Figure 2.6. First jam with the band. From left: I, Kifimbo, Kikombe, Balaam, Shabo. The song is "Nataka Kucheza". The idea of the fast sebene part in the end of the song was originated in this jam.
I arrived in Dar es Salam on 21.9.2019. My plan was to make music with Kifimbo and otherwise be in the scene and learn Tanzanian music and culture, but I didn’t know exactly how everything would turn out. After all I had not met with Kifimbo in almost four years, even though we have been text messaging each other every once in a while. Kifimbo had offered his place for me to stay if I liked, and I ended up living there with him the whole time, excluding a few trips to other parts of Tanzania which we mostly did together as well.
Kifimbo’s place was situated in Kinondoni ward in Kinondoni district in Dar es Salaam. There are over 21 000 people living in the 1,90 square kilometers of Kinondoni and over a million people living in the whole 531 square kilometer district (Citypopulation.de, 2012 census). All social classes are represented in the area: you can get from small one-room concrete houses inhabited by large families living on a shoestring to the huge manors of highly influential people including the president and ambassadors with a ten-minute walk. Our neighborhood of unpaved streets and small concrete houses was relatively deprived, at least compared to the nearby areas with apartment buildings, offices, and embassies. On broader East-African terms you could definitely depict Kinondoni also as middle class considering the general rate of poverty in the region. Of Tanzania’s 55 million inhabitants 12 million live under the poverty line and 4 million in extreme poverty. Most of the people in our neighborhood were living alright even if poor in western terms. After all, 70% of Tanzanians live with less than 2 dollars a day (The World Bank, 2015).
We shared a room with Kifimbo. The compound was owned by Ronnie Schulte, a "half-German, half-Chaga" rasta who lived in the other building sharing the inner yard, shower, and toilet with us. Our home, or as Kifimbo called it, ghetto, was visited every day by many friends, some of them being daily visitors. It seemed like our inner yard was a get-together place for a certain group of rasta-minded people.
We started jamming together at Kifimbo’s place and also sometimes at a rehearsal spaces around town with Kifimbo’s band consisting of five musicians: Kikombe (drum kit), Ally Chudo (percussion), Shabo (guitar), Balaam (bass) and Elisha (keyboards). The rehearsal spaces we used needed to be booked and paid for each time. The basic equipment was usually a drum kit, some guitar amps, a bass amp, maybe a keyboard, and a PA system for amplification of vocal mics. The quality of the equipment wasn't usually great, but the music we played was. Me joining the group felt quite natural, almost surprisingly natural. The band consisted of very high-level players, so maybe that also made it easy to enter the jam. Soon we started to talk about the possibility of recording some material, which I had not taken for granted we would end up doing. As this presentation will show, in the end, we made a full album of nine songs, with cool cover design and two music videos.
