The knowing, barely, of our rage is an opening to other winds. Swagger opens to that, in its impossible speculative gesture of acting like rage could be expressed and used. If swagger is a walking tall, it's a wounded, blown-open walking, not stoically or stone faced, but porous and without shine, pocked, the imagined scars over rage's non-closure.Footnote 1
In 2011 I arrived in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania to embark on fieldwork exploring a popular East African hip-hop style called Bongo Flava. Bongo, a sobriquet for Dar es Salaam and a term derived from ubongo or brain in Swahili, refers to the street-savvy smarts and hyper-vigilance necessary to endure everyday precariousness in city life. Flava is hip-hop vernacular for flavor, or as one interlocutor explained, for a musical pilau – the trans-Indian Ocean rice dish notable for its spice mélange combining various tastes. Bongo Flava emerged in the mid-1980s and early 1990s in the wake of what Rosemary Coombe and Paul Stoler describe as ‘global capital restructuring’,Footnote 2 a period when economic and political uncertainties intersected with new inflows and consumption patterns for global musical commodities and mediascapes; early artists began rapping in Swahili to critique false good life fantasies espoused by the state and to voice, as popularly phrased, hali halisi or ‘the real situation’ of urban life. Put differently, Bongo Flava emerged through what Paul Youngquist describes as hip-hop's counter-esthetics of recombination, which involves ‘playing with received materials in such a way as to wrest new possibilities from them by dislocating their component parts and redeploying them in new ways’.Footnote 3 When I began fieldwork I presumed to find just this style of glocalized, counter-public Bongo Flava – music appropriated from American rap and localized with shared frustrations in the wake of foreclosed promises of democratization and liberalization.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, I found precisely the critically conscious Bongo Flava I expected to find in Dar es Salaam. Although these insights bear great significance to its cultural economy, there is also, however, a now-dominant Bongo Flava scene featuring songs about riches, parties, girls and love. I learned from countless interlocutors that contemporary artists are increasingly producing ‘lite’ (mweusi) Bongo Flava, aspiring not to become like the ‘has-beens’ of the past, but international pop icons like Chris Brown and Lil Wayne. In the process, hip-hop and pop Bongo Flava sensibilities have splintered and become sites of contention and competition within the industry, each employing distinct styles, consumption habits and aspirations. Here is an example of what the industry looked like in 2011, as well as in the contemporary moment.
In Mbalamwezi Beach Club's parking lot, Soulja Boy's voice resounded over thumping bass reverb with the lyrics, ‘Everybody pay attention/watch me pretty boy swag’. The club cast a triumphant glow on its former next-door competitor Sine Club – a venue once featuring hip-hop performances now vacant and boarded up. Mbalamwezi in contrast was thriving, hosting events like that evening's highly anticipated BlackBerry Party; the celebration was advertised in newspapers and flyers and on the radio, TV and Internet. At the entrance table a list of sponsors scrolled below stacks of BlackBerry swag for guests. The sponsor list included the radio and television giant Clouds Media Group, the youth-oriented print company Global Publishers and the renowned video media company True Vision Production. In addition to the cover charge, guests were required to show a BlackBerry phone to the bouncer for entrance and received a t-shirt to wear in exchange.
Despite the advertising targeting the general public, the social cues at Mbalamwezi suggested an elite and exclusive audience. Those mingling over glasses of top-shelf alcohol included the owner of Times Radio, Clouds FM deejays and the producer of Bongo Star Search, a reality show like American Idol. There were also Bongo Flava artists networking in the crowd. Mangwair, a once-popular East African artist,Footnote 4 introduced himself by his nickname Cowbama. He held out long gold chains, leaned backward and explained ‘I'm always in charge, a cowboy with guns and lassos’. Bongo Flava artists like Cowbama sought media owners’ attentions with displays of attitude and charisma, socializing over deafening pop songs throughout the evening. Everybody was ‘paying attention’ to the different forms of promotion competing to be heard. Whether it was corporate hype in print, media and t-shirts, the aesthetic and lyrical qualities of popular music or artists’ confident demeanor of being ‘in charge’, what remained central to understanding contemporary Bongo Flava was its economy for swag.
Swag past and present can be understood in a dialectical relationship between competing claims to hip-hop authenticity. On the one hand, swag is a ‘process of integration and valorization’ of American rapper's gangster realism refashioned into a form of local rage and political ambition ‘that underlies its use’ as an ongoing counter-public social movement.Footnote 5 On the other hand, the present swag economy is not merely an iteration of Afro-futuristic ‘counter-esthetics [that] comes in its readiness to cannibalize the commodity’.Footnote 6 Rather, it offers phantasmic ‘imaginary and reflexive production’ of glamourous entrepreneurial and social opportunities out of reach for many Tanzanians.Footnote 7 In the process, critical Bongo Flava has increasingly been driven underground from state censorship and capital interests and, as a result, popular Bongo Flava swag frequently conceals rather than reveals the material conditions that produce it. In this article, I trace these transforming conditions to argue that swag, in its various imaginary and material expressions, generates deferrals to abject states of everyday affairs. Whether emphasizing the impasse of present realities to produce hope and political determinations, or to provide momentary abeyances from hali halisi with signs pointing to an aspirational elsewhere, swag unites divergent social and affective attachments to Bongo Flava and concomitantly, divergent stances in relation to desired futures.
In the sections that follow, I detail the political and economic infrastructures that hold up Tanzanian hip hop markets and induce new forms of value and desire. I begin with the historical conditions of possibility that inform hip hop's development in Tanzania and provide a theoretical overview of swag as a fetish connected to, but not wholly organized by, emergent capital logics. Second, I describe the advent of critically conscious hip hop in the early 1990s and the ways in which swag generated political determinations around pressing social issues. Third, I detail the complex of political censorship, industry cartelism and restrictive copyright and legal provisions that have since diminished the visibility and fungibility of early Bongo Flava. In its wake, swag has been further commodified to serve capital interests, magnetizing desires to glamorous fantasies of wealth deterritorialized from the real challenges facing most Tanzanians. I conclude my analysis with contemporary field insights and argue that swag, despite its significantly transformed political economy, nevertheless unifies shifting attachments in a fractious industry; it is a fetish rooted in material inequalities that holds open and mediates disjunctures between present foreclosures and promissory futures, as well as everyday experiences and dreams of different worlds.
Swag as fetish: hype and Tabia
Swag is tied to transforming economic and legal conditions since the mid-1980s, a period that saw the collapse of state-sponsored socialism, a growth in informal market activity, and the institutionalization of Tanzania's budding private music economy. During this era of Structural Adjustment and global financialization, Tanzania's first democratically elected president, Benjamin Mkapa, became ‘remembered as Rais Ruska – President Permit – for his willingness to agree to almost any form of private enterprise’.Footnote 8 Yet rather than alleviate the state's economic crisis, unemployment soared, civil service jobs and parastatal enterprises were eliminated, and by 1990 the minimum wage was barely sufficient to ‘cover the cost of one month's maize meal for a family of five’.Footnote 9 As a response, urban youth unable to find employment, social security or education populated informal markets. While daily life grew more precarious, commercial mass media expanded with private radio stations and broadcast television. And in parallel, informal markets became spaces that fostered ‘creative self-fashioning facilitated by consumerism [and that] began to focus on services that promoted these new forms of value’.Footnote 10 Bongo Flava emerged once youth began tapping the exuberant supply of new global music commodities like cassette tapes and recording devices, drawing inspiration from Western styles and fashioning their own musical expressions.
I began my fieldwork on Bongo Flava speaking with consumers and machinga or pushcart vendors in the local Mwenge market. Most of these vendors were unemployed youth seeking fast cash by selling knock-off CDs, second hand clothes and beauty products. Giant billboards surrounded the complex, advertising cigarettes and cellphones. The entrance was a flurry of marketing for potential tourists with Maasai beading jewelry, woodcarvers chiseling ornate masks and art vendors hanging tinga-tinga paintings of African warriors and safari animals. Lining Mwenge's entrances were daladala buses, some painted with images of Obama and others with gospel slogans. The sounds of their radios filled the busy market with reggae, Bongo Flava and Western pop. Local shoppers could be seen clad in a range of styles: women wearing kanga dresses, young men sporting imitation Gucci sandals and Levi jeans, and Muslim men identifiable by their white robes, kofias and at times, Nike sneakers. Informal market logics are central to understanding swag in Bongo Flava as they are zones connecting consumer desires, economic speculation and the production of new kinds of social identities and values.
At Mwenge, the relationship between the local and global, the word and the world is a dynamic process of social inclusion and exclusion. According to Arjun Appadurai, the ‘word can encompass all forms of textualized expression and the world can mean anything from the means of production and organization of life-worlds to the globalized relations of cultural reproduction’.Footnote 11 Imagined global connections and forms of deterritorialization are linked processes that provide a space of possibility in which ‘imagination and fantasy [become] antidotes to the finitude of social experience’.Footnote 12 However, the disjuncture between finitude and fantasy may also serve as a reminder of the ‘real inequalities that leave most Africans today excluded and abjected from the economic and institutional conditions that they themselves regard as modern’.Footnote 13 Within this disjuncture there also exists a temporal gap in which global styles are appropriated in a situated, lived present deferring the aspirational forms of social inclusion they promise into the future. As Kaushik Sunder Rajan argues, hype is central to the desire to consume and reproduce markets for commodities – a present abstract value for a tangible commodity and the future perfect tense of the commodity's promissory realization. Rajan refers to this as a ‘new grammatical tense’ or the ‘future perfect, present tense’.Footnote 14
Hype for music commodities is, in a Marxist sense, a gesture to social inclusion within imagined global worlds considered modern – social relations connected through the fetishistic qualities of commodities. Swag similarly operates as a form of commercial hype and commodity fetishism. As an abstract value that inspires the exchange and consumption of musical commodities, it helps activate capital's transformative movements across the value chain to entail surplus value. Yet, as James Ferguson argues, ‘against the truly fetishized view that would see ‘the market’ as a natural force to which human life simply must submit, the African insight that markets, prices, and wages are always human products is a powerful one’.Footnote 15 In Tanzania, consumption choices are associated with a person's tabia or perceived character and it is ‘less a discreet property of persons than a way of relating persons, places, and social relationships’.Footnote 16 Neither wholly economical nor social, hype for global hip-hop commodities is tethered to social identity construction and local desires to inhabit a certain mode of being in and relating to the world. Likewise, swag's self-valorizing qualities also open to the political, ethical and moral indeterminacies of value chains. As a human, embodied, and material labour, swag generates and magnetizes a wider range of social contestations and affective attachments in the process of generating surplus value for capital.
In its early reception, hip-hop consumption in Tanzania created social connections steeped in imagined global solidarities with urban Black America, sharing feelings of privation ‘when manufacturing jobs that provided gainful employment to urban families, most of them Black and recent immigrants, declined and were replaced with service jobs’.Footnote 17 In so doing, it connected the word and world in novel and historically particular ways, refashioned to respond to local Tanzanian experiences. More importantly, locally refashioned hip-hop connoted the rage and defiance about the present hali halisi; its swag produced confidence and charisma hyping a future perfect to which consumers could attach their desires – a commercial and tabia fetish quality mediating the disjuncture within the future perfect present tense.
The rise and fall of politically conscious Bongo Flava
As I set off to meet Zay B, one of Bongo Flava's first artists, my 18-year-old host cousin remarked that she is a ‘very famous “old-school” rapper but had not made music in a very long time’. I rode a daladala bus for an hour to the city's limits. Her house was larger than most in Dar es Salaam but had the appearance of a once beautiful property that had fallen into a state of disrepair. She greeted me clad in baggy pants, a large black shirt reading ‘THUG LIFE/ZAY 2 THA B/HERO’, and a necklace with Tupac Shakur's face printed on it. Walking to the entrance of her home, we passed a broken-down pick-up truck with white graffiti spray-painted on it. The graffiti read ‘Nipo Gado’, Swahili for ‘the strong person is here’. Zay B explained, ‘I am Gado. My fans gave me that name years ago and I have used it ever since. I got [the nickname] because I am a terrorist on the mic’. She complimented this explanation rapping her eponymous song Gado while gesticulating with recognizable American hip-hop hand positions and postures like the Mos Def Wave – ‘a simple classic that's been used by everyone from Tupac to Big Boi to Mos Def’.Footnote 18 The rap went as follows:
Zay B's appearance, attitude and rap express the elements of authenticity frequently associated with American hip-hop realism. Brad Weiss argues, ‘many devotees of rap most appreciate what they call the “realness2” of its performance’.Footnote 20 Three kinds of ‘authenticity are initially evident’ in hip hop that convey this sense of ‘realness’:
First, there's a concern with being true to oneself. Rap illustrates self-creation and individuality as a value. Next, there's the question of location or space. Rap prioritizes local allegiances and territorial identities. Finally, the question becomes whether a performer has the requisite relation and proximity to an original source of rap.Footnote 21
Zay B expresses all three of these elements. Her self-created persona becomes tied to her role as representative of Dar es Salaam's residents – a role that makes her fiercely territorial over her local allegiances. She conveys her inherent strength (gado) emphasizing that she can protect her role with a terrorist's brutality against any challenger. Terrorist and ‘HERO’ may also be conceived as an identity ‘intended to create revolutionary conditions’ in response to repressive states with limited material and political resources.Footnote 22 Likewise, Zay B connects her rap persona as a terrorist/hero to combat the struggles of daily life in the absence of other resources. Lastly, Zay B demonstrates her relationship to the source of rap by donning a Tupac necklace, using hip-hop vernacular (Zay 2 Tha B), and employing a boastful demeanor common to American hip-hop artists.
Zay B's hip hop ‘realness’ is also enacted within a male-dominated industry and a Tanzanian context where patriarchal systems of inequality entail ‘unequal power distributions [that] impact women's control over their bodies, as well as access to economic resources, power structures, and the public space’.Footnote 23 Zay B's markedly masculine appearance can be read as a mode of bargaining whereby she tries on hegemonic styles in exchange for recognition. Yet if we return to the paradigm of Mwenge's informal market, women are observed doing much more than purchasing food, household and consumer goods as mere extensions of private domestic labour. They enter these publics and shape their worlds, creating and managing social intimacies with gossip, jokes and other forms of social leveraging. These activities, among numerous other bodily and affective labours, nuance and propel exchange in markets, and have historically been difficult to regulate by men. Historian James Brennan, who analyses transformations in pre- and postcolonial Dar es Salaam, argues that women figured ‘prominently in the male African political imagination as the vulnerable barriers through which other “nations” and “races” undermine the African taifa’ and were therefore able to incite surprising reversals in sexual power relations in domestic spheres, markets, and politics.Footnote 24 Sex/gender norms are spongey, absorbing myriad variations and holding resources flexible for play in identity formation and resistance.
Likewise, Zay B's early visibility as one of Tanzania's few femcees in the hip hop industry was disruptive of social expectations for women. Her mimicry of masculine styles served as a ‘menace’,Footnote 25 expressed in songs that subvert patriarchal power relations, build solidarities between women and educate women and girls. One example can be seen in Msia Kibona Clark's analysis of Zay B's song ‘Monica’, which instructs women to stop blaming each other for men's infidelities. Clark argues that Zay B's song conveys the message that, in a society where women cannot ‘expect the man to look after their best interest, … the betrayal by one woman to another is perhaps seen as an even greater offense’.Footnote 26 In this way, Zay B's swag both enabled her fungibility in a market committed to streetwise ‘realness’ and enacted contestation in the sexual division of labour to hold open a space for feminist critique and mobility across sex/gender hierarchies.
Zay B's swag as an ‘old school’ rapper is also tethered to the broader socially conscious hip-hop movement from which it emerged and has impacted her success as an artist. In the late 1990s, appropriations from American hip-hop created social anxieties and revealed a split in the values between Tanzania's older generation and young Bongo Flava artists. Public discourse about Bongo Flava during this period focused on the figure of the msela, the Tanzanian version of the American gangster. Adults believed Bongo Flava professed uhuni or hooliganism that promoted violence and drug use. The generational split also exposed values cultivated during Ujamaa socialism of moral concerns about unemployment.Footnote 27 For youth, the aspirations of Bongo Flava artists were seen as a route to the same financial success enjoyed by American hip-hop artists and a celebration of street life. Conversely, adults thought careers in music detracted from earning gainful employment, a vicious cycle back into the delinquency of street life – the life of the msela.
The result was a negotiation between fantasy and reality in ‘popular culture (of what is “in” and what is “out”) [in which] Tanzanian hip-hop [artists] considered the merit of both gangsta rapper and postcolonial elite in overcoming the naive ideals of predecessors’.Footnote 28 The swag of Bongo Flava artists during this period not only mitigated msela discourse, but was also refashioned to filter out and criticize fantasies that detracted from real social issues. In one song Heki Heki (Hustle & Bustle), Professor Jay – one of the first and most famous Bongo Flava artists – attacks his peers who boast about their wealth after becoming famous while hiding their real experience of poverty:
During our interview,Footnote 29 Professor Jay explained that the social anxieties over appropriating the negative aspects of American hip-hop led artists to write ‘socially conscious’ music in order to ‘educate society’ on the hali halisi. The term came from a popular song by Mr. II that repeatedly sold out across Dar es Salaam.Footnote 30 In the song, Mr. II attacks the government leadership (Chama cha Mapinduzi or Revolutionary Party) for perpetuating corruption, police violence and bribery in the justice system and calls on youth to voice their outrage.
The swag of Bongo Flava artists at the dawn of the millennium appropriated American hip-hop artists’ style, attitude and dress, but took an active role in filtering particular phantasmal elements from performance. Their dual role of embodying American gangsta realism and performing messages about the hali halisi allowed artists to ‘immunize themselves against the suspicion of moralism (and thus keep their streetwise status) by attributing the criticized practices to survival needs they share too’.Footnote 31 Artists became representatives of social issues both lyrically and through their persona, hence the reason some artists, like Mr. II, successfully transitioned into politics. Today he holds a seat in Parliament for the opposition party; likewise, many Bongo Flava artists have taken up political causes, like Mkoloni from Wagosi wa Kaya, who served as Mr. II's regional secretary.
In recent years, however, socially conscious artists have been driven underground. Mkoloni was one among artists promoting socially conscious music in the early 2000s, but today is no longer heard on the airwaves. In our interview, he explained that during the election in 2005, he voiced public dissent about Bongo Flava artists who publicly supported the ruling party, arguing that it conflicted with the role of rap music by ‘undermining artists’ ability to stage critiques about social welfare’. At the end of our interview, he claimed that CCM operatives poisoned him and as a result he spent two weeks in the hospital, nearly going blind.
These same anxieties emerged during my interview with G-Solo.Footnote 32 During our interview, he rapped a song from his album Poritricks (a play on the Swahili word pori or bush and politics). His rap was a message to the president detailing the struggles of everyday people, the loss of wealth to foreign investors, and the need for political reform. However, Poritricks never became widely available on the market because private media companies have become reluctant to circulate controversial music. G-Solo emphasized that ‘you have to be careful otherwise [the government] will “disconnect you” and your assisted income’. Music videos for songs like his Muda wa Vitendo (Time for Action) have only been featured via the internet – media inaccessible to the many Tanzanians unable to afford computers. In the video G-Solo is surrounded by street children and raps the refrain ‘There are still so many problems … the time for action calls’. The risk of being ‘disconnected’, however, is silencing this call for action.
The state also exerts legal controls over private media that hinder critical hip-hop music. Legislative measures like the Communications Regulatory Act in 2003 ‘encourages profitability of broadcasters and other communication industries [and] pushes more nationalist ideals in its language’.Footnote 33 The Broadcasting Services Content Regulation bill passed in 2005 stressed the need to uphold ‘national sovereignty, national unity, national interest, national security, and Tanzania's economic interests’.Footnote 34 Artists who continue to express critical political messages on the airwaves must take measures to conceal them in metaphors and allusions in a respectful manner. The state also retains close oversight over ‘broadcasting owners, as well as the control over licenses’.Footnote 35 These connections began to surface during my interview with the Tanzanian House of Talent, a music school that procures, educates and produces new artists; it also recommends and promotes these artists to media broadcasting companies. My interview was derailed after posing questions such as, ‘Is it true that President Kikwete donated this school to the owner of Clouds Media?’ and ‘How do you manage to provide these services for free?’ I was asked to turn off my tape recorder and prevented from taking pictures of the premises, only to be hastily escorted out of the school.
Although claims of covert government involvement are supported only circumstantially, G-Solo's book Harakati za Bongo Fleva na Mapinduzi alludes to state-sponsored legal actions taken to protect the integrity of large broadcasting industries, notably Clouds Media. He describes a controversial mix-tape made by Mr. II called AntiVirus, which sought to reveal the ‘dirty deeds of stakeholders in [Bongo Flava] music’ (G-Solo, 116). G-Solo recounts the state's reaction after the album was released:
On 06/25/2010 the famous hip hop artist Sugu [a.k.a Mr. II] was arrested by security officials of the Ministry of Interior in Dar es Salaam. Sugu was arrested for three hours at the offices of the National Arts Bazara (BASATA). Sugu was then taken to the Office of the Ministry of Interior for interrogation for a song [in which] Sugu cited Ruge's name [owner of Cloud's Media], accusing him of stealing from working artists.Footnote 36
The state secures its ability to articulate nationhood through the ‘fetishism of the law, of the capacity of constitutionalism and contract, rights and legal remedies’Footnote 37 whenever forms of ‘communal action [are] taken … in the name of informal justice’.Footnote 38 The restrictions imposed on socially conscious Bongo Flava are suggestive of a postcolonial state reacting to disturbances in its semblance of sovereignty. It reflects a privatization in its means of coercion, bridging the historical trends of ‘deregulation and the primacy of the market, and … the rise of violence and the creation of private jurisdictional organizations’.Footnote 39 Violence and coercion have significantly limited Bongo Flava artists’ power to articulate social justice, transforming swag's fundamental fantasy at the turn of the millennium.
Legal loopholes and shadowy distribution
Such ‘confrontation of signs and practices along the fault lines of power’ also extends to artists’ limited control over the means of production, promotion and distribution of their music beyond state purview.Footnote 40 After the TCRA Act was passed in 2003, the TCRA broadcasting commission became the gatekeeper to broadcasting licences. However, abiding by the state's content regulations is only the first step in attaining a licence. If an applicant is successful ‘then there is a list of fees that need to be paid … Even before purchasing equipment, renting office space, hiring staff, and buying music to air on the radio, an applicant has to invest a great deal’.Footnote 41 The high costs shouldered, and consequentially, the elevated financial risks for private media companies, have led to higher fees for artists and lower salaries for deejays. Today, deejays often demand bribes known as payola before they will play an artist's music. As Professor Jay explained:
Nowadays Bongo Flava is more of a business and there is lots of bribing; it has become very expensive for an artist to do his job. Radio deejays always want money. In the old days, my song Chemsha Bongo cost only 30000 shillings, but now it can cost up to 500000 shillings to record a song.Footnote 42
These costs have effectively locked out many formerly popular artists, like Zay B, who claimed, ‘I can't afford the bribes anymore, so I can't get on the air’.
The owners of broadcast studios control commercial hype central to the production and distribution of music commodities on the market. Only a few distribution companies produce CDs and music DVDs and they broker deals with broadcast media owners rather than directly with artists. As producer Professor Ludigo explained,
Back then distributors like Mamu were present, but back then it was the artists who went straight to the distributors with their music. When radio producers became involved in the business and became sponsors and promoters of the artists, Mamu made each artist wait a long time to get their music distributed. People waited in line to sell their albums. Then came a time when artists wanted to sell their albums on their own. When the radio producers asked about the songs – if the artist had no connection with the deejays – these songs didn't sell. Radio presenters became very powerful, like Clouds FM and Cloud's managers like Ruge. There came a time when every manager had their own artist to present to Mamu to get business going. What they [the artist] had to do was bribe the managers and deejays to get enough airtime so Mamu could hear their music. Once these distributors hear it on the radio, it becomes viable. Even if you bribe them, you wait for permission from the radio station managers. These are the people who robbed the business. Now business is in other people's hands and now they are trying to rob performances and entertainment.Footnote 43
Artists today have very little control over the means of production and circulation of their music. Considering the greater costs of production and promotion, many artists make little or no profit from their music. Some experience a net loss and are forced to give up their careers. To make matters worse, nearly every interviewee mentioned dubious distribution practices that rob artists of record sales on the market. Professor Jay expanded on this point:
Professor Jay: There is no way of controlling the duplication of the CDs, so the money ends up in the pockets of the distributors who duplicate the copies while the artist has no clue of what is going on in the market. There are also very few distributors in the market and they have formed some sort of a cartel; they work together to exploit the artists. So, at the end of the day they control the artist and that is why most artists end up as poor as they came in. They do not make good money compared to the work they put in. In addition, artists sign contracts with distributors to only sell enough copies for one year, but still there is no guarantee that the distributor will stop duplicating after a year since [the distributor] has taken the master CD from the artist.Footnote 44
I decided to meet with Mamu representatives. On my way to the interview, I passed through Kariakoo, one of Dar es Salaam's largest informal markets, and explored the goods sold by CD vendors. Many of the CDs were fakes, some sold with cheap computer printed covers, and others with more subtle defects, like broken seals. Since there are virtually no formal music stores in Dar es Salaam, CDs are sold exclusively at these markets. I asked each vendor where they had procured their CDs and each one told me that the CDs had come from the Wahindi or ‘Indians’, referring to the Indian-owned distribution companies in the area that are frequented each morning by machinga purchasing commodities for sale on the informal markets. One stand I visited had a small computer. When asked to see the collection of Bongo Flava music, the vendor responded by asking for a list of artists. He was willing to burn up to 100 songs for only $5000 Tanzanian shillings, roughly $2–3 USD. I declined and continued to the interview:Footnote 45
Pierson: I often see fake copies of artists’ albums sold at the local market. What do you know about this?
Distribution Manager: Listen to me clearly. My company always adheres to COSOTA's [intellectual property organization] policies. We are very careful to protect artists’ intellectual property rights. Otherwise, this company won't last. I want my children and my children's children to be able to eat, to run this company someday.
Pierson: What measures do you take?
DM: We ensure that the artist signs each and every copy we make, and we are very serious about upholding our contracts with the artists. Do you see this hologram? We had these added to the CD's in order to ensure that the CD is a real copy.
As I was later shown, the distributors possess expensive machinery to create CDs on their premises and reduce their overheads by using cheap local labour and outsourcing some of the inputs across diaspora exchange networks in India, such as the holograms, for example. It is moreover unlikely that any consumer would be aware of or care about whether a CD was signed by the artist or not. Importantly, the distributor also showed me a copy of the contracts used to establish CD deals with artists. The contract read that the artist was the copyright owner of the music, but the contract also signed over rights for the Master CD – the template CD used to make additional copies – to the distributors. It also ensured that the distributor would be legally bound to intellectual property laws upheld by the Copyright Society of Tanzania (COSOTA).
Pierson: So, who is responsible for the illegal distribution of CDs?
DM: COSOTA is responsible. They do not do enough to prevent it. They may even be involved in promoting piracy.
In this way, the artist retains the rights to the music and spearheads complaints about CD piracy to COSOTA. Many music industry representatives have described COSOTA's ineffectiveness, and these poor, but extant regulations provide a suspicious loophole for distributors to illegally copy Master CDs unabated. The street vendors certainly pirate CDs, but they buy pirated CDs from distributors as well. And while most artists agree about the unprofitability of CD sales, higher returns on performances can also become subject to robbery. As Professor Ludigo claimed:
Professor Ludigo: I remembered the way the album Chemsha Bongo was handled. It was a groundbreaking album. We were very young at the time and didn't understand how powerful the album was and we rushed it to the market and it was a serious mess up. We did a show at Slipway's Summer Jam organized by Clouds FM … and uh, we never got paid for that show because the dealer we had made arrangements with changed his mind. That night, the show sold out. COSOTA was even at the show, but no one could press charges. COSOTA was not doing its job and no one could vie for copyright infringement.
Michael: But why were there no other ways to address the issue?
Professor Ludigo: Lots of powerful people were making a lot of money and most of them were not visible in the forefront. Mamu told me, ‘Ludigo, if I die today my children and my children's children will eat’.Footnote 46
Though informal markets are generally ‘unregulated by the institutions of society’, the illusion of ‘a legal and social environment in which similar activities are regulated’Footnote 47 provides a space in the shadow of copyright laws to strip artists of their financial returns. In effect, it incites a cycle of blame across machinga, Mamu and COSOTA that leaves little recourse for artists to demand accountability and undercuts the reproduction of certain kinds of hip-hop commodities and culture.
‘Don't I Sound Like Lil Wayne?’: swag's shifting aspirational value
Bongo Flava swag cannot be understood apart from these political and economic transformations. As glocalized musical form it is important to attend, following Frederick Cooper's argument, to how ‘commodity circuits are constituted, how connections across space are extended and bounded, and how large scale, long-term processes, such as capitalist development, can be analysed with due attention to their power, their limitations, and the mechanisms which shape them’.Footnote 48 The political and economic limitations within the contemporary music industry have significantly challenged the reproduction of socially conscious Bongo Flava. Dispossessed of the means to achieve commercial viability, socially conscious Bongo Flava swag is losing its hype both in its commercial viability and social attractiveness. And by attending to and emphasizing ‘questions of class’ and social, legal and political power in the industry, it becomes possible to see that the swag economy is not merely a ‘free play of identity formation’.Footnote 49 As both a material and imagined, commercial and tabia fetish, the ‘heterogenous components appropriated into a [hip hop] identity’ from the West and in Tanzania, may be momentarily ‘fixed (or fixated) by the fetish’ – an element scholars like William Pietz argue is an essential element of the fetish and its power to order.Footnote 50 Yet they are also continually refashioned in the music economy, challenging swag's ‘originating act of forging an identity’ since its first emergence in East Africa.Footnote 51 Swag's future perfect promise of repairing hali halisi impasses is being replaced by desires for new kinds of swag, new attachments to the present and future, and new values and social identities consumed and produced in the music economy from diverse actors and networks of power and exchange.
Two music videos by now-popular artists Diamond and Dully Sykes aptly describe Bongo Flava swag today. Diamond's video for his song Moyo Wangu (My Heart) features him following a girl around the city, a girl clad in hot red skinny jeans, who attracts male attention every time she walks down the street. Diamond serenades her, with a team of backup dancers, wearing bright purple trousers, a diamond necklace, designer sunglasses and a shirt that reads ‘I am not perfect, but I am limited edition’. His fashion, wealth and talent make him a ‘limited edition’ that attracts even the most attractive women. Dully Syke's song Bongo Fleva is perhaps even more popular, played in almost every nightclub in Dar es Salaam. This video begins with Dully saying ‘Asante sana [thank you] Home Shopping Center … Rest in peace my homeboy brotha … tunapo na kupop my champagne [we are here popping my champagne]’ and then features Dully Sykes surrounded by girls in black miniskirts, dancing on stereos, in the images on flat screen televisions, and at times, lying outstretched on motorcycles. He sports sunglasses, a deep V-neck t-shirt and black cardigan, with a gold chain around his neck.
Dully and Diamond Sykes's performances not only conceal the realities of life in Dar es Salaam, but they also celebrate images of wealth that are still largely unavailable to most Bongo Flava artists. In fact, only ‘one quarter of all Bongo Flava musicians are making any profit, while three quarters invest more than they get out’.Footnote 52 And those who fall within this one-quarter of artists are rarely ‘always in charge’ as Cowbama might say. Negotiating with those who wield money and power has been crucial for the popular and successful artists today. As a result, the desires of up and coming artists and consumers reroute swag from the territorial hali halisi conditions from which hip-hop authenticity was once tethered with new aspirations beyond borders. Consider the following conversation:
Young man: I'm Pimp Cita. My friend there, the one who helped you get into the club, his name is Bluetooth. You said you like music, right?
Michael: Yes, I've been meeting with some Bongo Flava artists in the area.
Pimp Cita: You should hear my music! I'm a rapper. I want to make it big and I know I will. Maybe you can help promote me. Here, listen to my songs.
[Pimp hands me an MP3 and I listen to his newly recorded rap music.]
Pimp Cita: Don't I sound like Lil Wayne? I want to be international. I have the talent and I'm going to make a lot of money. I just need to find some connections. I don't want to make Bongo Flava like the Tanzanian artists. I want to rap like the Americans. They make money. They're famous. They have swag. I don't want to be a national musician; I want to go abroad.
Pimp Cita's desire to ‘rap like the Americans’ because ‘they make money’ connects swag directly to wealth out of reach in Tanzania. Although Bongo Flava swag has transformed to pop sensibilities and reproduces a simulacral image of wealth, it nevertheless retains a diasporic dimension that ‘entails a culture and a consciousness, sometimes diffuse and sometimes concentrated, of a “here” separate from a “there”, a “here” that is often characterized by a regime of marginalization and a “there” that is invoked as a rhetoric of self-affirmation, of belonging to “here” differently’.Footnote 53 Pimp Cita's self-promotion hyped a promise not of national ambitions, political change, or even popularity in the local economy, but of opportunities desired elsewhere – opportunities to which he hoped I as an American, might be able to connect him to in exchange for the social power he was able to wield helping me enter the club. Given the difficulty accessing networks of monetary exchange and industry power necessary to produce music in Tanzania, Pimp Cita's self-affirmations and braggadocio not only performed unrealized futures but also functioned as a way to search and ask for resources in the present. His swag was a way to keep connecting, to keep moving forward, to keep dreaming.
Conclusion
Throughout this article I have traced the political and economic infrastructures that have shaped swag and the desires it magnetizes. In the wake of structural adjustment, Bongo Flava was valorized for its ability to acutely express shared feelings of precarity and rapper's abilities to enlist political determinations. Predatory market practices, political consolidation, and legal restrictions and censorship have since diminished this critical function. Despite these shifting conditions, swag is still informed by material inequalities that connect divergent attachments across music producers and consumers. In this way, core aspects of swag as a charismatic fetish remain constant despite a fractious music industry.
Although pop Bongo Flava swag has come to dominate the present music industry, critical hip-hop still exists, even if marginalized. The splintering of the genre has led to common debates in Tanzania on whether hip-hop can still be considered Bongo Flava or if it relates to a different genre altogether. The variable aspirations in the swag economy, from political ambition to wealth both near and far are certainly suggestive of the latter. Yet perhaps what holds Bongo Flava's diverse genre together is not a unifying claim to a particular future or trajectory but the opposite: regardless of whether disenfranchisement is an everyday reality revealed or one concealed in the networks of exchange in the music industry, swag is a fetish that joins these heterogeneous elements. It is an intimately embodied performance, a labour, and a ‘very particular kind of dispossession, an affective position that codes for no resolution’.Footnote 54 In other words, it draws power from a space of a frustration, rage and possibility.
Swag, then, is a kind of in-between. It operates between the present and a promissory future, between foreclosure and fantasy, between the word and the world. And though the primary conditions that drove Bongo Flava to become a social movement may be declining, as Gilroy argues, when studying the emergence and dissemination of belief systems, ‘even as the movement that produced them fades, there remains a degree of temporal disturbance’.Footnote 55 Swag holds open a space to reimagine different futures within this disturbance or disjuncture, not because it can necessarily realize them through performance, but because it reinstalls hope without these impasses even from within them. To consume Bongo Flava swag, whether apolitical or underground, is to interrupt the not yets that enervate life and transform them into shifting and yets. Bongo Flava is not a stable musical object or genre nor is it wholly global or local, Tanzanian or Western. Swag economies open a lateral space in which material and imaginative possibilities and their limits are negotiated and contested and may provide belonging for those who can command or desire to pay attention to the many fashions it offers.
