Primarily based on 2009–10 fieldwork conducted in Dar es Salaam, this collection is the outcome of a project on negotiating culture through new media and popular genres in contemporary neoliberal Tanzania, ‘bongo’, by a team of staff and students at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz. Most contributions include researchers’ descriptions of their participation in the processes of media production.
The chapters examine several appropriations of global media flows as ways of bridging the cultural gap between the ‘foreign’ and the ‘local’. A major argument of the book is ‘the agency of local audiences vis-à-vis transnational media circulating in an already globalised world’ (p. 182, emphasis added). Tanzanian spectators are not ‘victims of an alleged cultural imperialism – be it American, Chinese or Nigerian’, but they adapt ‘something alien to the conditions of “home”’ (p. 182). The rationale for this collection, as suggested above, lies in contesting discourses on US/foreign cultural imperialism (‘the West’ and ‘the rest’) that have been key debates in media studies. This approach, however, overlooks Tanzania's longstanding familiarity with global cultural flows.
An introduction contextualizing the case studies presented is somewhat anecdotal and undertheorized. It is followed by an inadequately referenced overview of some of the existing literature on bongo flava (foreign-derived Swahili music), and artists as entrepreneurs. The authors conclude that artists’ entrepreneurial ‘strategy is informed by social learning from early childhood’ (p. 40), but do not mention patron–client relations. The next chapter focuses on artists’ protests against an exploitative private radio station. Gabriel Hacke examines how artists use video clips to ‘articulate their own vision of the Black Atlantic’ (p. 80). While the engagement with Gilroy and African-American popular culture is interesting, it elides the many references to the Indian Ocean and Arab ‘worlds’ contained in the video clips. In a study of a satirical television programme featuring the comic group ‘Orijino Komedi’, the subsequent chapter illustrates the permeable boundaries between producers and consumers as well as ambivalent state–society relations. ‘Mediating charisma in Tanzanian televangelism’ invokes Stuart Hall's ‘encoding’ and ‘decoding’ model and Kurt Lewin's 1947 notion of ‘gatekeepers’ to explore audience reception and negotiations between Pentecostal leader Gertrude Rwakatare and the TV crew. A closer engagement with the literature on Pentecostalism and a gendered analysis of obstacles for female church leaders would have enriched the chapter.
Ratering's contribution on local responses to a Mexican telenovela mostly ascribes viewers’ conversations while watching to their ‘insufficient knowledge of English’ (p. 155). This interpretation neglects the fact that such verbal exchanges have long been part of local visual practice. The chapter further argues that audiences recognize ‘typical formal features’ because of previous exposure to telenovelas (p. 156), and through reception analysis one can grasp audiences’ attempts at making ‘the world depicted in the telenovela more understandable to them’ (p. 157). Such statements closely resemble early studies assuming spectators’ passivity. Lastly, despite the popularity of US movies and series in Tanzania, Latin American (and Philippine) telenovelas are deemed more appealing ‘because they serve as windows into […] a “parallel modernity” that comes without Western political and ideological significance’ (p. 159). Reference to works on the South–South connection is fascinating, but needs further evidence.
Matthias Krings focuses on live video narration, namely the addition of Swahili oral commentaries to foreign film screenings in video parlours. These performances are then recorded and marketed on DVDs. This practice results from ‘a media reconfiguration born during the encounter between (non modern) oral practices and the appropriation of a cinematographic apparatus born out of a foreign culture (in this case Western modernity)’ (p. 172). Yet probing the effects of the past on the present is not the most productive engagement with recent cultural forms. Stating that ‘primary orality’ and ‘traditional storytelling’ influence video narrations occludes the emergence of translocal cultural products uninformed by pre-existing ‘traditional’/rural/oral practices. Moreover, the 1935–37 Bantu Educational Kinema Experiment failed to establish a ‘contemplative-hermeneutical mode of spectatorship characterised by silent spectators’ (p. 173). Archival and oral sources show that, far from being quiet, moviegoers consistently ignored and reinterpreted colonial educational efforts.
Rohrback's chapter on beauty contests aptly reflects on the disapproval – reminiscent of the ujamaa period – of pageants, which are seen as encouraging commodity culture and immoral behaviour. Her examination of Miss Tanzania 2007, won by a woman of Indian descent, compares verbal attacks against this allegedly non-Tanzanian citizen to the late 1960s Operation Vijana. This was a campaign by the TANU Youth League that included physical attacks against ‘indecently’ dressed and financially independent young African townswomen. The latter, together with Tanzanian Indians, are construed as minorities threatening the ‘shared’ imagination of the nation. Situating pageants within the context of nation building is intriguing but neglects the complex discourse of race about Tanzanians of Indian descent.
The contribution on contemporary Swahili cartoons assumes a Eurocentric readership (p. 237) and has some inaccuracies. The first 1956 (pre-independence) cartoon could not reflect ‘the atmosphere of early postcolonial Dar es Salaam’ (p. 238). Comics of the 1950s represent the stance of African urban elites towards their poorer or rural counterparts; they do not simply depict ‘Africans in subordinate positions’ (p. 238). Contemporary Swahili comics, Späth claims, target schooled individuals. This leads the author to ask if they ‘can still be categorised as popular culture’ (p. 250, footnote 15), thus conflating popular culture with commoners’ culture.
Overall, the book contains a number of errors and oversights. But the major weakness of this interesting empirical collection is its failure to locate contributions firmly within debates on media texts in (and outside) Africa, on popular culture and on audiences/viewers/publics – seen as interchangeable and unproblematized categories. To be fair, most chapters draw on MA dissertations, yet these lacunae remain a drawback: while this collection presents some fascinating case studies, it is unclear who is the targeted readership and in what way the book advances scholarship on the production and reception of Tanzanian and African popular culture.
