Identity and Politics in Tanzanian Youth Culture

The proposed project is part of the interdisciplinary research project "Dimension de l`objet Swahili: texts et terrains" which is funded by the French ANR (Agence Nationale de Recherche) from 2008 to 2011 and based at the L`Université Michel de Montaigne (Bordeaux III) in Bordeaux, France. I therefore want to outline very briefly the overall aim of "Dimension de l`objet Swahili: texts et terrains" which is to take a new approach to the study of the Swahili sphere by looking at "texts et terrains" simultaneously, exploring the geographies of verbal and written literature in Swahili. One of the more specific aims is to analyse literature in Swahili language in terms of space, based on the hypotheses that spaces produce texts through writers. In the project proposed here, the specific aim is to trace contemporary forms of verbal art created by youths and to examine them from a socio-political perspective. An important part of contemporary Tanzanian youth culture is the musical genre of Bongo Flava which is going to be in the centre of this project. I view the lyrics of these Bongo Flava songs, which are mainly being written in Swahili language, as literary products by a new generation of Tanzanians who have taken up various global influences in order to create a new form of expression. While a number of academic studies have been dedicated to the "superstars" of Bongo Flava, little attention so far has been paid to the aims and strategies of the many youths all over the country who think of themselves as maandagraundi - as those who have not yet made it. In the project proposed here, I want to focus on these commercially insignificant musicians, because this will offer insights into youthful identities among the "average" Tanzanian youths, male and female. The project aims to explore cultural expressions by these youths who can be said to be at the bottom of Tanzanian society in terms of access to economic and political opportunities. The concrete aim of this project is, in a first step, to collect these song lyrics which usually exist only in oral form, to transcribe them in Swahili and translate them into English. In a second step these texts will be contextualised through the analysis of the circumstances of their production and the biographies of their authors. A further aim is to localise the texts also in geographical terms because in this project I will examine the cultural expressions by youth in three different regional towns of Tanzania which can be viewed as constituting a "cultural transect". Most research on popular culture and the use of Swahili in Tanzania has up to now centred on the country`s largest urban centre Dar-es-Salaam, and the coast in general. As all three research sites in this project are "off-coast" and differ significantly from each other in terms of geographical and cultural background, this project will contribute to an understanding of the nature of what can be termed the "Swahili sphere" in a cultural sense. The project has a qualitative research design but also incorporates quantitative means of data collection which will contribute to a comprehensive understanding of youth culture, not only taking into account the cultural expressions themselves (collection of lyrics and text analysis) and the artists perspectives (to be explored through qualitative interviews and participant observation) but also the reception of the music (to be explored through questionnaires as well as interviews).