Musical figures of enslavement and resistance in Semzaba’s Kiswahili play Tendehogo

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article examines the use of musical figures in a Kiswahili play, Tendehogo. Written by an eminent Tanzanian playwright named Edwin Semzaba, the play recounts how slave trade was conducted by Arab traders in East Africa during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. It tells about the experiences of African slave captives being driven by an Arab slave trader away from their homeland in the interior of Tanganyika to the coast. This forced estrangement from their lives as free persons into slavery is accomplished on both physical and mental planes. The article examines how the play uses songs as literary devices, namely musical figures, to represent and enact African and Arab identities, as apparatuses of enslavement and as means of resistance. The article argues that the use of these musical figures in the play Tendehogo sonically mediates readers’ understanding of and attitudes towards East African slave trade and slavery as historical phenomena.