In this section, I will provide some information about my collaboration partner Kifimbo. I acquired this information through the many conversations with him during the four months we spent together, and a video interview we did after my fieldwork (Yahaya & Pelkonen, 2020). First is a short biography of him, concentrating on his musical background, and afterward, I will go through how we first met and started our collaboration.
Ramadhani Shabani Yahaya, known to everybody (including close family) as Kifimbo is a reggae-afro-fusion artist, musician, dancer, and a craftsman. Kifimbo means ”small stick” in Swahili. He’s originally from the little coastal town of Bagamoyo, 60 kilometers north of Dar es Salaam. Bagamoyo is famous not only for being historically a slave trade port and the capital for German colonialists in East Africa, but for the present day Bagamoyo Arts and Culture Institute, TaSUBa (Taasisi ya Sanaa na Utamaduni Bagamoyo).
Born in 1982 and named by his then alleged father, a medicine man by the name Kifimbo Yahaya, he grew up with his mother, stepfather, and many siblings in a rural environment in central Bagamoyo. He belongs to the Zaramo ethnic group found mostly in the coasts of Tanzania. As a boy, he attended Quran school like any youth of the Zaramo tribe, who are mostly Muslim. He fished in the ocean, gave trouble to the crop terrorizing monkeys, and worked at the family’s farm and quite often neighboring farms also as it was usual for neighboring farms and families to co-operate in the time. In the village where he grew up, there was a certain place under a big mango tree where older men would gather to play drums in the afternoons. Inspired by this experience, Kifimbo and his peers started to build their own drums and percussion to practice. This became a daily habit in his teens. Young Kifimbo was very much drawn to music:
”I was using to play too. I’m running home tonight and then I hear to be running with the friends. We lie... I lying my mum like I’m going to pray, to the mosque, then I’m running I’m going to that dancing. And we go there we’ll play, cause we love it!” (Yahaya & Pelkonen, 2020).
In 1994, at the age of 12, Kifimbo started practicing traditional Tanzanian music and dance in a children’s group organized by the TaSUBa college of arts, which wasn’t the plan his mother had for him. He just told his mother he had started to attend a ”Chuo” (college/school), which his mother happily but mistakenly presumed to be Islamic tuition. Kifimbo’s first experiences with music creation happened around this time. He gathered a group of friends and they started to play their own music with self-built percussion instruments mixing different traditional styles that he had learned. They performed this music called ”Daku” in the time of Ramadhan in the early morning to wake up the people to eat before the sunrise. Kifimbo’s early experiences with music also include the traditional ceremonies and feasts of the Zaramo tribe, which would include communal drumming, dancing, and spiritual possession.
Stories of Kifimbo’s childhood were quite peculiar and fascinating to listen to as they included many things quite foreign to me: farming, Muslim lifestyle, witchcraft, spirits, and the village community. Some things more fundamental and global felt also familiar and relatable: the fascination of music at a young age, respect for your elders, and the products of Coca-cola company. (Which seemed to make it to Kifimbo’s all-natural diet for they had been there since he’s early years unlike, say, sweets). Nevertheless, it is a puzzling yet somehow profound experience to share life so intensively with a person from, let’s face it, completely different kind of cultural and economic background.
