Achebe and a writer from Sierra Leone, who laments that the white man came and killed his father and raped his mother. Chinua responds: “at least you haven’t lived to see the day that your own African people do those very same things to your family.” I guess this type of honesty isn’t what government ministers want to hear.

Vitali is also a painter. He sketches his ideas whenever they come to him but only paints once a year, filling 30 or 40 canvasses during a two-week reverie. His paintings depict the same themes that are present in his songs, and they are wonderfully colorful and sensual.

Mwandale Mwanyekwa is a sculptor who studied in Bagamoyo and is currently featured with other women in an exhibition entitled “Women are Creators” at the National Musem of Culture in Dar es Salaam. It’s hard to say what was more beautiful, her style or her art. Her clothing, jewelry and sculptures are all expressions of the same spirit – the spirit of the African woman, strong and beautiful.

The exhibition was unique because only female sculptors were represented, and all the pieces focused on the world seen from a woman’s perspective: the special relationship between a mother and her child, daily tasks such as fetching water or cooking, all done with a baby wrapped to her back. One of her most striking pieces was a wooden African continent on which she carved her own profile encircled by the words “Women can create change.” As she told us, the goal of her art is to empower women by celebrating their strength, grace and wisdom, qualities that are imprinted in each of her sculptures.

Artists like these are fundamental to change in any society. Where would we be, for instance, without Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, Arlo Guthrie, Neil Young and the countless other musicians who helped change American consciousness in the 1960s? Artists, like all people, draw inspiration from working together, and as their ideas merge and evolve, events like Woodstock are born. For this reason, Bagamoyo’s College of Arts is so important to the future of Tanzania - all the more so because there are so few schools like it in all of Africa.

Ally, Shabani, Vitali and Mwandale all studied at the College of Arts and have worked together on each other’s projects, just as Federico Garcia Lorca, Luis Buñuel and Salvdaor Dali formed their artistic identities while living and working together at La Residencia at the University of Madrid in the 1920s.

Much of Garcia Lorca’s energy in his last few years was spent touring with his theater company to culturally isolated parts of rural Spain. Interestingly, graduates of the College of Arts are meant to take their art to other parts of Tanzania to give workshops and set up schools of their own. Unfortunately the government doesn’t have the money to employ many of the graduates, but judging by the enterprising nature of Ally, Shabani, Vitali and Mwandale, Bagamoyo will continue to produce amazing artists for generations to come.

Bagamoyo: The Berkelee of Tanzania

A crescent moon of sand reaches gently out into the Indian Ocean as if trying to touch Zanzibar, 20 kilometers to the east. Palm trees with gracefully arced trunks line the beach creating the perfect sunset panorama. Fishermen sit on buckets scaling their fish while women crowd around in their colorful kangas bargaining for the best price. A 15-foot hammerhead was caught today, sprawled on the beach it still seems alive with otherworldly power. A herd of insanely long-horned cattle are driven down the beach and into the surf by a couple of barefoot teenagers. Having never seen cattle on a beach, we asked the locals what was happening.

“They’re going onto the boat.”
“The boys?”
“No, the cows.”

In Norway, picturesque cows dot the mountainsides that crash down into the fjords, and you can imagine that if a Norwegian farmer ever decided to move his cattle by water, he’d have a big iron ship waiting to transport them. But this is Bagamoyo, Tanzania, East Africa, and the boats here are still made the same way they were thousands of years ago. The long wooden dhow with its single sail gave medieval Arabs supremacy over the Red Sea trading routes, and is still used daily along the Swahili coast from Somalia to Mozambique.

Historically infamous as the starting and ending point of the Arab slave route across Tanzania into Central Africa, Bagamoyo (which means “lay your heart down”) is fast becoming one of our favorite places in Tanzania. We first came here in December on the recommendation of my good friend Jake Thomsen, who found out about Bagamoyo when he came to Tanzania in 1999. Jake took six weeks of drum lessons and was told by his teacher of a music school where the students start their day by drumming on the beach at sunrise, singing into the wind, then diving into the ocean. He then called his parents and said he wouldn’t be returning to Brown for his junior year.

Fortunately for me, Jake came back and taught me how to play the djembe. After college he enrolled at the Berkelee School of Music and I was enticed to move to Boston so I too could play music 8 hours a day. Bagamoyo’s Chuo cha Sanaa (College of Arts - LINK) is Tanzania’s answer to Berkelee. Founded in 1981, it is one of very few arts colleges in all of Africa. Its teachers comprise the Bagamoyo Players, who have performed the music of Tanzania’s 125 ethnic groups at concerts all over the world. For those interested, I highly suggest that you download their 2006 release “Tramo” on iTunes.

Every year, the College of Arts hosts the Bagamoyo Music and Arts Festival (LINK), an event that draws performers from all over Africa and tourists from all over the world. It’s a week of round-the-clock performances and bonfires on the beach, and we’re determined to make it this year. It will be October 14-18, anyone want to join us?!

As if this weren’t enough to make us fall in love with Bagamoyo, it turns out that Norway has been supporting the College of Arts for about a decade now. There is an exchange program for students and teachers of the University of Stavanger to study and work in Bagamoyo, and NORAD (LINK) money helped produce the “Tramo” album. Consequently, many locals know how to say “kjempebra” and “tusen takk,” and we share many a laugh while sitting under the stars at the local café, mixing languages after a day of drumming and singing.