2023-05-20 15:16:15
WIf you roam the streets of the Tanzanian capital Dar es Salaam with open ears, you will soon notice: the more rocked out the district, the worse the streets, the more upbeat and faster the music.
While hip-hop and R&B are still ringing out from bars and chic restaurants around the glass office towers downtown, much more anarchic sounds are pumping out at the Kariokoo market, in the hopelessly overflowing Dala-Dala minibuses and at block parties: Lively, at 160 to 300 Beats per minute high-pitched beats. Nervous keyboard noodles. And Swahili-language chants that talk about poverty, unemployment and the ecstasy of the Saturday kidogoro parties, named after the kidogoro, foam mattresses or just scraps of them, on which the completely exhausted dancers eventually collapse.
This sounding stimulant is called Singeli. A rhythm faster than drum and bass or even some gabber. A state of intoxication turned into music that represents Tanzania’s youth more than any other genre.
“We’re talking about cars, they’re just talking about phones,” a Tanzanian hip-hop star mocked the singleli competition. And in doing so he hit the point: Unlike the East African hip hop variant Bongo Flava, the Singeli does not project any middle class dreams. It’s the music of minibus conductors in tattered plastic shoes singing along to every word of a Singleli hit like a creed, and when Bongo Flava smells like Gucci and Chanel, the Singleli carries, well, more the smoke of coal fires.
In Tanzania, around half of the population is younger than 16 years. There are few formal jobs for them, while the rural exodus swells the ghettos of Dar es Salaam by half a million people every year. It is a biotope of poverty and the struggle for survival, as if made for the emergence of a music that wants to be both an outlet for frustration and a party drug at the same time. Or: what would a Saturday night be like if you couldn’t get high on the single?
Like a fresh fuel rod in the reactor
The Singeli is not the first electric variant from Africa. The South African Shangaan, the Malian Balani Show or the Congolese Likembe Orchestra operating under the label “Congotronics” with their overdriven finger pianos have struck a chord with the western electronic avant-garde for a number of years. Bands from Animal Collective to Berlin techno producers Mark Ernestus and Errorsmith to hip-hop inventor Flying Lotus have been inspired by them.
And now from the single. It is possibly the mangy, loudest and fastest of all African dancehall variants. This street music made its way to the west for the first time in 2017. At that time, the Afro-Electro label Nyege Nyege Tapes released “Sounds Of Sisso”, a cassette with the recordings of the singeli pioneer Sisso, which had previously only been circulating on Dar es Salaam’s black market. A revelation for the weary Western techno scene: As if a fresh nuclear fuel rod brought a reactor in danger of breaking up once again to melting temperatures.
Sholo Mwamba on stage
What: Jonathan Fischer
The hype was not long in coming. Sisso, MCZO and Duke, young men without any training or knowledge of English, were invited to DJ performances at the CTM in Berlin and the London Café OTO as far as Warsaw and New York. The Tanzanians brought their Kidogoro energy with them. And they conjured up – even without foam mats and the smell of coal fire – hyperkinetic sound tops that no DJ booth had ever heard in this country. Can it be even faster? In any case, the dirty drive and the hyper nervousness made the single a promise for everyone who is looking for a break from the genre clichés of globalized techno.
Whereby it is precisely the constructive misunderstandings, the funkified errors that make up the charm of the single. It starts with the name of his biggest star at the moment: “Sholo means little birds and Mwamba is the rock,” explains the singer and rapper Upstairs Hall, a wiry guy with a bleached afro, braided pigtails and sunglasses. “Actually, the birds are called Sholwe. As a child, I couldn’t pronounce it well and always said Sholo. That made everyone laugh.”
Sholo Mwamba and his crew smoke under a thatched roof after they have just completed the sound check for an open-air performance at the music conference ACCES in Makumbusho in central Dar es Salaam. A school class walks by on their way to the neighboring Village Museum. Huge screams when they recognize the music star. Everyone wants to take photos. Sholo Mwamba intones one of his hits: as if on command, the school children add the refrain: “If I call you, then you come!”
He himself, says Mwamba, and it’s only now that one notices how emaciated he seems, grew up as an orphan and street kid. “I never had the opportunity to go to school. Only the single opened many doors for me.” Although: Mwamba’s chutzpah was also needed. At celebrations like a boy’s coming of age, circumcision, or a wedding, he would fit DJs playing traditional songs and drum beats on their laptops and just jump on stage as the master of ceremony. As a single rapper.
Originally, DJs and producers used fragments of taraab, an orchestral music played at weddings and family celebrations on the Swahili coast, mixed it with other rhythms and speeded it up. “Taarab music has a slow beat. But if the DJ increases the speed, no one can sing along – so people start dancing like crazy.” If DJs have always loved to experiment with such stimulants, then this one works great too. Fast, faster, singleli.
Even the predecessor of the Singeli, the Mchiriku, broke away from all Western pop norms in the 1990s with noodle-like Casio melodies and noisy lo-fi aesthetics. The single then took over his energy to create a crossover into the pop market thanks to better production technology. Today, even hip-hop stars like Professor Jay are embracing the once frowned upon poor man’s music. The clearest indicator of the popularity of the Singeli, how could it be otherwise, is the advertising: Whether mopeds, soap or beer – no promising marketing campaign aimed at the mass market in Tanzania can afford to come along without Singeli drumming .
The voice of the disrespectful
“People used to say that the singeli was the music of the Wahuni, the irreverent.” Yes, Sholo Mwamba used to see himself that way. In fact, the genre still has a dubious reputation, due to its origins in slum bars selling insecticide-laced alcohol, dancers often drawn from the petty criminal milieu, illegal street parties regularly broken up by the police.
But even before TV stations and radio stations picked up the single, he won the referendum with his feet: no hip-hop DJ, no glitzy beach party can compete with the single on Saturday night. In the meantime, its pop variant has long outgrown the ghettos. Sholo Mwamba’s videos have now garnered millions upon millions of clicks. “Even the president danced to our music in public.” The slim man adjusts his sunglasses and raises his fist: “We are respected.”
For his concert as part of the Music in Africa initiative initiated by the German-African non-profit network Music fair ACCES but in addition to the DJ, he brought a real band with him: three drummers, two guitarists and a trumpeter, musicians who clearly didn’t spend their time in air-conditioned studios. But there is one thing they masterfully understand: to use their instruments as rhythmic weapons, to ignite a thoroughly physical euphoria on stage that spills over to the audience in waves. One sweaty, sexy accelerated spin cycle.
Sholo Mwamba struts across the stage, quite the fairy tale king, with a plastic crown, tusk-tipped shoulder pads and a leopard cape. His dancers also seem to have stepped out of the Black Panther film set from “Wakanda Forever”. “We never stay the same,” Sholo Mwamba had explained: “Singeli is constantly changing.”
Now he fires off chants in staccato Swahili. Too fast even for some compatriots. But one refrain sticks. About “Ghetto la Bibi”, the ghetto where his grandmother once watched over little Sholo: “How about you finally go to sleep/ Your arrows can’t harm us.”
Sholo Mwamba performs at the African Music Days in Munich on May 25, 2023.
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