‘Taarab’ is a popular music entertainment in East Africa whose origin is ‘contentiously’ given as Middle East. It is an art form imported to East Africa perhaps in the early years of the 1900s. Taraab has been ariedly looked at, but has generally been seen as a uniform body. This essay sets out to show that from its inception in East Africa, taarab has never been uniform as it started to develop its own characteristics and peculiarities as a performing art. It has been undergoing a number of changes in its musical and lyrical structures. It moved outward to become a popular music instead of being court music, and from being coastal music to being a music that has spread out to inland Tanzania, Kenya, Uganda and Burundi, thus approximating musical structures of these regions as it is assuming new roles and functions. Although in our description we do in passing refer to the whole body of the art complex ‘taarab’, it is on the lyric that we focus on. This article is written on the basis of findings from field work and library research that have been conducted from 2000 to date in a project entitled Local and Global Aspects of Taarab: A Popular Music Entertainment in East Africa, under the umbrella topic “Lokales Handeln in Afrika im Kontext globaler Einflüsse”, funded by Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG).

Taarab is a style of music performed all along the Swahili coast at weddings and on other celebratory occasions. It is arguably the most important type of entertainment music played in this region, and it is certainly prevalent in Zanzibar, where it has come to be considered part of the very characterisation of the island itself: this is the island of cloves, the island of slaves and `the island of tawab` (Seif Salim Saleh, lecture at the African Music Village Holland Park, London, July 18, 1985)

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.

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.

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`.

The osmotic relationship between oral and written literature has been neglected for a long time by literary criticism in post-independence Tanzania: the development of new genres and the related debates about literary values have until the end of the Eighties mostly attracted the attention of the scholars, making thus marginal the study of oral literature until the recent awakening of critical studies. Residual were especially those oral forms, like contemporary oral poetry, not wholly ´traditional` - coming from a pre-colonial past or alluding to unchanging features -, nor enough `modern` and `progressive` to be assigned much interest in scholarship. This paper is a tentative to approach the question from a different perspective, presenting the case of one kind of oral poetry - taarab songs - , which has been dealt within creative writing, from the pre-independence era until our days - creative literature, being not bound to categorising and coherence as criticism is, sometimes succeeding better than a too `scientifically- oriented` criticism in containing the subtle relations between opponents, like orality and writing, tradition and modernity, elite and popular arts. In the following pages I will discuss three Swahili prose works, namely Wasifu wa Siti Binti Saad by Shaaban Robert (1958), Utengano by S.A Mohamed (1980) and Siku njema by K. Walibora (1996), in which taarab appears in the narration- both thematically and stylistically -, evidencing the continuities but also stressing the different ways in which symbolism and literary techniques are employed by the authors.

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.

‘Taarab’ is a popular music entertainment in East Africa whose origin is ‘contentiously’ given as Middle East. It is an art form imported to East Africa perhaps in the early years of the 1900s. Taraab has been ariedly looked at, but has generally been seen as a uniform body. This essay sets out to show that from its inception in East Africa, taarab has never been uniform as it started to develop its own characteristics and peculiarities as a performing art. It has been undergoing a number of changes in its musical and lyrical structures. It moved outward to become a popular music instead of being court music, and from being coastal music to being a music that has spread out to inland Tanzania, Kenya, Uganda and Burundi, thus approximating musical structures of these regions as it is assuming new roles and functions. Although in our description we do in passing refer to the whole body of the art complex ‘taarab’, it is on the lyric that we focus on. This article is written on the basis of findings from field work and library research that have been conducted from 2000 to date in a project entitled Local and Global Aspects of Taarab: A Popular Music Entertainment in East Africa, under the umbrella topic “Lokales Handeln in Afrika im Kontext globaler Einflüsse”, funded by Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG).

The osmotic relationship between oral and written literature has been neglected for a long time by literary criticism in post-independence Tanzania: the development of new genres and the related debates about literary values have until the end of the Eighties mostly attracted the attention of the scholars, making thus marginal the study of oral literature until the recent awakening of critical studies. Residual were especially those oral forms, like contemporary oral poetry, not wholly ´traditional` - coming from a pre-colonial past or alluding to unchanging features -, nor enough `modern` and `progressive` to be assigned much interest in scholarship. This paper is a tentative to approach the question from a different perspective, presenting the case of one kind of oral poetry - taarab songs - , which has been dealt within creative writing, from the pre-independence era until our days - creative literature, being not bound to categorising and coherence as criticism is, sometimes succeeding better than a too `scientifically- oriented` criticism in containing the subtle relations between opponents, like orality and writing, tradition and modernity, elite and popular arts. In the following pages I will discuss three Swahili prose works, namely Wasifu wa Siti Binti Saad by Shaaban Robert (1958), Utengano by S.A Mohamed (1980) and Siku njema by K. Walibora (1996), in which taarab appears in the narration- both thematically and stylistically -, evidencing the continuities but also stressing the different ways in which symbolism and literary techniques are employed by the authors.

Taarab is a style of music performed all along the Swahili coast at weddings and on other celebratory occasions. It is arguably the most important type of entertainment music played in this region, and it is certainly prevalent in Zanzibar, where it has come to be considered part of the very characterisation of the island itself: this is the island of cloves, the island of slaves and `the island of tawab` (Seif Salim Saleh, lecture at the African Music Village Holland Park, London, July 18, 1985)