The Heart-Moving Sound of Zanzibar

Taarab embodies a complex history of settlement, empire and colonial domination. Although it originated in Zanzibar, taarab spread throughout the Swahili coast of Africa and the Indian Ocean. It is still performed in the capital, Dar es Salaam, and Tanga in Tanzania, Mombasa and Lamu in Kenya and the Comoros Islands.

In local Swahili, the word taarab means “to move the heart.” University of Michigan anthropologist Kelly Askew is the author of Performing the Nation: Swahili Music and Culture Politics in Tanzania (The University of Chicago Press, 2002). Back in a 2005 interview for the “Afropop Worldwide” radio program about her book, she explained that Swahili taarab has diverged significantly from its roots in traditional Arab music. “When we speak about Middle Eastern music, we can talk about it as having evoked ‘tarab’ in listeners. But when we speak about taarab in East Africa, we are speaking about a very specific form of sung, Swahili poetry that emerged in the late 19th century and became very popular in the 20th century.” 

Askew’s analysis stuck with me, and I wanted to explore more. Turns out, the connection between these two forms of taarab (or tarab in Arab music) lies in the emotion experienced by listeners: While classical Arab music is rather formal concert music, Swahili taarab is social. You might say it’s been Africanized to become a communal experience, accommodating influences from this region’s diverse cultural history.

The origins

In my travels in East Africa and the Indian Ocean, I’ve heard various popular and folkloric music styles, but Zanzibar’s taarab stands apart for its elegance and its welcoming inclusivity. In a recent interview, Askew told me that taarab music “draws inspiration from recitatives and the poetic forms associated with Islamic culture in East Africa,” such as the melismatic vocals in Qur’anic recitation. Despite those elements, she says, taarab does not count as religious music. 

History books tell us that the Swahili coast and Zanzibar were inhabited by Bantu peoples until the arrival of the Portuguese in the 15th century. Omani sultans drove off the Portuguese in the 17th century and achieved control of the region, including trading centers on the African coast. Because of that influence, to this day Zanzibar remains predominantly Muslim, according to government records, while Tanzania is a majority-Christian country. 

Sultan Barghash bin Said was the last sultan to rule from Zanzibar before it became a British protectorate in 1890. Barghash was a music lover who brought musicians from Egypt to play in his court. He also dispatched local musicians to Egypt to study and return with qanuns, ouds, violins and percussion instruments. Askew says that very quickly, the music became “indigenized,” with lyrics in Swahili rather than Arabic, African rhythms and even popular Western influences like foxtrots, waltzes and cha-chas.

“The sultan sent musicians to Egypt to learn to play taarab. These musicians came back to Zanzibar and formed a group inside the palace,” John Kitime, a veteran of the Dar es Salaam music scene and a friend of mine for more than 20 years, tells me. “But then the rich people outside the palace, the king’s friends and comrades, decided to form another taarab group. They took one of the guys sent by the king to Egypt and formed a group. And immediately, the two groups started making songs about each other.”

Competition—between music groups, politicians and romantic partners—has been a mainstay of taarab’s appeal throughout the region and up to the present. Askew says, “Zanzibar taarab became dominant in part because of a particular singer by the name of Siti bint Saad, who became wildly famous throughout East Africa and beyond.” A woman of slave ancestry, Saad recorded in Bombay (Mumbai today) in India in the late 1920s, singing in Swahili and daring to comment on the sultan’s law and later that of the British court, as Askew notes, “both terribly unfair to women.” Saad’s popularity can perhaps be compared only to that of the legendary Egyptian singer Umm Kulthum, who began recording and rose to fame around the same time.

Early taarab groups were small, with just four or five musicians, effectively mimicking the era’s Egyptian takht ensembles. But as taarab’s popularity grew, groups began to form in Zanzibar neighborhoods. With limited access to instruments, these groups featured a vocalist, a single melody instrument, usually a violin, and two dumbak drums, one tuned high and the other low; hence the style’s name kidumbak, meaning “small dumbak.” Kidumbak ensembles have long served as a training ground for future taarab musicians.

The first release in the Zanzibara CD series (Buda Musique) features the oldest surviving taarab ensemble in Zanzibar, Ikhwani-Safaa, literally “the brotherhood of purity.” This group was founded in 1902, the height of sultanic rule, a cosmopolitan era when high culture was officially promoted and nurtured. Its founder, Sheikh Moh’d Ebrahim, was in the sultan’s takht. He taught musicians to adapt popular Swahili melodies from Lamu, a Kenyan island. 

Over the years, the orchestra grew to the large firqa format used in Egyptian film music of the 1930s and ’40s, with multiple violins, oud, qanun and a mix of Middle Eastern and African percussion. The ensemble included Arabs, Africans and Indians, and earned a loyal following, but the music was reserved for social occasions. It was not commercially recorded or sold. 

Culture Musical Club, the other veteran orchestra and the more active one today was officially founded in 1958, but there has been significant evolution to arrive at the group I saw in Zanzibar. Before the concert, group member Chimbeni Kheri told me, “It’s a very long history. Before the 1964 revolution, there were so many small groups in the street, and they played kidumbak, the aforementioned Zanzibari music genre. They came together and formed one group. So, by 1970, the group was really about music and theater arts, dramas with traditional dance and acrobatics.”

Taarab today

Beginning in the 1970s, “modern taarab” groups began to form in coastal Tanzanian and Kenyan cities. 

Outside Zanzibar, my most satisfying experience of modern taarab came in the Mangomeni neighborhood of Dar es Salaam. The capital is a two-hour ferry ride from Zanzibar, which allowed me to go back and forth while in the country. 

There I met Abdullah Fereshi who has created a home for the ensemble he founded in 2000, Dar Es Salaam Modern Taarab, probably the city’s top modern taarab group working today. In this large, florescent-lit hall, suitable both for rehearsals and public performances, Fereshi’s musicians were meticulously focused on the vocal rendering of his poetry. Askew notes that vocal improvisation is rare or non-existent in taarab music. “Part of the attraction of taarab is that you build your fan base. Fans know your songs and will pop up out of the audience to tip during especially beloved songs.”

The taarab ensemble blends different styles. The Mombassa style showcases oud and hews closer to Arab maqam music. The Tanga style, central to Askew’s research, substitutes acoustic instruments for electric guitars, keyboards and drum machines, and incorporates more African rhythms from ngoma ensembles associated with Tanzania’s 120 ethnic groups. 

In modern taarab performances, competition is a major attraction for audiences, with female singers using poetic allegory to playfully skewer one another. 

During her fieldwork, Askew was closely attuned to the confrontational undertones between singers and audience members at Tanga’s taarab performances, an important, if fraught, forum for social interactions. “Choosing to tip the singer at a certain moment,” Askew explained, “or who you look at when you tip, or perhaps a nod of the shoulder or any sort of indirect gesture with your hand could send the meaning of a lyric towards somebody in the audience.” For all the tension involved, public airings of romantic intrigues serve both as compelling entertainment and a collective bonding experience for the community. 

I asked Askew if this could have been going on in taarab performances I have attended. She said it was likely. “It is very sotto voce [subtle]. It’s sublimated by design so that nobody can be accused of inappropriate social behavior.” Taarab lyrics are not always about rivalry and criticism. “There are occasions where a song is used to affirm a social relationship,” says Askew. “It could be friends going up to tip together. I think of the songs as vessels into which many different meanings can be put.”

Fereshi has a long history with taarab ensembles in Dar es Salaam, but he decided to create his own. At the end of a rigorous rehearsal, he told me, “I started this band with two motives. The first one is passion, and the second one is to promote Tanzanian coastal culture.” 

He adds, “In Tanzania, there are many taarab groups, but if you hear the music of other groups, you will find it very different from ours because we do not run away from tradition. We embed the modern within the traditional.” As such, this malleable syncretic music continues to adapt to changing times, without losing sight of its history. 

Back at the Dhow Countries Music Academy in Zanzibar, I watched the Culture Musical Club wrap up its lively performance. It concluded with a lively kidumbak set, the ensemble’s percussive grooves now anchored in the slap and thump of a standup washtub bass called sanduku. 

And everyone stood up to dance.