Dr Janet Topp Fargion

Contextual discography: the complementary roles
of ethnography and discography in the study of repertoire

This paper will explore the complementary roles of ethnography and discography in analysing a popular musical tradition. I see ethnography  as the cornerstone of ethnomu-sicological research; supported or upheld by fieldwork, a methodology that assists us in contextualising data. Discography, I’m taking to mean the study of existing recordings, whether they be published or unpublished, though in the current example I’m referring to published recordings primarily. I shall use the musical tradition of taarab  in Zanzibar, east Africa to demonstrate my thoughts. In particular I shall focus on the significance of the legendary taarab singer, Siti binti Saad.

Taarab is a style of music played for entertainment at weddings and other festive occasions all along the Swahili Coast in east Africa. It is aform of sung poetry with instrumental accompaniment, to varying degrees based on Egyptian popular urban models. Taarab  remained a preserve of the upper-classes, largely Arab, until the 1920s - and it was exclusively male. In the 1920s Siti binti Saad, a poor African woman of slave parentage rose to international fame as a taarab  singer, her success marking the beginning of a popularisation of the style within the lower class, and female population in particular. One of the primary means for her rise to fame  was the broad dissemination of a recorded repertoire but many of her songs have entered popular memory through oral transmission alone. While her status as music legend rests importantly on the recorded repertoire, the frequent quoting during ethnographic enquiry of unrecorded songs to explain her cultural significance indicates that recordings cannot be viewed out of context and in isolation.

Taarab was introduced to Zanzibar by the leisure-loving third Omani sultan, Sultan Barghash bin Said, in the mid-1870s when he brought entertainment music from Egypt to the palace. Around the turn of the 20th century, then, Egyptian music was played in Zanzibar, sung in Arabic rather than the native Swahili, for the entertainment of the sultan and his upper-class,Arab guests.

The music in Egypt was performed by a solo singer (male or female, though female singers became the norm in the first decades) and small chorus (male), with accompaniment on the instruments of the takht ensemble - '°d (short-necked, plucked lute), qan°n(trapezoidal zither), n‚y (oblique-blown flute), violin and riqq (small, round frame drum with metal jingles). The songs were known as taqt°qah, “ditty, gay, popular songs” with strophic form and short refrain. The songs used colloquial Arabic texts and most often dealt with sentimental, romantic subjects.

This is the tradition that was brought to Zanzibar in the 1870s. It was also the tradition that came to dominate the output of the recording industry that began tooperate in Cairo in 1904, an output that was disseminated far and wide. The arrival of these recordings was to have great significance in Zanzibar, as much of the repertoire performed there was learned from the recordings, and the Egyptian tradition has continued to provide a model for the development of taarab music in Zanzibar.

Up until the 1920s and 1930s taarab remained predominantly a male, upper-class Arab performance genre. It took a female, peasant African to bring change and to begin the process of "Swahili-isation". Siti binti Saad was born in 1880 in a small village in the south of Zanzibar island. (The name given to her by her parents was Mtumwa, meaning slave. The title ‘Siti’, or ‘Lady’, was bestowed on her by“an Arab from the landed gentry”(Hashim 1988:3). Though both her parents were born on Zanzibar, but were of mainland ethnic groups. The family was poor, relying for their livelihood on her father's small-scale farming and her mother's pottery, a skill that Siti herself learned and practised. She did not attend conventional school, nor, by all accounts, did she attend any Koranic school, a place often cited as the first learning ground for singers. In 1911 she moved from Fumba to Zanzibar town. This was not an unusual move for the time: between 1910 and 1920 many people moved to town where prospects of financial advancement were more attractive (Khatib 1984:11).

Singing songs based on the recorded Egyptian taqt°qah form she rose to fame as a taarab singer in the 1920s and remained activeuntil she died in 1950. For many Zanzibaris it was with Siti binti Saad, often called the "mother of taarab", that taarab actually began.

I have described her significance in detail elsewhere. Suffice it to say here that she began to sing in Swahili andconcerned herself with themes of local everyday life. As someone of African descent, she inspired the formation of informal African groups on home-made instruments playing her songs. As a woman she inspired other women to form taarab  groups, being seen very much as a sort of spokesperson for them.

Swahili is and was already in the early 1900s one of Africa's most widely-spoken languages. Making recordings in this language would seem like an obvious thing to do, but it was not until the late 1920s that this process began; until this time the only recordings marketed in East Africa were of Arabic, Indian and European music. The Gramophone Company was the first to test the field, and in March 1928 Siti and her band travelled to Bombay to make the first evercommercial Swahili recordings.

28 records were released from this session. Their sales were so high that the artists were invited for a second recording trip a year later in March 1929, from which some 49 records were issued. The sales brought large profits for the Gramophone Company and by 1930 Odeon, Columbia and Pathe were all making Swahili records in order to cash in. To a large degree the companies all used the same artists and a very similar repertoire was recorded. Siti recorded a third time for Gramophone in Bombay in 1929 (resulting in a further 48 records), but she was also recording for Columbia in Dar es Salaam and Zanzibar, and for Odeon in Mombasa. Such fierce competition between the labels, on top of the impact of the general depression ofthe late 1920s /early 1930s and the introduction of the sound film as an alternative mass medium for music, ensuring that the recording boom was brief. By June 1931 the company's turnover had reduced by half. Nevertheless in the few years since Swahili records first hit the market in 1928, the Gramophone Company reports to have sold over 72,000 records, the "vast majority of which were recordings of Siti binti Saad, as well as a few other taarab  performers" (quoting Laura Fair 1998:4).  Very little information is available on recording activities in East Africa in the years immediately prior to the Second World War, but it would appear that no recordings of Siti binti Saad were made after about 1935.

The volume of record sales is itself a testament to Siti’s  status, but it is also important to understand Siti's role within the political, social and economic milieu of the 1920s and 1930s, with respect to the particular significance she had for women.

Siti binti Saad transcended her poor, African background through taarab. She increased her personal wealth, hobnobbed with the affluent Arabs, and gained widescale respect as a singer despite being a woman. Still today female singers suffer the bad reputation of being loose women, even though they are highly praised for their artistry as singers. Even though only the wealthy could afford their own gramophones and discs, a large proportion of the general population were nevertheless influenced by her songs. "In these early days of Swahili records the coffee shops and eating houses were flooded with members of the public listening to the songs of Siti binti Saad. Members of the public who played them inside their houses were astonished to hear encores from listeners outside their houses. The people were proud and pleased with this new invention in their national language" (quoting Suleiman 1969:87-88). She was an inspiration to women frequently lumped at the bottom of the political and economic pile, looking to climb the social ladder, and during the late 1930s and 1940s many women’s taarab clubs and small informal taarab groups - kidumbakgroups - emerged, at least initially, all playing Siti's songs.

No recordings of the activities of these women’s and kidumbak groups were made until the Globestyle Records company recorded (in 1988) and issued (in 1989) a set of 4 LPs, by which time most groups were performing their own repertoires. Siti's original recordings have never been reissued and remain inaccessible even to this day. Yet the songs are clearly remembered. People are often able to recite full lyrics with only minor variations. It is interesting to note, as Laura Fair points out (1998:8-9), that

 
the material for which Siti is most widely remembered - her trenchant criticisms of local class and gender politics comprised less than a quarter of her published repertoire…What is abundantly clear, however, is that the songs which have stuck in people's minds over the last half-century were either those which echoed important personal experiences or events of major significance to the Ng'ambo community at large.
(Ng’ambo is an area of Zanzibar Town inhabited by rural immigrants from other parts of the island and from the mainland. It houses the poorer, African-descended sector of the population.)

The themes highlighted in the songs most frequently cited reflect Swahili/Arab conflict, class struggles, gender issues, and the apparent ubiquity of authority, particularly as justice came to be played out in the courts. One song, for example, "Wala Hapana Hasara" ("Thereis no loss") refers to a case brought against Mselem bin Mohamed el-Khalasi, an influential Arab civil service official in Zanzibar Town, for embezzlement of government funds. As a property owner he had a bad reputation for exploitation among the largely poor, African inhabitants of Zanzibar Town. Amidst a round of ground rent strikes in the late 1920s, due to inhabitants’  inability to pay what they viewed to be unjust sums of money as ground rent to wealthy Arab landowners, hundreds of eviction notices were  issued and many cases ended up in the courts. "Wala Hapana Hasara" commemorates the downfall of Mselem El-Khalasi, who was sentenced to a period of hard labour. For many, by singing songs such as these, Siti became something of a mechanism through whichthey could publicise grievances.

Another song that is very clearly remembered and frequently cited when discussion turns to Siti binti Saad is called "Kijiti". Kijiti (literally meaning a stick) is the name given to a man who allegedly raped and murdereda woman during a night out with friends. Kijiti himself escaped, but two of the women who came forward to testify in court against him were found guilty of the murder themselves and, say some, were sentenced to death by hanging. This was not an unusual outcome in cases where women were involved. "An analysis of court records from these decades indicates that women were particularly prone to having cases decided against them. In cases of rape and domestic abuse women were frequently told by the European court officials that their own immoral behaviour was the ultimate cause of their problems" (quoting Laura Fair, 1998:10). The final verse of the song indicates the anger this crime and its judicial outcome evoked:

 
Kijiti I warn you, don't go to Dar es Salaam
You will meet an old man and he has warn (sharpened) a razor
    just for you
People are swearing about you, may God give you elephantiasis
Neither of these songs is among Siti's recorded repertoire. A contemporary of hers, Fatuma binti Baraka, who remembers singing with Siti during the 1940s and ‘50s, appears to have helped keep the song "Kijiti", and others, alive by singing it with a women's taarab group of which she was a member from the 1930s to the late 1980s. She then won international acclaim with this  and other Siti songs as a member of the professional taarab group Twinkling Stars. In 1995 she worked with a Tanzanian jazz band, Shikamoo Jazz, in an experiment to modernise taarab. This band was recorded on tour in Europe and the recordings released ona British label, Retroafric, documenting these important historic moments perhaps for the first time in tangible form. Always singing only Siti binti Saad songs, from whom she learnt them directly, Bi Kidude's role in sustaining memory of the songs should  not be underestimated.

A comprehensive discography of the work of Siti binti Saad has yet to be done. The facts that she was recorded at all, that she was the person to first make commercial recordings in Swahili and travelled extensively to make recordings are always mentioned to demonstrate her importance. But it is not always the recorded songs that are remembered. In fact most of the songs cited by informants may never have been recorded; they entered the public domain as live performance and have remained in memory through oral transmission alone. Clearly the recorded repertoire has become enmeshed with the unrecorded, and in order to appreciate the cultural significance of this East African music legend, any discography of Siti binti Saad would haveto be thus contextualised.
 

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