Social Science Research Council

"Taarab Music and the Politics of Ethnic Identity in Mombasa, Kenya"

Mombasa is at once an Islamic town" of the "Swahili Coast" and a thoroughly heterogeneous port city of Kenya. In its long, complex history it has always been a setting for dynamic and high-stakes ethnic identity politics, a place where one's economic opportunities and political rights are tied to ethnic affiliations. In particular, residents identified as "Swahili" are haunted by colonial struggles over the terms of citizenship. They have often found difficulty in claiming land ownership, securing passports, and finding employment. Today, in the midst of a nation-wide political restructuring, issues of ethnicity in Mombasa have gained new significance. The fierce stance of the Kibaki administration against corruption and nepotism has opened up the question of what ethnic identity will mean for political and economic opportunities in the future. Utilizing ethnographic methodologies and semiotic analysis, this study investigates the ways individuals and communities in Mombasa negotiate notions of Swahiliness, Bantuness, Arabness, and Indianness in their engagements with a local form of popular music known as taarab. This highly poetic musical genre circulates within an ethnically heterogeneous social context. Even so, the art form is considered distinctly "Swahili" (both locally and in the West), and stylistic variations within the genre are discussed in markedly ethnic terms (e.g. "Arabic taarab," "Indian taarab"). Attention in this study is given to the ways in which the social processes of taarab production and reception serve as discursive fora within which subjects work through emergent debates about ethnic identity. I seek to analyze the linguistic and musical communicative interactions involved in taarab production and reception as both reflections and practices of ethnic identification and political positioning. My primary goal is to offer a highly textured case study of the nature of ethnicity in the African postcolony, an issue at the center of many of the continent's most urgent dilemmas. I am also interested in developing new analytical methods for approaching the semiotics and dialogics of popular culture in heterogeneous urban spaces.