Tourism and Imagining Musical Traditions at the East African Coast: Harmony and Disharmony

This article presents an analysis of the invention of tradition within musics created by and related to Swahili culture. We focus on the ways the local tourist industry deals with musical heritage. Through the analysis of history and praxis of the traditional music of Zanzibar, we will showcase how the musical heritage is dealt with in four cases: 1) the invented tradition of beni music, 2) the musical heritage of taarab (specifically the Music Culture Club of Zanzibar), and 3) the music of the Sidi Sufis, the recently reinvented traditional African-Indian mystic music of Gujarat. These traditions were embraced by the local population, yet all for different reasons. This, in contrast to 4), the heritage of Farrokh Bulsara, otherwise known as Freddie Mercury, a Zanzibar born Parsi from India, whose musical heritage is not embraced by the whole local community of Zanzibar and whose legacy recently caused a discussion between the locally-oriented tourist industry and the one oriented more towards the North Atlantic sphere. Our aim is not to merely illustrate the dialectics of tradition, but to link these very dialectics to the problematic position that the resulting cultural difference takes. How are these “traditions” framed? What role do they have? Whom are they enacted for? As such, this article is more than a mere illustration of invented traditions or imagined communities, as it provides compelling examples of the expediency of culture in the transnational cultural market, and the influence of the global demand for traditional experiences, without disregarding its boundedness to its places of origin.

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