At the archives of Radio Tanzania, more than 15,000 reel-to-reel tapes are stacked in floor-to-ceiling shelves. Each band, musician and recording date is painstakingly notated. The tapes reside inside three musty rooms of the Tanzania Broadcasting Corp., which occupies the old brick-and-concrete BBC building in Dar es Salaam.
Radio Tanzania was the country's only station from its birth in 1951 until the mid-1990s, when competing stations came on the air and state-controlled radio became irrelevant.
The station's archives include poetry, drama, speeches and loads of the music now known aszilipendwa. The word translates literally to "the ones that were loved"; a looser translation would be "golden oldies."
Rebecca Corey, co-founder of the nonprofitTanzania Heritage Project, says the music crosses cultural lines. "When you hear this music," she says, "you don't have to know Swahili to be moved by it."
Corey is a 25-year-old music lover from Athens, Ga., who fell in love with Tanzania when she came to volunteer at an orphanage when she was 18. She came back to enroll at Dar es Salaam University, and two years ago she learned about the radio archive. Today, Corey produces the Zanzibar Music Festival and is spearheading the effort to save the Radio Tanzania tapes.
"During the '60s, '70s and '80s, Tanzania had one of the most lively musical scenes in East Africa," Corey says. "There was only one radio station at the time, and it was Radio Tanzania Dar es Salaam."
TBC needs to digitise that collection before it gets lost
ReplyDeleteWadau wote tuungane kusaidia TBC wasipoteze kazi hii adimu ya music wa zilipendwa.
ReplyDeleteWatalaanika wote kwa tamaa zao! Wenzenu wana kumbukumbu toka kabla mitume hawajazaliwa na wanazilinda kama mboni ya jicho! Mlevi gani huyo asiejua maana ya kumbukumbu muhimu kama hizo? Kemeeni kwa nguvu zote kupoteza vitu adimu kama hivi.
ReplyDelete