In Praise of the Ordinary
Thembi Mutch
Back in 2011, I sat on a grubby, unpromising working beach near Tanga in Tanzania, with Sophia Kinogo, a close friend and the housekeeper of the decaying bungalow I was renting. It was typically hot, and very humid. We watched fishermen unload paltry catches from small hand-carved boats, and a group of exhausted women load the fish onto their heads, with no iceboxes, no lorries to take them market or processing factories. Sophia pointed out how to identify the best fish cuts. She bantered in slang with the fisherfolk, speaking too fast for me to follow. She plucked a twig from a tree. ‘Arobaini, dawa,’ she pronounced – meaning this is neem tree, medicine (literally called ‘forty’ in Swahili because it cures up to forty different ailments). The scene seemed idyllic, timeless, and incredibly vulnerable.
In 2019, after eight years of research in Tanga, I secured academic funding for an oral history project, ‘Historia Ilyofichwa ya ardhi na bahari’ or ‘untold stories of land and sea’. With a team of Tanzanian researchers – Aida Mulolozi, Sylvester Julius Mkwaya and Neema Mtenga – we wanted to celebrate the Swahili crafts and traditions specific to this coastal area, twelve hours by road north of the capital Dar es Salaam. Poverty, land-grabs and ill-judged British and German imperial schemes of groundnut, cashew and jatropha biofuel plantations pushed Tanga further down national priorities for investment. There was talk in Pan-African media of a mega pipeline and port that would process the limitless riches of liquid natural gas and oil being prospected for. But the outlook for Tanga remained gloomy: the protected marine park and surrounding fishing zones would be dug out for berths and pipelines, the small farm plots cleared for factories and roads.
Just as the UK celebrates roof thatchers, lobster pot makers and British folk songs, we wanted to shine a spotlight on Tanga’s crafts and skills – boatbuilding, net-making, seed preservation and traditional ways of healing and cooking. If the multi-million-dollar port and its infrastructure did come to fruition, then songs, rituals to mark birth, puberty and marriage were in danger of being wiped out.
We chose a small village near to the beach to co-creatively collect and record the hopes, opinions and experiences of the people around us. We all lived together in a rotting 1950s colonial bungalow with unreliable electricity, hopeless sewage and no internet coverage. Our neighbours were mostly squatters and officially ‘precarious’ – their jobs (farming, fishing, entrepreneurial activities) existed under the radar. We wanted to work slowly, and cooperatively, and maintain the fragile trust we built up. Sophia Kinogo, the housekeeper, kept us sane, fed and laughing. She knew the area and she was trusted; she introduced us to her family and friends, who were farmers and who, in turn, introduced us to their husbands, fathers and kids, who were fishermen, taxi drivers, boat-builders.
Our project was deliberately organic: we weren’t going to statistically gather information, or rigorously find out exactly who had been doing what. We were more interested in working in the Studs Terkel way of talking to ordinary people, sitting to chat alongside fishermen as they fixed their nets or working alongside farmers as they hacked away weeds. We wanted to record and document the knowledge in people’s heads, gathering stories and disappearing skills. Sophia, now in her early 60s, had spent her childhood on the sisal plantations in Tanzania in their heyday; her father was as senior as an African was allowed to become by the colonial administrators. She recounted with clinical accuracy the grades of sisal, and the ‘t-shirt prizes’ given to workers who brought in high weekly yields. This was the first time any of us, ever, had heard the sisal story from an African perspective.
Trying to find ways to hold on to, capture, archive and immortalise (the words for this are so problematic) the delicate observations of details like these, and others such as how fish spawning has changed, or which plants grow well and why, how the winds and rains have gradually, but hugely, shifted over the last ten years, is difficult. Yet this sort of ephemeral, workaday knowledge is the very essence of Tanga; it is a place of ritual and attention to detail in pavement cafes where people take coffee and eat cashata (peanut brittle) at the same time every day. A place where the banter of fishermen at dawn or on the daladalas (minibuses) provides a backdrop to the cacophony of cicadas, mosquitos and many other ‘wadudu’ (insects) depending on the season. This is what is meant by Intangible Cultural Heritage (ICH).
The definition of ICH proclaimed in UNESCO’s 2003 Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage is that non-material culture embedded in a ‘practice, representation, expression, knowledge, or skill’. Nineteen categories of ICH were identified, including rituals, folklore, handicrafts, customs and art practices. This covers an impossibly vast range of phenomena. In terms of ‘stuff you can touch’, 90-95% of Africa’s cultural heritage is held outside of Africa[i] in royal collections and major European and American museums, with France having over 90,000 objects from sub-Saharan Africa in its national collections, the majority locked away in vaults.[ii] Both the British Museum (73.000 objects)[iii] and the Royal Maritime Museum Greenwich have over 80% of their artefacts in store. This is not just contentious, it’s hidden, and obfuscated. What is noticeable is that whilst debates on the repatriation of looted African material culture is (rightly I believe) raging and lively, the issue of how to honour, preserve and pass on the intangible, living value of ICH is not.
Part of the reason for this that ICH is so embedded in daily life, it’s taken for granted by people who live there. At the same time, in Tanzania, government and private investors are laser-focused on improving access to sewage, clean water, education and (of course) generating profit. While increasing agricultural productivity (which again isn’t good news for small farmers, as larger industrialised projects are favoured), the arts, cultural heritage, archaeology, museums all slip further down as national priorities, even if for local, diasporic and international people and tourism, there’s obvious merit in promoting them. We found ourselves in the peculiar and ironic position of ‘making the case’ for ICH to the Tanzanian government and its various ministers in fancy conference halls miles from Tanga, whilst the people at the heart of ICH practices seemed to understand implicitly the profound and far-reaching importance of knowing and communicating their own cultural history from an accessible, non-academic perspective.
Our interviewees came from a wide range of jobs. An elderly basket and rug weaver and farmer, Mama Mwanamvua, lamented that people spent so little time together these days, that no skills or knowledge were being passed on. The reeds she used to weave were harder to find as the fertile wetlands were also prime beach property, earmarked for building condominiums. Sixty-five years younger than her, the young men of the village where we lived desperately wanted to train as ‘waganga’ (witchdoctors, healers) as the local appetite for their trade was so great and predicted great riches with not much work. International jazz musician Charles Joseph Nyasolo, natty and dapper in his suit even in the humidity of 34 degrees, was an encyclopaedia: he told us of the many music clubs and shops in Tanga. He remembered the beach in front of our home was used to trade boats, food, building materials, fish and even people until as late as the 1940s. He talked of Khamisi, the freed slave hiding out in the caves, who organised a rebellion against British tax collectors in the 1900s in Tanga, whose story has never made it into the history books. Brother Vincent, a monk from the convent next door to us came over many nights and talked of people being walked in chains from Congo, Burundi and the DRC for the slave trade. These brutalities existed long after the trade was officially ended in 1873, with the British colonial occupiers using unpaid and indentured labour to build the Tanga-Dar-Arusha railroad, then on the coffee, clove and sugar plantations, and then later on sisal. Slavery was only abolished in Tanganyika in 1922.
None of this historical material was in the local Tanga Urithi (legacy) museum, although we are currently working out how to transfer our research materials to them. Meanwhile, Joel Negamile, the unpaid curator, sells his own art to fund the museum. As he says:
‘Our items in here are mostly German photos. We struggle to get collections, but we need our own material, gathered in our own communities. Unless we understand our own past, it’s another form of enslavement. We are only free when we are mentally free and understand our pasts and educate our next generations.’
There are massive hurdles. Our research information, for example, exists in digital form – there’s no reliable electricity in the town, and the museum does not have enough money to buy or run electrical equipment. There is one ten-year-old laptop which was donated to Joel. For the moment, we can’t work out how Tanga people will access the hours of Swahili interviews. ‘Historia Ilyofichwa uncovered an incredible array of wisdom and knowledge – of coastal marine life cycles, shoal movements and tides, particular resin-heating techniques to fireproof mangrove canoes. Elders talked for hours about climate changes, resistance to colonial rule, natural medicines and mangroves. They talked of pottery, dances, song, food preparation, rug and basket making, weaving.
Our research team does not have the answer (yet) how to ‘preserve’ or host these stories and their cultural knowledge. Museums, of the grand colonial sort in a national capital, are probably not the answer. Pop up museums, like the one in Ghana, which is housed in a freight container in the capital’s market, allow people to offer their stories and personal mementos. This interactive approach is also used in the Museum of British Colonialism[iv] in Kenya, a joint UK/Kenyan initiative run by volunteer activists. It is a multi-site digital museum that unflinchingly looks at British brutality in the Mau Mau rebellions, sidestepping the problem of destroyed and disappeared British records by interviewing relatives of people tortured and killed by the British, and by investigating the sites of torture and detention in Kenya.
Sylvester Julius Mkwaya and Neema Mtenga are the first two Tanzanians to be trained in oral history research. They presented our findings to government ministers in June 2022, and Intangible Cultural Heritage is now formally written into the research priorities of Tanzania. Neema is now studying for a PhD on local medicinal herbs as a result of our research project and has set up an NGO to support women using traditional healing methods. Sylvester continues as a community organiser and believes that local Tanzanian history must be incorporated into a broader educational curriculum, and at the same time be collected and stored at village levels, curated by those that create it, and funded by national government:
‘I think the solution is to train people to collect stories, as we have, and also to have local heritage hubs, where we can collect stories and knowledge at a local level… These histories are vital for our future.’
What this project revealed, over the many years it took to set up, execute and deliver (eleven in total) is that it’s really important not to instantly denigrate and dismiss older people and their traditions: gathering the intangible cultural heritage creates wonderful moments of connection, of trust, dialogue and learning, and profound sense of pride and ownership in land, trees, sea life and plants.
Currently, in 2022, there is a small photographic exhibition, a short film and hours of audio interviews and recordings from this small patch of Tanzania. Funding for the pipeline, the port and processing plant has stopped. For the time being, the villages where we worked are still there.
Photo by Jenny Matthews
You can view Hidden Histories online here:https://hiddenhistoriestanzania.wordpress.com/blog-feed/
The photographic exhibition will be displayed as part of the Film Africa series at SOAS from October 28th: for further exhibitions, please contact Thembi Mutch here if you can help: [email protected]
Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford will feature some photos and audio interviews from Historia Ilyofichwa in December 2023 as part of its exhibition of Makaramo figures:
We have literally no idea, “Uliziiba kutoka kwetu”.
Interviews and photos of the interviewees will be taken back to Tanzania in February 2023 and presented to the contributors and the Tanga Urithi museum
[i] https://www.vice.com/en/article/qvyp95/the-fight-to-repatriate-african-skulls-in-european-museum-collections
[ii] https://thisisafrica.me/politics-and-society/africas-looted-heritage-needs-to-come-home/[iii] https://www.addisherald.com/stealing-africa-how-britain-looted-the-continents-artifacts/
[iv] https://www.museumofbritishcolonialism.org/