"In the Town of Love, Music and History": Maintaining a Place-Space Dialectic in Msafiri Zawose's "Karibu Bagamoyo"

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In May 2016, the Tanzanian Gogo musician Msafiri Zawose released a new song, “Karibu Bagamoyo,” accompanied by a music video.  Zawose’s project celebrates and praises the cultural, historical, and natural resources of Bagamoyo, a small, littoral town roughly sixty kilometers north of Dar es Salaam.  Based on interviews and ethnographic work in Bagamoyo, this paper illustrates how Zawose’s “Karibu Bagamoyo” project produces, on the one hand, discourse of place in Bagamoyo through a combination of text, musical processes, and visual representation – a process of affective localization imbuing Bagamoyo with particular meaning and significance.  And, on the other hand, it reveals how this place-producing project is ultimately contingent on urban transformations that are inseparable from larger patterns in global development – that is, space.  Specifically, direct connections between “Karibu Bagamoyo,” tourism initiatives forwarded by the Tanzanian government and local and foreign aid organizations and neoliberal reform in Tanzania are highlighted.  This paper follows a growing trend among ethnomusicologists who are attempting to rethink how the “African city” should be studied largely in response to widespread, bleak perspectives concerning developing countries’ (and their cities’) positions vis-à-vis the dominating force of neoliberal capitalism – perspectives wherein space often overtakes place.  As such, “Karibu Bagamoyo” is advanced as a strategic place-producing, spatially-illuminative creative work of a particular individual searching for successful ways to negotiate the many social and economic uncertainties and particularities marking his urban life in Bagamoyo, Tanzania.  “Karibu Bagamoyo,” thus, maintains a co-constitutive place-space dialectic.

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