BongoFlava artistes! Spice your act, it lacks oomph for the masses

By ELSIE EYAKUZE

Did you know that many people who are not Africans, and probably some who are, do not believe that Timbuktu is a real place. And yet in its heyday it was a library city, full of scribes and scholars and I imagine ink-stained fingers, on par with other great places of learning like Alexandria.

And Timbuktu had an extra feature: griots. These are the keepers of oral history and it seems that they didn’t necessarily have the same views on how things should be remembered as the people who worked with scrolls.

I think they are fascinating. It is a little bit unclear to me whether the political campaigns have started for real in Tanzania, but recently the ruling party held a massive concert for the people featuring all the big names in BongoFlava that they could muster.

When I got into the genre, the topics that artistes addressed were almost overwhelmingly social and political. It is what made it attractive to me — the outrage, the authenticity and the daring to speak truth to power. The one thing that hadn’t infiltrated BongoFlava yet was praise-singing: we left that to older forms of music and bands dedicated to that sort of thing. Art is powerful and as a visceral experience the impact of music and visual arts is unparalleled. And coming as it did at a time of transformation, BongoFlava’s beginnings have quite the pedigree.

I didn’t watch the concert. Partly it is an age problem: there is no music like the music of one’s youth, everything pales in comparison and we shrivel into dissatisfied moaners who can always name artists and songs that were “better than this dreck.”

The library and Timbuktu’s treasures are lost to history except for two main works which are known as the Timbuktu Chronicles: the Tarik al Sudan and the Tarik al Fattash. What little I have heard from them — because why read if you can listen to a podcast — are beautiful, redolent with opinions of the scribes. I bring them up because what we produce to transmit information through the ages is made much more interesting for having the force and flavour of the artist and this is what BongoFlava and older (zilipendwa) songs did.

They told stories. Our stories, of life and death and struggle in the 20th and 21st Centuries.

By contrast, and here comes the complaint, this new BongoFlava suffers from a lack of political oomph which makes it perfect pap for the masses. Bread, circuses or in our case khangas, T-shirts and concerts.

When we are all returned to the earth and future humans sift through the digital debris to get some idea of what was important to us in our democracies, what will they find? What will they think? Will it be as beautiful and dated as the Timbuktu Chronicles? Will the 2020 candidates speeches, recorded for posterity, lift our hearts with longing for a possible tomorrow? Will our scribes and griots stand the test of time? Last Century, I might have said yes.