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.