I his paper examines the music and career of Siti binti Saadi, a famous taarab musician who performed in Zanzibar during the 1920s and 1930s. Relying on four distinctive types of evidence: her recorded music, written documentation produced in East Africa, interviews with men and women who heard her perform and records of company executives I compare perspectives regarding the source of power and authority attributed to her voice as well as the meaning of her music. Siti binti Saadi was the first East African to have her voice captured and reproduced on 78 rpm gramophone disks. The production of these records enhanced her status and imbued her voice with a sense of authority that it otherwise may never have attained. Written histories of taarab, particularly those authored in the 1950s and 1960s, often memorialize her as literally, `giving voice to the voiceless,´ allowing the voice of East Afiica to be heard internationally.

Book review of the biography "Mfinyanzi Aingia Kasri – Siti Binti Saad, Malkia wa Taarab", written by Nasra Mohammed Hilal (2007)

Historically the culture of the Comoro Islands shows a strong relationship to the Swahili culture of the East African coast. Archeology, written and oral history have impressively documented these bonds dating back not less than a thousand years. The appearance of so called twarab in the first decades of the 20th Century once more demonstrated the closeness of this cultural imaginary that links the Comoros to the Swahili world, and beyond to include the predominantly Islamic cultures of the Western Indian Ocean. The paper is a first approach to the history of twarab on one island, Ngazidja, until the mid-1960s. It also addresses the question of language use, especially the relationship between East Coast and Comorian varieties of Swahili, and the influence of the Swahili poetic canon on the practice of Ngazidjan poets and singers. The orthography of names and place names follows Comorian conventions. A distinction is made between `twarab` and `taarab`, the former is the Comorian rendering and refers to the Comorian style, while the latter designates the East African Coast or Swahili variant.

Taarab in contemporary Zanzibar currently experiences great changes since the Nineties with the emerging and growing success of modern taarab. This has shocked the fans of the traditional style (taarab asilia) with musical and instrumental innovations, including powerful amplifiers and more danceable rhythms, but also textual innovations, using in their songs, commonly called mipasho, a sort of language and poetical imagery very open and non-disguised (Khamis 2002: 200). The perception of a split between the two musical and poetical styles is widely shared among the artists and fans of traditional taarab, but it actually tends to simplify the dynamics of continuity and change of this art deeply rooted within the social and political life of Zanzibar islands.

Remarks on aspects of taarab such as its history, nature, definition, and change appear prominently and repeatedly in nearly every previous study of the subject. Some of these remarks, however, serve more to expose a clash of interests rather than provide untainted facts about its conceptualisation. This esseay aims at revisiting the notion of taarab in an attempt to concretise its conceptualisation on the basis of various variables that affect change in its structure. The relevant variables are convergence, divergence, linguistic constrains, formal conventions, spontaneity and preparedness in composition, actualisation and performance, instrumentation (i. e. number of instruments and how they are played), the art of vocalisation, the performer/ audience divide, stage organisation, setting, occasion, functions and media influences. For the purpose of avoiding much attention to every category of taarab, however, we prefer to take `group-styles`- hence our concentration on three phases: the period of the inception of taarab in Zanzibar, the period prior to 1905 through the 1920s up to the 1940s when the phonograph record and then the sound film was introduced, from the 1950s to the 1960s when the radio was introduced, and from the 1970s todate - the period of the impact of the tape-recorder, video-recorder, TV - and most recently the period of the influence of satellite television. Our analysis is based on theoretical conceptions of genres by Dubrow (1982), Fowler (1991), Finnegan (1976) and Okpewho (1992) in written literature and `orature`.

To refer to the origin of taarab as a direct importation of Egyptian music by the Arab upper class (Topp 1994:153) is a plausibility without solid evidence. To define it as a style of music played for entertainment at weddings and other festive occasions all along the Swahili Coast (153) is to exclude other styles of music, indeed played for entertainment at weddings and other festive occasions all along the Swahili Coast. To say that taarab contains all the features of a typical `Indian Ocean music`, combining influences from Egypt, the Arabian peninsula, India and the West with local musical practices (153) is apparently true but does not adequately capture the ambiguities and complexities of its protean nature. Refening to taarab as the Swahili popular `salon` music whose song may be recorded or, as often is the case, orally transmitted (King`ei 1992:29) is misleading, for taarab is not always `salon` music and the method and process of creating and transmitting a song in taarab is not the same as that of other forms of African music. To state that taarab has transcended its local Swahili boundaries to be consumed in other communities including other cities in East and Central Africa (Ntarangwi 1998: 150) is a valid statement from a point of view of media, change and spread, but still leaves out a lot to be said. Taarab, like so many complex living things, refuses to be thrust into neat bags or squeezed into terse all-embracing definitions. It is an ongoing process whose form(s) are amorphous, assuming different structures, roles, functions and epithets triggered by a number of factors. That notwithstanding - whatever forms, role and function taarab exhibits at different stages, its making consists of five major components or processes: the composition of the lyric, the composition of musical patterns, the extemporized performance of its song, instrumentation and audience.

Book review of the biography "Mfinyanzi Aingia Kasri – Siti Binti Saad, Malkia wa Taarab", written by Nasra Mohammed Hilal (2007)

In a paper which appeared two years ago, I outlined some of the main features of the contemporary taarab world in Zanzibar, which is undergoing great changes due to economic, social and cultural factors (Aiello Traoré 2004a). A recent development that I highlighted is the vanishing of women\''s taarab clubs. The greater participation of women within the groups of taarab asilia has strated, in my view, an interesting confrontation between the tendency of conversation of the codes which are identified as \"traditional\" and the innovations proposed by female members in music and performance, as well as in the production of lyrics, an area where many women are now regularly involved. I will concentrate my analysis on the taarab lyrics being composed by Zanzibari women, which are of great interest because of the variety of cultural and social backgrounds, themes, techniques and poetical sensitivities.

Historically the culture of the Comoro Islands shows a strong relationship to the Swahili culture of the East African coast. Archeology, written and oral history have impressively documented these bonds dating back not less than a thousand years. The appearance of so called twarab in the first decades of the 20th Century once more demonstrated the closeness of this cultural imaginary that links the Comoros to the Swahili world, and beyond to include the predominantly Islamic cultures of the Western Indian Ocean. The paper is a first approach to the history of twarab on one island, Ngazidja, until the mid-1960s. It also addresses the question of language use, especially the relationship between East Coast and Comorian varieties of Swahili, and the influence of the Swahili poetic canon on the practice of Ngazidjan poets and singers. The orthography of names and place names follows Comorian conventions. A distinction is made between `twarab` and `taarab`, the former is the Comorian rendering and refers to the Comorian style, while the latter designates the East African Coast or Swahili variant.

I his paper examines the music and career of Siti binti Saadi, a famous taarab musician who performed in Zanzibar during the 1920s and 1930s. Relying on four distinctive types of evidence: her recorded music, written documentation produced in East Africa, interviews with men and women who heard her perform and records of company executives I compare perspectives regarding the source of power and authority attributed to her voice as well as the meaning of her music. Siti binti Saadi was the first East African to have her voice captured and reproduced on 78 rpm gramophone disks. The production of these records enhanced her status and imbued her voice with a sense of authority that it otherwise may never have attained. Written histories of taarab, particularly those authored in the 1950s and 1960s, often memorialize her as literally, `giving voice to the voiceless,´ allowing the voice of East Afiica to be heard internationally.