Reinventing the drum
By Mohamed Yunus Rafiq Posted Apr 1 2007
Like many indigenous people in Tanzania, my longtime friend Lesikar Ole Ngila goes to the town of Arusha to attend the gulio, a weekly market. There he can buy necessities that aren’t available in his village. One day he went to a stationery shop to make photocopies. Before he could enter, the shop’s owner yelled angrily at him.
“I don’t want dirty primitives in my shop,” Ole Ngila recalls the owner saying.
His sole offense was his identity as a Maasai warrior. The Maasai are easily distinguished from the rest of Tanzanians by their red plaid kilt wrappers. This was neither the first nor last time we witnessed fellow Tanzanians humiliate the Maasai.
“They shave off our sacred hair, throw away the jewelry that has been blessed by the saliva of our elders, ban us from wearing our traditional dress, beat us for speaking in our own languages and tell us that our traditional medicines are satanic,” Ole Ngila says.
Some in Arusha mistreat the Maasai and other indigenous peoples because they see them as primitive, rigid traditionalists. However, this stereotype ignores the Maasai’s ability to reinvent old experiences to address new ones, a cultural concept called Engisasai. For instance, old Maasai songs about lion killings are molded to address AIDS, alcoholism and environmental degradation.
Angry at the discrimination of our indigenous brothers and sisters, Ole Ngila and I created Aang Serian, an indigenous youth organization complete with media center. The media center, Aang Serian Drum, trains youth to create their own video documentaries based on news and indigenous knowledge. Like the reinvented lion killing songs, the media center sustains traditional practices while adapting them to modern concerns.
The Drum project has contributed to social change in Tanzania by enabling indigenous youth and women to produce their own messages on critical issues. Most importantly, through education and technology, it has empowered the communities who occupy the social, political and economic periphery of Tanzania.
The birth of a new beat
We hadn’t planned to do all this. It began in 1999 with a handful of frustrated youth. When we were angry, we would vent at the home of our friend’s grandmother. Once, in a conversation about conditions in Arusha, a guest said, “You men talk too much. Why you don’t do something?” This sparked the creation of Aang Serian.
We gathered indigenous youth from six communities to talk about critical issues they faced. We identified appropriate education, micro-enterprise and a recording studio as ways to reach our goals. Because the stories of indigenous people are often misrepresented or unheard in the mainstream media, the media center was a natural outgrowth. The opportunity to create it came when Bret Erikson, an American visual anthropology student visiting in 2000, agreed to train our students in video recording and editing skills.
In 2002, Erikson returned to Tanzania armed only with his personal laptop and a camcorder. In three weeks, he trained students from diverse indigenous roots, some who used electrical sockets for the first time. Since October 2002, the indigenous media center has trained 12 youth from the Chagga and Warangi communities. The students make trips to their ancestral villages to find important issues and then produce documentaries.
Keep the Drum; up the volume
Volunteers such as Edmund Massawe, a former student from Chagga village of Machame, support the media center. He says that Aang Serian Drum is a modern twist on our ancestral ways of disseminating news, such as with a drum or horn.
“Media has not taken the role of traditional forms of sharing information, but it has expanded the degree to which the message can be shared,” Massawe says. “For example, instead of only Uduru, our village, hearing the sound of the Kudu horn, now all the 120 indigenous groups can hear the news at the same time. The center continues to train indigenous youth and produce documentaries in the hope to educate the public as well as contribute the voice of indigenous youth to important debates around development, education, AIDS and the environment.”
The documentaries also reinforce the traditional passing of knowledge from elders to youth. For example, Kesuma Ole Kasikasi, a Maasai warrior, produced a documentary titled The Life of the Maasai. In this film, he interviews village elders about marriage, rites of passage and family in Maasai society. Similarly, in her documentary Maa through the Eyes of a Maasai Woman, Nina ene Sangau, a Maasai girl, interviews Maasai women elders about the use of traditional medicine. When these documentaries were screened in a hotel in Arusha in 2002, it was the first time we had a video and story exclusively produced by the target community themselves.
Impacting society
The Drum project has increased the diversity of local media content with issues of indigenous people. For example, you can now find locally made videos about the Maasai, Chagga or Rangi in Tanzania. The project has produced four major documentaries on the themes of indigenous people, female genital mutilation and Tanzanian hip hop, called Bongoflava, which are available for sale. The films have been screened publicly in cafes and community centers in Arusha. We undertake these efforts in the spirit that education is crucial in fighting discrimination and creating a peaceful community.
The Drum project will continue its work thanks to the support of a network of colleagues around the world, such as friends in the U.S., who donated cameras and computers. In 2006, the center received a $10,000 grant from the U.N. Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues. The grant will be used to produce a documentary on the lifestyles of Tanzanian indigenous people. The film will be shared in the U.N. forum, screened in Arusha and submitted to local television stations. It will also be submitted to the Zanzibar International Film Festival, which showcases films from the Dhow countries. There are plans to market the video to help maintain the center.