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'Mimi ni msanii, kioo cha jamii' urban youth culture in Tanzania as seen through Bongo Fleva and Hip-Hop

This article addresses the question how Bongo Fleva (or Flava, from the word ‘flavour’) - also defined as muziki wa kizazi kipya (‘music of a new generation’) - and Hip-Hop in Swa-hili, reflect Tanzanian urban youth culture, with its changing identities, life-styles, aspirations, constraints, and language. As far as young people residing in small centres and semi-rural ar-eas are concerned, I had the impression that they have the same aspirations as their urban counterparts, especially those in Dar es Salaam. They keep well up to date on urban practices through performances, radio and local tabloids, even if they lack the same job and leisure op-portunities as their city brothers. Although I do not take ‘youth’ as a fixed and homogeneous category, the ‘young generation’ has been assuming a central, though frequently ambiguous, position in many places in Africa (for this issue, see Burgess 2005). Here, however, I have chosen to focus on two urban contexts, namely Dar es Salaam and Mwanza, the sites of my one-and- -half-year fieldwork between 2004 and the end of 2005.

Identiferoai:union.ndltd.org:DRESDEN/oai:qucosa.de:bsz:15-qucosa-91140
Date14 August 2012
CreatorsSuriano, Maria
ContributorsUniversity of the Witwatersrand, School of Social Sciences, Universität Mainz, Institut für Ethnologie und Afrikastudien
PublisherUniversitätsbibliothek Leipzig
Source SetsHochschulschriftenserver (HSSS) der SLUB Dresden
LanguageEnglish
Detected LanguageEnglish
Typedoc-type:article
Formatapplication/pdf
SourceSwahili Forum 14 (2007), S. 207-223

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