Bongo Flava

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Bongo Flava is the name of the Tanzanian rap music . Bongo Flava is next to Senerap , the rap music from Senegal, the most widespread version of African hip-hop .

Bongo Flava surpasses all other East African styles of music in terms of cassette sales.

background

Bongo is a slang expression for Tanzania's largest city Dar es Salaam and for the country itself. Bongo Flava basically means the sound from Dar es Salaam / Tanzania. The word Bongo originally comes from the Swahili word for brain or mind, ubongo . There are different interpretations of the name in Dar es Salaam, where most of the songs are written; the most common, however, is that you need brains to survive in Dar es Salaam. The rappers refer to the difficult living situation in the city of 3 million people on the east coast of Africa. Bongo could be seen as a Tanzanian variant of the hip-hop ghetto term. However, it was not the rappers who invented the nickname Bongo for Dar es Salaam (or in the meantime also all of Tanzania ): The name has been around for several generations.

The music genre Bongo Flava is characterized, among other things, by the lyrics sung or rapped in the Tanzanian national language Swahili . English rap songs are no longer produced in Tanzania, and if they do, then they do not belong to the Bongo Flava division.

history

Hip-hop first came into the country through the children of the rich, who either had studied abroad or had connections abroad through their families and thus got LPs and CDs. In the 1980s Tanzania did not have its own television station and only one radio station that strictly refused to play this style of music. In contrast to its beginnings in the USA or in South Africa, hip-hop was initially played mainly in discos in large hotels or at beach parties.

In the early 1990s it was a young man named Salley al Jabbir who called himself Saleh J. as a rapper and was the first to have success with a rap song in Swahili. His first rap song was a cover version of Vanilla Ice ' Ice Ice Baby . It appeared on the King of Swahili Rap tape . Also on this cassette was a Swahili version of the song OPP by the US rap group Naughty by Nature . OPP is originally called “Other People's Pussy”, but Saleh J.'s version said it was “Omba Pure Penzi” - “Desire for true love”. Saleh J. represented the youth of the middle and upper classes who first adopted this style of music. He is the child of a white mother and a black father, has relatives in the United Kingdom and left Tanzania after his first album to move to the United Arab Emirates.

The first rapper to be successful with his own music and of course also rapping in Swahili was Mr. II . He himself cites Tupac Shakur as the most important role model , the rapper who is probably the greatest role model for the entire bongo flava scene.

Bongo Flava is also very successful in the neighboring states of Kenya and Uganda ; Swahili is also spoken there, among other things. The media are primarily responsible for the spread and success of Bongo Flava: The emergence of Bongo Flava and the liberalization of the media system in Tanzania coincided in the late 1990s. Many private radio stations play bongo flava almost exclusively. After the music was initially considered a form of hooliganism, it is now heard across almost all social and age groups. Many of the early rappers to this day work on radios and play bongo flava on their programs, and television shows related music videos. The 2003 film Girlfriend was a huge hit in Tanzanian cinema. The film, recorded in Swahili, showed a large number of rappers, all of them from the East Coast.

The rappers are now engaged by commercial companies for advertising sports (for example for Kilimanjaro Pure Drinking Water or Benson & Hedges cigarettes), by NGOs for campaign advertising (for example by UNICEF for AIDS education), and by political parties for election advertising or for political goals. For example, Mr. Ebbo has worked with the Parastatal Sector Reform Commission (PSRC), whose main concern, Mr. Ebbo says, is to show people how privatization can help the country's economic development.

position

The Bongo Flava rappers want to contribute through their lyrics to Tanzania being better perceived internationally. For example, they worry about their country in the texts, support AIDS awareness campaigns by the government under President Mkapa and distribute messages ( ujumbe ) as advertising for their country. However, they remain extremely critical: They denounce the corruption of police officers, medical care or unfulfillable election promises and demand changes for the good of society and the state.

The music of the Bongo Flava is, after a few years, in which the sound should sound as American as possible, shaped by pan- and East African musical influences. The producers use marimbas , filimbi (flutes) and ngoma (drums); they are based on the musical structure of music such as bolingo (Tanzanian version of Congolese music) or taarab (music of the Islamic coast). Today, Bongo Flava is not only its own music because of the text content.

Hip-Hop became Bongo Flava, and Bongo Flava has largely broken away from the model and trigger US hip-hop. That is why music is also treated as an example of cultural globalization in ethnology : as an example of the fact that not the whole world is homogenized, but that similar consumer goods can be bought all over the world and similar cultural concepts are applied - but that have different meanings around the world and are creatively appropriated and modified in a dynamic process. In human geography, this is called glocalization .

The most important contemporary bongo flava artists

The first big star of the genre was Mr. II, who in the meantime has not withdrawn from an active music career, but is by no means as successful as he once was under the name Sugu. This is also due to the growing competition: A big star in Tanzania is Professor Jay, who occasionally records with rappers like Juma Nature or Mkoloni from Wagosi wa Kaya, but is also a friend of the Daz Nundaz group.

There are several neighborhoods in Dar es Salaam where hip-hop originates and which have distinctly different styles. The best known are the East Coast team and the Temeke Family (TMK), but also other Hoods, for example in Sinza (Daz Nundaz Foundation) or Kinondoni (Big Dogg Posse).

TMK is an abbreviation for Temeke , a poor district in Dar es Salaam, from which the musically less catchy and lyrically more radical crews such as Juma Nature or Gangwe Mobb (members: Inspectah Haroun, Luten Karama) came. Gangwe Mobb have since disbanded, and Inspectah Haroun is now on a solo career.

East Coast stands for the wealthier Upanga district in the far east of the city. In Upanga, nine rappers are now active together under the name Eastcoastteam. They are more oriented towards old-school hip-hop forms and focus on catchy music and themes. The Eastcoast team consists of GK, AY, Mwanafalsafa, Pauline Zongo, Buff G., Snare, O-Ten, Imam and Sharifu.

Well-known rappers are above all Zay Bi and Sista P., but there was fierce competition between them - entirely in the sense of the hip-hop battles, which are not to be understood in the sense of an actual fight, but rather as content-related and aesthetic hip- Hop convention.

  • Afande Sele
  • Big Dogg Posse
  • Bwana Misosi
  • Chidi Benz
  • Daz Nundaz, consisting of Daz Sajo, Daz Mwalimu, Feroozi, Daz Critic, La Rhumba
  • G-Solo
  • Lameck Ditto
  • LWP Majitu
  • Mandojo na Domokaya
  • Mr. Ebbo
  • Professor Jay
  • Sugu (previously Mr.II, previously 2Proud)
  • Wagosi wa Kaya, consisting of Mkoloni, Dr. John
  • X-Plastaz

Internationally available albums

  • Bongo Flava - Swahili rap from Tanzania (2004) out here records

featuring Mr. Ebbo, Professor Jay, LWP Majitu, Wagosi wa Kaya, X-Plastaz, Afande Sele, Juma Nature, Daz Nundaz, and many more.

  • Maasai Hip Hop by X-Plastaz (2004) out here records

The most important radio stations (coverage area)

  • Clouds FM (Dar es Salaam)
  • East Africa FM (Dar es Salaam, Nairobi, Kampala)
  • Magic FM (Dar es Salaam)
  • Radio Uhuru (Tanzania)
  • Times FM (Dar es Salaam)

The main producers

  • P-Funk, Bongo Records
  • Miikka Mwamba Kari, FM Productions
  • Master Jay, MJ Studio
  • Enrico, Soundcrafters Studio
  • Boni Luv, Mawingu Studio
  • Professor Ludigo

literature

  • Birgit Englert: Bongo Flava (Still) Hidden "Underground". Rap from Morogoro, Tanzania. in: samples. Viennese magazine for critical African studies No. 5/2003, 3rd year as pdf
  • Anna Roch, Gabriel Hacke: Hip Hop in Tanzania between Message and Flava. SAAP - social anthropological working papers 101, Verlag Hans Schiler, 2006 as pdf
  • Klaus Raab: Rapping the Nation: the appropriation of HipHop in Tanzania , Lit Verlag Berlin, 2006 ISBN 3-8258-9327-8

Web links

  • mzibo.net ( swahili )
  • Bongo Exclusive (Bongo Flava website)
  • Africanhiphop.com (English, extensive website on the entire African hip-hop scene)
  • outhere.de (record company from Munich released the first internationally available Bongo Flava compilation: 'Bongo Flava - Swahili rap from tanzania' (see above) and the album of the group X-Plastaz )