jesp in tanzania

Google Earth

It’s a Saturday afternoon and I sit in the study. I’m playing with Google Earth on my desktop computer. My wife comes by. “Can you show me how you found our house in Dar es Salaam on Google Earth?” she asks, and I show her. First we find Dar es Salaam, then we zoom in, find Msasani, zoom in, and finally we can clearly see our house. Our roof terrace stands out as a big white square.

“If you go out on the terrace and wave, I’ll take a screen-shoot of you” I joke, and to my utter disbelief she says ok, and walks out on the terrace. With eyes as big as badges and a mouth forming a perfect capital O I watch her begin jumping up and down while she waves her arms and stares up in the sky.

My wife. I love her.

If you also want to see House of Jesp through Google Earth, you can find it through the ’House of Jesp’ Icon in the left column. But I can’t promise that you will see my wife on the roof terrace.

Jesp

In the Bush

Tanzania has been through turbulent times over the last week. Not because a long list of ministers were forced to resign after allegations of corruption (although that too created quite a stir), but because President Bush came on an official visit.

Apart from the usual no-content speeches, a seemingly extravagant gift of 698 million USD to fight malaria in Tanzania, and the promise of a – considerably smaller – grant to fight HIV/AIDS, most Tanzanians felt the presence of the most powerful man in the universe through endless obstacles in traffic and in communication. Major roads were blocked for unknown periods of time, airports closed down, the mobile network disappeared, radio signals were scrambled…

And you would think that such a disturbance would create frustration, maybe even enmity towards George Bush among Tanzanians, but no, not at all. Apart from a few harmless demonstrations in Dar es Salaam, people have been overall welcoming and positive. They even decorated the blocked road between Arusha and Kilimanjaro airport with Tanzanian and American flags, as the picture shows.

But maybe a different political statement was hidden in the decorations after all? You judge…

Jesp

Sauti za Busara

In an earlier blog entry I mentioned the lack of quality art in Tanzania, but I have to revise that after visiting Sauti za Busara, Zanzibars annual music festival. Very impressive!

It would be too much to mention them all, but let me present some of the names which, at least for me, represented the highlights of the festival:

Bassekou Kouyate &Ngoni Ba
Malian Bassekou Kouyate and his band plays the ngoni, a banjolike instrument with an almost 800 year long history in Mali.

But forget about traditional African music, this guy is rocking HARD! With an attitude like BB King and some very, very groovy riffs this guy is pure energy and he is a true master of the ngoni.

www.myspace.com/bassekoukouyate
www.bbc.co.uk/radio3/worldmusic/a4wm2008/

Black Roots
Was the only band in the program I had heard before, and I had decided that I wanted to hear them again even before I left Dar es Salaam.

Black Roots is from Zanzibar and mix traditional ngoma with African rhythm.

The lead singer is Othman Mohamed, the most famous actor coming from Zanzibar and a very charismatic stage performer.

It’s the kind of music that just makes you in a good mood.

N’Faly Kouaté and Dunyakan
If Bassekou Kouyate is the BB King of the ngoni, then N’Faly Kouaté is the Jimmy Hendrix of the kora – he even plays it behind his back!

N’Faly Ko delivers a very intense onstage performance and the music is exellent.

Modern rhythms inspired by traditional music from Guinea.

www.Dunyakan.com
www.myspace.com/Dunyakan
www.myspace.com/NfalyKouyate

Sakaki Mango
This guy was one of the most curious treats of the festival. Japanese, but fluent in Swahili, and an expert in the limba, a traditional instrument of the Gogo people of Tanzania.

Sakaki is a one man band, playing the percussion with his legs, while singing and playing the limba.

The music is trancelike and soothing – and Sakaki Mango can sing Swahili so it sounds EXACTELY like Japanese.

www.sakakimango.com

Yunasi
Yunasi is music for the legs. For the whole body actually. And if you dance well enough, you might be invited to join them on the stage (as it happened to my wife – but she refused).

The band is from Kenya (with the exception of the accordion player who is from France), and they are playing a crossover between traditional East African music, gospel and pop.

www.yunasi.com

National Tarab All Stars
No Sauti Za Busara without tarab music, the traditional music from Zanzibar. Several bands at the festival presented a fusion between Tarab and other kinds of music, but the tarab band I enjoyed the most, was the real thing.

The National Tarab All Stars consists of the top within traditional tarab music from the Islands of Tanzania.

I will not pretend to know anything about tarab (it would be hard anyway), and it is definitely not the kind of music I would go out of my way to purchase. However, lying in the grass in the old fortress of Stonetown on a lazy Saturday afternoon listening to these guys singing and playing their traditional instrumensts was definitely one of the most pleasant moments of the festival.

Seckou Keita Quartet+
Another high octane fusion band starring Seckou Keita, but with an excellent backing band mixing the sound of the kora with violin, electric bass, congas and calabash percussion.

Seckou Keit is from Westafrica but the music is a tour de force of genres and comes out as something you haven’t heard before but recognize anyway because of the many influences from Africa, Europe, the States and Latin America.

www.seckoukeita.com

I could mention many other names – Malouma, Jaymore, Afrodynamix, Bring the Noise!, Ahmed el Salam, Eric Wainaina & the Mapinduzi Band, Maurice Kirya, all playing really good music – but let me just once again emphasize the high artistic level of the festival. Amazing stuff!

Sauti za Busara means sounds of wisdom.

Jesp

Still dancing with the champ...

Jesp

Dreams from My Father

My wife is black.

And I’m white.

It is not something I’m just saying; it is stated in our wedding certificate. Race: Black. Race: White. Even if this whole interracial issue is something we hardly ever think about when we are together, we are frequently reminded by the outside world. It is inevitable.

My wife is proud to be black. Her background makes it a strong identity marker. A marker of culture, of unity, of belonging.

And me? Even if this b/w issue is somewhat new to me – after all I come from a country where the chance of meeting an Inuit in the street is bigger than the chance of meeting a black person – I’m somewhat proud of the fact that I don’t give a flying fuck. The color of my skin is such a shallow identity marker that it is hard for me to see what values I share with other so-called white people. If all IT geeks where blue, I might take another stand, but until that happens I will just shake my head in disbelief of peoples automated willingness to judge other people by the color of their skin.

My wife and I share a profound admiration for Barack Obama, and a sincere hope that he will become the next president of the United States. Not because he is black – or white – but because we believe that he is the best candidate for the job.

Some time ago Lidet read Obama’s’ book ‘Dreams from my father: A story of race and inheritance’. She wrote a review of the book and asked me if she could post it here on my blog.

And therefore I’m delighted to present the first entry on my blog not written by myself, but my wife. Hopefully there will be more to come.

Jesp

Book of the month: Dreams from my father

Long before the world came to know Barack Obama as the US controversial potential democratic candidate Obama had asked himself the most popular question most Americans ask of him: Is Obama black enough?

And that is what “Dreams from my father: A story of race and inheritance” manages to address. Obama wrote this book in his early 30s, soon after he graduated from Harvard law school and became the first black editor of the Harvard Law Review.

The book reads as a novel as Obama describes his early childhood in Hawaii, his brief life in Djakarta, Indonesia, his adolescence back in Hawaii, his brief life as a young man in New York, being a community organizer in Chicago, and finally tracing back his roots to Kenya.

His language is simple & descriptive as he narrates the first moment when he discovered that his color is different from his white Kansa mother and her parents who raised him in Hawaii.  One can’t help but admire his recollections of details of specific incidents that highlighted the complexity of his race and identity crisis that had started way before he reached adolescence. 

His confession of confusion, complacency and drug use are the most emphasized and discussed points in the U.S. media and the U.S. politics. But for the reader, it does not register as more than a numbing element Obama had briefly chosen for himself to quiet down the deep-seated questions within him. And it is not as interesting as how Obama overcomes his addictions and attempts to change the face of the world that had brought him so much grief.  For Obama the solution was to become a community organizer and change the lives of poor, unrepresented black people starting from the ghettos of Chicago.  He describes the complexity of the task by narrating the course of events that took place and by describing the challenges he faced. What’s fascinating is not his success, but his will and determination to see through the things he believed will bring about change.

It is clear that the core of Obama’s discontent, confusion and even success is the shadow of a father he once met but never knew. When he finally realizes that this missing piece in him to be stronger than his issues of race or identity, he travels to Kenya to learn about this missing link in his life. What he finds is more questions than answers. Also he discovers how one man’s life can be as intricate and convoluted as the issue of race.  The narration takes an interesting turn and is even humorous as Obama discovers the complexity of Kenya, his Kenyan family and how he fits in all of it.    

There are parts in the book that becomes a prolonged monologue on issues of race, identity and family. But it is not often. It is worth to be patient and let these moments pass to get the full picture on how Obama came to realize that he is black enough. And even white enough.

Lidet