African Studies

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Musical figures of enslavement and resistance in

Semzaba’s Kiswahili play Tendehogo

Imani Sanga

To cite this article: Imani Sanga (2020): Musical figures of enslavement and resistance in
Semzaba’s Kiswahili play Tendehogo , African Studies, DOI: 10.1080/00020184.2020.1825927

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/00020184.2020.1825927

Published online: 09 Oct 2020.

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AFRICAN STUDIES
https://doi.org/10.1080/00020184.2020.1825927

Musical figures of enslavement and resistance in

Semzaba’s Kiswahili play Tendehogo
Imani Sanga
University of Dar es Salaam, Tanzania

ABSTRACT ARTICLE HISTORY

This article examines the use of musical figures in a Kiswahili play, Received 13 October 2019
Tendehogo. Written by an eminent Tanzanian playwright named Accepted 23 June 2020
Edwin Semzaba, the play recounts how slave trade was
KEYWORDS
conducted by Arab traders in East Africa during the eighteenth musical figures; Edwin
and nineteenth centuries. It tells about the experiences of African Semzaba; Swahili literature;
slave captives being driven by an Arab slave trader away from music of Tanzania; East
their homeland in the interior of Tanganyika to the coast. This African slave trade
forced estrangement from their lives as free persons into slavery
is accomplished on both physical and mental planes. The article
examines how the play uses songs as literary devices, namely
musical figures, to represent and enact African and Arab
identities, as apparatuses of enslavement and as means of
resistance. The article argues that the use of these musical figures
in the play Tendehogo sonically mediates readers’ understanding
of and attitudes towards East African slave trade and slavery as
historical phenomena.

Exposition
Written by an eminent Tanzanian playwright, novelist, actor and director Edwin
Semzaba,1 a Kiswahili play, Tendehogo,2 creatively recounts how slave trade was con-
ducted by Arab traders in East Africa during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
The play is a story about a group of African slave captives being driven by an Arab
slave trader away from their homeland in the interior of Tanganyika to the coast. This
forced estrangement from their lives as free people into slavery is accomplished on
both physical and mental planes. On the physical plane, the Arab trader, equipped
with physical apparatuses of biopower – such as chains, rifles and a stick – keeps the
slave captives under his control, forcing them to carry heavy loads to the coast. On the
mental plane, he tries to brainwash them to accept the idea that they are mentally, cul-
turally and economically inferior beings in comparison to the Arabs. To perform this
psychological subjugation, he teaches them a song about the goodness of the Arabian
Peninsula (hereafter referred to as Arabia), he assigns them Arabic names, and he tells
them of the superiority of Arabic civilisation relative to their local cultures, including
their local foods and names. The play also tells about the struggle of the slave captives
to resist both physical and mental enslavement. The play uses a number of devices,

CONTACT Imani Sanga imanisanga@yahoo.com

© 2020 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group, on behalf of the University of Witwatersrand
2 I. SANGA

namely musical figures, to represent this struggle, including songs performed by the slave
captives about their homeland, their local names and local food. Two songs play a central
role in this play as tropes and apparatuses of enslavement and resistance. The first song is
used in an attempt to make the slave captives forget their homeland and to cultivate their
desire for Arabia. The second song is sung by the slave captives to express their remem-
brance of homeland and to resist the psychological enslavement propagated by the song
about Arabia.
This article sets out to examine how the two songs are deployed in this play as semiotic
devices to represent and construct African and Arab identities. It also examines how the
play uses the two songs as apparatuses of enslavement and domination, as well as
a means of resistance and liberation. The article argues that the use of these musical
figures in the play Tendehogo sonically mediates the audience understanding of and atti-
tudes towards East African slave trade and slavery as historical phenomena. Given the pro-
minent use of these musical figures in this play, an analysis of these songs and the
contexts in which they are used in the play, as well as the general historical phenomena
the songs represent and critique, will enrich our understanding and appreciation of
the play.
Drawing from Louise Meintjes (2003, 149), I use the concept of musical figures to refer
to recurring musical motives, songs, music genres or dances that are used as tropes to
represent and enact social identities and relations. Meintjes discusses, for example,
how guitar styles, riffs, particular playing and vocal techniques, specific timbral features
and drum patterns are manipulated and used in a South African studio as tropes of Zulu-
ness, South Africanness or Africanness. She points out that these musical elements are
usually modified and used differently when the musicians want to represent ‘whiteness’
(2003, 170). Similarly, the two songs in Tendehogo are deployed to simultaneously rep-
resent and enact race, place and class. The songs are used to represent and identify Arab-
ness and Africanness as racial categories. They are used to represent Arabia and Africa, or
at least a specific fictional village in Tanganyika, namely Undongi.3 The songs are also
used to represent slave traders (slave masters) and slave captives. The concept of
musical figures is, therefore, useful in examining the master-slave relationship, which
includes the process of enslavement and the struggles against slavery.4
In this article, I juxtapose Meintjes’ concept of musical figures with Gilles Deleuze and
Felix Guattari’s concept of refrain. Both concepts concern the role of musical phenomena
(such as songs, dances, music genres etc.) in representing and enacting social identities
(such as gender, nationality, ethnicity and class). A description by Deleuze and Guattari
of refrain is specifically important here because of its focus on the way songs are used
as tools for defending particular territories against intruding enemies. In A Thousand
Plateau: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, Deleuze and Guattari discuss how birds and
animals claim their territories through territorial marks such as bird territorial-defence
calls, rabbit territorial urine or excrement, and the brightly coloured sexual organs of
monkeys that are all normally displayed to mark their territories (Deleuze & Guattari
1987, 310–50). They point out that ‘the bird sings to mark its territory’ and to defend
the boundaries of its territory by keeping other birds of the same species away (1987,
312). For Deleuze and Guattari, territories are created through acts of singing or
producing refrains. To emphasise this territorialising function of refrains, Deleuze and
Guattari write:
 AFRICAN STUDIES 3

The territory is not primary in relation to the qualitative mark; it is the mark that makes the
territory. The functions in a territory are not primary; they presuppose a territory-producing
expressiveness. In this sense, the territory, and the functions performed within it, are products
of territorialization (1987, 315).

In the same way, the two songs in the play Tendehogo are deployed variously as refrains
that enact Arabness and Africanness (or specifically, Undongi-ness) as social assem-
blages. These refrains constitute the characters as belonging or not belonging to
these assemblages. Thus, when forced to become Arabs, the slave captives begin to
sing their own song to assert and defend their Undongi-ness. Deleuze and Guattari
also make a distinction between a ‘narrow sense’ and ‘general sense’ of refrain. In the
narrow sense, refrains include only those territorial marks that are sonorous in character
and are dominated with sound while the general sense includes both sonorous and
non-sonorous territorial marks (1987, 323). Therefore, although the primary focus in
this article is the refrains in the narrow sense (for example, the two songs), the article
also takes note of the non-sonorous refrains, such as names and food, because in the
play these refrains reinforce each other. Therefore, the discussion of musical figures
or refrains throughout this article highlights the interactions between these types of
refrains. But first, a brief historical overview of the East African slave trade is provided
as context.
People of East Africa have had a long history of contact and exchange with the outside
world as far back as the seventh century. Historical documents such as The Periplus of the
Earythrean Sea (The Periplus of the Erythraean Sea, 1980) and recent archaeological
research provide evidence and clues of the commercial contacts and exchanges
between the people of East Africa and traders from the Persian Gulf, the Mediterranean
area and China (Chami 2006, 170–184; Kimambo, Maddox & Nyanto 2017, 37–42; Zhao
& Qin 2018, 430–443). Ivory, rhinoceros horns and tortoise shells, were among the
exports from East Africa while imported goods included beads, coins, fine pottery, porce-
lain (or glassware) and cloth. In addition, scholars have also acknowledged the arrival of
some African cereals such as millet and sorghum in Asia as far as China as early as 3000 BC
(Chami 2006, 131–132).
However, since the seventh century, a particular kind of relationship began to
emerge as the Portuguese, and later Oman Arabs, at different periods began to exert
imperial domination over the East African region. As Abdul Sheriff writes ‘From the
seventh to the ninth century, however, there was a massive demand for slave labour
to reclaim the marshlands of southern Iraq’ (1987, 13). He also notes that because of
‘severe exploitation of and oppression of a large number of slaves concentrated near
Basra’ the slaves mounted resistances such as the famous ‘Zanji rebellion’ during the
ninth century (1987, 13). This imperial domination continued up until the eighteenth
century when slave trade became a major economic activity along with the trade in
ivory (Alpers 1970; Biginagwa & Mapunda 2018; Sheriff 1987). The East African slave
trade flourished and expanded momentously, especially during the eighteenth and
nineteenth centuries, because of the establishment of big sugar and clove plantations
in the East African islands of Zanzibar, Comoros and Mauritius. The consolidation of
Oman’s rule to Zanzibar, including the final move of Sayyid Said Ibn Sultan capital to
Zanzibar in 1840, also contributed to the flourishing of East African slave trade (Fair
2001 and Iliffe 1979). As Alpers writes:
4 I. SANGA

Herein lies the great importance of the French role in the East African slave trade. For the ear-
liest body of traders in the Western Indian Ocean who came to East Africa in search of slaves,
above all else, were French merchants from the Mascarene Islands, Ile de France (modern
Mauritius) and Bourbon (modern Reunion). Never seeking ivory, they directed all their
efforts to securing a regular and growing supply of slave labor for the colonial plantation
economy, based on coffee and sugar, which mushroomed on the twin islands during the
course of the eighteenth century (Alpers 1970, 82).

Up until the abolition of slave trade in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century,
Bagamoyo and Zanzibar functioned as the major slave markets. Another important
slave market, though relatively smaller, was in Kilwa (Biginagwa & Mapunda 2018;
Sheriff 1987).
In his article entitled ‘Slavery and Its Space in Kiswahili Literature’ (2016), Tanzanian lit-
erary critic Aldin Mutembei describes how Semzaba’s play Tendehogo depicts slavery and
forms of resistance against slavery. He also discusses how the type of slavery represented
in the play is used to challenge other forms of slavery that still torment Africans, and Tan-
zanians in particular, today. In this regard Mutembei critically discusses the relevance of
this play in the contemporary African context, which is characterised by similar slave men-
talities challenged in Tendehogo. For Mutembei, Tendehogo and other antislavery plays
serve two purposes:

1) They serve as tools for remembering the historical slavery, and

2) They participate in constructing the contemporary attitude and actions towards both
the historical slave trade and the current forms of slavery and slave mentalities
(Mutembei 2016).

In this regard, the play Tendehogo joins the voices of many other artistic productions in
the fight against slave/colonial mentality in today’s Tanzania (see Sanga 2008; Sanga
2017; and Sanga 2019). The present article advances this argument by showing how
the play Tendehogo performs these functions through the use of musical figures as
a central literary device and technique.

Musical figuring of enslavement: becoming slave

The play is set in the era of East African slave trade around the eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries. Since the context in which the musical figures are used within a play is essential
for the functioning of the figures and for our understanding of their power, a description
of the context in which the first song is used is in order. Harun, an Arab slave trader, leads
his group of five slave captives from the hinterland to the coast. The chained slave cap-
tives are carrying heavy loads on their shoulders and heads. Most of the time, Harun com-
mands obedience from these captives through force, specifically the use of chains, a stick
and two rifles. This depiction reflects how East African slave trade is narrated in most his-
torical accounts (see for example, Alpers 1970, 80–82, Kimambo, Maddox & Nyanto 2017,
87–88 and Sheriff 1987). However, the play Tendehogo brings to our imagination another
form of power. At one point, Harun leaves the group and visits other Arab slave traders
who are also leading their own slave caravans. When he returns to his group of slave cap-
tives he suspects that they are talking to each other and so he devises a way to stop them
 AFRICAN STUDIES 5

from conversing. He does so because he suspects that in their conversation they may be
expressing their longing for their homeland and planning to escape. Therefore, he
teaches them a song about Arabia and compels them to sing it regularly before going
to sleep and when he is absent (1980, 8). Here are the lyrics of the song:

Kiswahili original version Author’s English translation5

Majua tende na halua Do you know dates and sweetmeat (or halwa)
Meshaonja tende na halua Have you ever tasted dates and sweetmeat?
Kama bado mafanya hima, If you have not, then hurry up
Bara Arabu kufika, To go to Arabia
Menda faidi tende na halua You are going to enjoy dates and sweetmeat
Nchi ta tende, Nchi ya Ustaarabu. The land of dates; the land of Civilisation.
(Semzaba 1980, 8)

On the surface, Harun introduces the song in order to occupy the slave captives, so that
they do not have time to talk to each other when he is away. Singing the song repeatedly
ensures that they also do not have time to think about their homeland. The song is used
to distract not only their attention from their servitude but also their efforts and plans to
escape from this servitude.
The song also functions at a deeper psychological level. Harun introduces this song as
a supplément in order to replace the use of force, carried out with weapons such as chains,
rifles, and a stick, as apparatuses of domination. He begins to use it when he realises that
the use of force is insufficient or impossible. Pierre Bourdieu’s reasoning about the
working of this gentle mode of domination is instructive. According to him, ‘The harder
it is to exercise direct domination, and the more it is disapproved of, the more likely it
is that gentle, disguised forms of domination will be seen as the only possible way of exer-
cising domination and exploitation’ (Bourdieu 1984, 128). With this idea in mind, we may
think of Harun’s use of a song as a practice of what Joseph Nye calls ‘soft power’ (Nye
1990; 2005). This refers to the ability to make other people act in accordance with
one’s preferences without a recourse to military force, sanctions or any other means of
coercion but through co-optation and attraction. Nation-states, in Nye’s view, can manip-
ulate and influence the attitudes and actions of other nation-states, or individuals from
other countries, through the attractiveness of their own culture, values, political ideals
and policies. Harun’s use of the song is comparable with Nye’s idea of soft power only
with regard to the fact that it replaces the use of force or ‘hard power’, to use Nye’s anto-
nymic concept. The workings of power in Harun’s song differs from Nye’s idea of ‘soft
power’ because, given their position as slaves, there is no possibility for them to actually
benefit from the attractions the song proclaims. In other words, the song’s promises are
false, and they contradict the logic of slavery. In short, the song is only a luring apparatus,
a deceptive desiring machine to make the slave captives desire to go to Arabia. It aims at
making these African slave captives internalise their servitude and their position as
inferior beings relative to the Arab slave master. The song acts as an apparatus to
make them feel and consider their being-slaves as part of who they are.
In her Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century
America, Saidiya Hartman (1997) argues that white slave owners in the Americas also
allowed their Black slaves to sing and dance. According to her, by so doing the slave
owners exercised their domination over the slaves from whom total submission was
6 I. SANGA

expected and required by law. These ‘little enjoyments’, Hartman notes, were also used in
order to ‘deny, displace, and minimize the violence of slavery’ as well as to conceal this
violence and make it invisible or opaque (1997, 25). In the case of Semzaba’s Tendehogo,
Harun, the Arab slave owner, uses the song as a means to cultivate slave subjection to
his authority.
Harun uses this song not by performing as an ‘artist, the ruler’ who, as Ugandan cultural
critic and writer Okot p’Bitek (1986, 32–33) points out, rules by proclaiming his law using
sweet melodies, which are accompanied by beautiful sounds of musical instruments.
Instead, Harun teaches the slave captives to sing the song. It is through the reiterative
singing of the song (and the law it carries), that he believes these slave captives will inter-
nalise the law. Since he himself finds the tune to be beautiful, he believes that by loving
the song the slave captives will also unconsciously love what the song proclaims. To the
extent that the song praises Arabia as a very good place, he believes it will make them
aspire to go to Arabia and want to eat Arabic food. As mentioned earlier, Harun also
assigns each of these slave captives an Arabic name and he forces them to identify
with the new names. In short, Harun believes that the regular singing of the song will
capture the hearts and imaginations of these slave captives so that they begin to
desire to go to Arabia and to admire Arabic culture, which is represented in this song
as the true great civilisation.
The song’s message is built on an ideologically charged binary opposition between the
Arabs and Africans and Arabia and Africa. Arabia is represented as a land of civilisation. On
many occasions in the play, Harun, the Arab trader, also reviles the African slave captives
as ‘washenzi’ (uncivilised), ‘wanaharamu’ (bastards) and ‘nguruwe’ (pigs). The superiority of
Arabic civilisation and the Arabs is proclaimed and constructed by asserting Africans as
uncivilised and by dehumanising and animalising them. As Achille Mbembe (1992, 1–3)
points out, the category of the animal, the strange, and the monstrous is an othering dis-
course. It is a discourse on the basis of which even slave trade is justified as has been the
case with colonial conquest, colonisation and other forms of imperial domination. With
this othering discourse, slave trade is considered to be a way of bringing the animal,
the monstrous and the strange Africans into the service of the human, the Arab.
Hence, the song reveals the claim that the civilised Arab comes to civilise the primitive
Africans is used only as an excuse and cover up of the true motive of enslavement.
Of the five slave captives, only Chonge is psychologically enslaved. Thus, his behaviour,
actions and utterances best epitomise the process of becoming slave at both the physical
and mental planes. Chonge sings the song of Arabia with great enthusiasm to the point of
impressing Harun, who is impressed not only because Chonge sings the song fairly well
but also because he interprets Chonge’s enthusiastic singing as a mental act of becoming
slave. Harun is impressed by what seems to him to be Chonge’s free-will submission and
so he makes him a supervisor of the other slave captives. He equips Chonge with a rifle to
command obedience from the other slave captives. Chonge’s mental enslavement is
expressed not only by his enthusiastic singing of the song about Arabia but also by his
love of the Arabic name, Mabruki, a name given to him by Harun. He even tries to
force his fellow slave captives to call him Mabruki because he thinks that his previous
name, Chonge, as his master Harun told him, is ‘la kishenzi’ (uncivilised) and ‘la kipagani’
(heathen). He also mocks and discourages the secret plan organised by the other captives
to escape and free themselves from Harun’s enslavement. According to Aldin Mutembei,
 AFRICAN STUDIES 7

by accepting an Arabic name, Chonge does not only betray the anti-slavery plan to
escape, but he also succumbs ‘into a mental slavery’ (2016, 24). That Chonge’s enslave-
ment, in addition to being physical, is also a mental slavery can be witnessed by his
altered vision. Unlike his fellow slave captives, Chonge views his homeland with con-
tempt. He sees it as a land full of ‘giza nene’ (deep darkness) while his fellows see it as
a land of peace and joy (Semzaba 1980, 7). Unlike his fellow slave captives, Chonge
views Harun’s Arabia as a place of hope and prosperity, a place full of ‘mwanga mwan-
gavu’ (bright light) while his fellows see it as a place of enslavement and despair
(Semzaba 1980, 13; see also Mutembei 2016, 15).
This psychological enslavement can be understood in terms of the concept of becom-
ing slave. According to Deleuze and Guattari, ‘becoming’ involves two simultaneous logi-
cally related processes. On the one hand, becoming involves a process of being
‘deterritorialized’, that is, being cut-off from one’s position of self-determination and
ceasing ‘to be definable aggregate in relation to the majority’. On the other hand, and
at the same time, it also involves a process of ‘reterritorialization’, that is, a process of
entering (by force or by lure) into a dominated group, a minority group that has lost
its sense of self-determination (1987, 291). It should be remembered that for Deleuze
and Guattari the difference between majority and minority is not quantitative. The differ-
ence has to do with power relations and hence the majority refers to a polity that dom-
inates while the minority refers to a dominated group. South Africa is a good example of
this concept. During apartheid, the ruling white people (though very few in comparison
with Black people) were the majority. The segregated and dominated Black people, on the
other hand, were the minority. Deleuze and Guattari use the concepts of majority and
minority to refer to states of being as opposed to the concepts of majoritarian and min-
oritarian, which refer to processes of becoming. They write:
It is important not to confuse ‘minoritarian,’ as becoming or process, with a ‘minority’, as an
aggregate or a state. Jews, Gypsies, etc., may constitute minorities under certain condition,
but that in itself does not make them becomings. One reterritorializes, or allows oneself to
be reterritorialized, on a minority as a state; but in becoming, one is deterritorialized. Even
blacks, as the Black Panthers said, must become-black. Even women must become-woman.
Even Jews must become-Jewish (1987, 291).

In the play Tendehogo, this process of becoming-slave is most evident in Chonge’s life.
The process itself is accomplished mainly through cultural tropes or refrains, which
include a song about Arabia as well as the Arabic names and food. We have already
noted that Chonge sings the song of Arabia even when Harun is not with them. Later
in the play, he uses the rifle handed to him by Harun to kill one of the slave captives
named Ngati because Ngati questions the meaning of the song and refuses to sing it
when Chonge orders all the other slave captives to sing it.
In addition, Chonge expresses his longing to become Arab by sharing his wish to marry
Arab women. He thinks that because he is well regarded by Harun, at the end of the
journey Harun and other Arabs will give him the privilege to marry Arab women
(Semzaba 1980, 12–13). For him, Arab-ness is a yardstick of humanity. In other words,
Chonge suffers from his realisation that in spite of all his efforts to become Arab he is
still different from this yardstick, he is not yet an Arab. He judges his humanity using
Harun’s eyes who sees all the slave captives, including Chonge, as animals. Troubled
8 I. SANGA

with what Paul Gilroy calls ‘double consciousness’ or ‘frog perspective’ (1993, 161),
Chonge looks at himself from the position of an Arab slave master and despises his Afri-
canness. Following Frantz Fanon, we understand his wish to marry Arab women (whom
he takes to be real human beings) as an effort to escape from being African (or better from
being animal, in Harun’s sense). Marrying Arab women would confirm to him that he has
become an Arab, a human being because he would be acknowledged as such and he
would be lovable by Arab women. In Black Skin, White Masks, Fanon writes about
a desire of a Black man to marry a white woman in order to become a white person
since whites (colonisers) have made him believe that only whites are fully, or even
superior, human beings. Referring to and extending Hegel’s concept of recognition,
Fanon writes:
I wish to be acknowledged not as black but as white. Now – and this is a form of recognition
that Hegel had not envisaged – who but a white woman can do this for me? By loving me she
proves that I am worthy of white love. I am loved like a white man. I am a white man. Her love
takes me onto the noble road that leads to total realization […] When my restless hands cares
those white breasts, they grasp white civilization and dignity and make them mine’ (1986, 63).

Chonge’s slavery transcends physical slavery. It transcends the state of being chained,
forced to carry heavy loads for the Arab trader and being owned by another human being
or being sold at the market like animal commodities. His double consciousness manifests
itself especially in his dependence on the Other’s recognition for his own sense of being
human. His double consciousness is founded on his dependency on an Arab person as
a grantor of his sense of humanity. This dependency makes him vulnerable to the
Arabs’ physical and psychological enslavement. As Judith Butler puts it, in supposing
that one’s existence or recognition is only granted by the Other, the subject subjects
oneself to the supposed desires of the Other. As she writes in The Psychic Life of Power:
How is it that the subject is the kind of being who can be exploited, who is, by virtue of its
own formation, vulnerable to subjugation? Bound to seek recognition of its own existence in
categories, terms, and names that are not of its own making, the subject seeks the sign of its
own existence outside itself, in discourse that is at once dominant and indifferent […] Sub-
jection exploits the desire for existence, where existence is always conferred from elsewhere;
it marks a primary vulnerability to the Other in order to be (Butler 1997, 20–21).

It is this subjection to the Other, a desire to exist when the grantor of this existence is the
Other, that I call psychological or mental slavery. Those who suffer from it often misrecog-
nise their subjection and consider themselves to be acting out of their own free will. In the
same way, the play shows Chonge to be blind to his psychological enslavement and his
perpetuation of slavery. He misconstrues his desire to go to Arabia, his desire to marry
Arab women and his act of forcing other slave captives to sing the song about Arabia
as ways of escaping from being part of the minority to being among the majority. For
Chonge, therefore, the song about Arabia represents all the hopes and promises he
has about his future. To the extent that the play reveals that these are false promises,
we understand this song to be a representation of Chonge’s mental enslavement.
Furthermore, Chonge manifests a complex psychical condition, a condition that dis-
plays the interaction between physical and mental (psychological) enslavements. In
addition to being physically forced into slavery, he is also lured into psychological ensla-
vement and thus he manifests symptoms of a disease that Fanon (1986, 14) calls the
 AFRICAN STUDIES 9

‘psychoexistential complex’. The symptoms of this condition include Chonge’s desire to

be an Arab (see also Ahluwalia 2003, 342–345). In Chonge we see a failed movement
from the minority to the majority. Chonge was convinced that by singing a song about
Arabia and by adopting an Arabic name, he would be elevated to an Arab, but he finds
himself not yet an Arab, he still regards Harun as his master and he addresses him as
such. Harun too, still regards Chonge as his slave. For this reason, Chonge exists in
a psychological middle ground, an in-between or liminal space, between the two assem-
blages. He finds himself in a transitory space that calls for further ritualistic acts in order to
reach his desired identity. For Chonge, these further acts include marrying Arab women.

Musical figuring of resistance: unshackling the shackles of slavery

In contrast to Chonge’s acts of becoming slave, the other four slave captives (namely Pazi,
Tendegu, Ngati and Maugwaju) are only physically enslaved, not mentally. From the very
beginning of the play they are aware of the chains of slavery and what they take to be the
cause of their servitude, for example, disunity and social class differences among them-
selves. As Mutembei observes, back home ‘Tendegu came from a superior class’ (2016,
13). Their realisation that they must transcend their previous social differentiation
becomes an important step in their efforts to free themselves from the servitude they
all suffer. As one character named Pazi tells his friend Tendegu:
You see! None of us is worthy but Harun. And he is worthy because of our weakness
(unworthiness). And we are weak/unworthy because of our dividedness between those
from Undongipyenpekifaduro and those from Undongiwa shushwimahirwa. Now let us put
aside our difference and see how we are going to slash down his worthiness. We will
make him weak/unworthy (Semzaba 1980, 3).6

They also realise that Harun, the Arab slave master, wants to keep them apart by prohibit-
ing them from talking to each other for fear that they might unite and jointly revolt
against him: ‘Pia Harun hataki siye kuongea’ (And Harun does not want us to talk to
one another) (Semzaba 1980, 3). These slave captives ask questions that show awareness
of the powers that hold them captives. Referring to Jacques Lacan’s dictum about an hys-
terical question, Slavoj Žižek writes:
The subject does not know why he is occupying this place in the symbolic network. His own
answer to this ‘Che Vuoi’ of the Other can only be the hysterical question: Why am I what I’m
supposed to be, why have I this mandate? […] Lacan formulates the hysterical question as
a certain ‘Why am I you’re telling me that I am?’ – that is, which is the surplus-object in
me that causes the Other to interpellate me to ‘hail’ me as [… king, master, wife …]? The hys-
terical question opens the gap of what is ‘in the subject more than the subject’, of the object
in subject which resists interpellation – subordination of the subject, its inclusion in the sym-
bolic network (Žižek 1989, 126).

The discussion among these slave captives manifests a similar hysterical character. We
can reframe their questions as what does Harun want from us, and why do we occupy this
place in our relationship with this Arab slave trader? These are the questions that lead to
the failure of the full subjection of these captives. These are questions through which the
abortion of the interpellation of the subject to the injunction of the Other takes place.
According to Žižek, a psychoanalytic treatment usually begins with the process of
10 I. SANGA

making the subject come to question his/her own interpellated being. The play Tende-
hogo opens with this question, which leads to what Žižek calls ‘failed interpellation’
(1989, 126), or the refusal on the part of the slave subjects to accept or submit themselves
to the injunction of Harun, the slave master.
The failure of this interpellation is most clearly expressed through a song about
Undongi, the homeland of the slave captives. Let me recount the contexts of the
singing of this song in the play. At a time when Chonge tries to sing the song about
Arabia to express his desire to go to Arabia, the other slave captives decide to sing
a song about Undongi. The young girl named Maugwaju (the only woman in the
group of five slaves) leads these other slave captives to sing the counter song:

Kiswahili original version Author’s English translation

Undongi nakukumbuka Undongi how I remember you.
Ingawa nimetengwa nawe Although I have been separated from you,
Nikufikiripo furaha hainiishi moyoni. When I think of you, my heart is filled with happiness.
Sijui kama tutaonana tena I don’t know if we will meet again.
Ee Undongi nchi yangu Ee Undongi my land,
Undongi ya Amani na furaha Undongi, land of peace and joy,
Mihogo yako mitamu How sweet your cassava are!
Undongi nchi yangu ya asili Undongi, my land of origin
Isiyo na mfanowe. There is no one like you.
(Semzaba 1980, 8)

The song is staged by the slave captives as a counter act against Chonge’s enthusiastic
singing of the song about Arabia. It is also a counter act against Chonge’s order that the
other slaves join him in singing it. As pointed out above, in giving this order, Chonge does
not only obey the previous order given by Harun, he also obeys his own conviction and
wish to go to Arabia. The slave captives sing their song about Undongi as a way of remem-
bering their homeland. They also sing it as a way of expressing their longing to free them-
selves from the chains of slavery and return home as free human beings. Throughout this
play, names of food are used as tropes of social identities. The name mihogo (cassava),
which stands in for Africans or people of Undongi and their cultural practices, is con-
trasted with that of tende (dates) and halua (sweetmeat), which represent Arabs and
their cultural practices. The song also evokes the distinction between sweet and bitter
cassava. During the journey, the slave captives are only given the bitter cassava, while
at home they used to eat sweet cassava. This use of the bitter cassava represents the bit-
terness of slavery, while the sweet cassava represents all the sweet memories of living as
free people in their homeland. Singing the song of Undongi is therefore a way of remem-
bering their homeland and refusing to be dismembered from it. To use Deleuze and
Guattari’s concepts, the song together with the other tropes (their local names and
sweet cassava) are used in the play as refrains of resistance against deterritorialisation
(understood as detachment from their homeland as free people) and reterritorialisation
(understood as being transplanted or replanted in a foreign land as slaves).
When Harun (the Arab slave master) hears them sing this Undongi song he also under-
stands the act as a counter act or a revolt against the song about Arabia and against ensla-
vement more generally. Thus, he angrily silences them saying, ‘Be quite! What are you
singing about? […] I tell you that Arabia is beautiful, you disagree. You say Undongi is
beautiful and not Arabia. You bastards’ (Semzaba 1980, 9).7 In addition to ordering
 AFRICAN STUDIES 11

them to keep quiet, Harun also beats them up. He resumes his use of hard power when he
realises the failure of his use of ‘soft power’.
There is a gender dimension concerning the revolt by the slaves. Highlighting this
shows how enslavement is interconnected with other forms of human subjection, such
as class and gender. A number of feminist scholars recognise the need to pay attention
to the intersectionality of subjection (see, for example, Belkhir & Barnett 2001; Hooks
1984; and Spelman 1988). In the same vein, Rose Braidotti highlights not only the
‘multi-layered’ nature of the subject (for example, one may be simultaneously
a woman, Black, and a slave) but also that one’s subjectivity is a ‘non-unitary’ one, or in
other words, subjectivity is always ‘in a process of becoming’ (2002, 2). Maugwaju exhibits
this interconnectedness between gender, race and slavery through her experiences of
enslavement as a woman. Maugwaju’s participation in the struggle against enslavement
is at the same time a struggle against the sexism she experiences during the journey.
In her reading of this play, Laura Edmondson does not acknowledge the agency of this
woman character in staging resistance. Edmondson mentions Semzaba’s play Tendehogo
as one example of Tanzanian plays with a limited range of women representation. To
support this claim, she observes that during the 1978 production, the play included
only one woman among a cast of six and argues that her role was confined to watching
the men who revolted against and murdered their Arab captor (Edmondson 2007, 25). I
consider Edmondson’s reading to be true only with regard to the ratio of men versus
women being five to one. However, I find Edmondson’s reading inadequate, as it does
not acknowledge the central role and agency of woman character in the play. The play
demonstrates, among other things, that the woman character is not a passive observer
of men’s struggles; she is actively engaged in the struggle from the very beginning up
to the end of the play.
A few incidents in this struggle are recounted here to highlight the active role she
plays. First, it should be noted that Chonge (the slave captive who now helps Harun
to keep the other captives under Hanun’s domination) and Harun sexually objectify
Maugwaju. In the eyes of Chonge, for example, Maugwaju only exists as a potential
sexual partner. For him, whether in bondage or in freedom, the meaningfulness of
Maugwaju’s existence resides in her being a lover either of Bushuti (a lover who she
was forced to leave in Undongi) or of Chonge who believes that his proximity (during
the journey and at the expected destination) will make him win her love. In addition,
because of his closeness to Harun, Chonge considers himself to be the best lover for
her, when compared to the other three men, and tries to convince Maugwaju to see
him as such. For this reason, when Harun goes to visit other Arab traders, Chonge
(who because of his role as a supervisor holds Harun’s rifle) tries to entice Maugwaju
by giving her better food, by taking her load and giving it to another slave captive
(Pazi), and by unchaining her. On one occasion, Harun looks at Maugwaju and utters
a remark that shows that Maugwaju is simultaneously subjected to multiple forms of
oppression, namely being forced into slavery and being a sexual object of his gaze. In
his remark Maugwaju is reduced to a kigoli (a beautiful little girl) with small breasts
(Semzaba 1980, 4).
With this background in mind, it is now possible to see Maugwaju’s acts as heroic
against the multiple forms of oppression to which she is subjected. The play represents
12 I. SANGA

her as a true hero who participates as a central character in the struggle for freedom,
together with the other uncompromising slave captives. From the beginning of the
play, she does not stop remembering her homeland, parents, siblings and her village
lover (Bushuti). And she often tells the others, especially Chonge, about her longing to
return home. In their conversation, she criticises Chonge’s Arab-centric mentality. She is
the one who begins to sing the patriotic song about their homeland Undongi when
Chonge tries to force them to sing the song about Arabia. In fact, she is the one who
teaches the other slave captives to sing this patriotic song, an act that stands in opposi-
tion to Harun’s teaching the song about Arabia.
Maugwaju also performs a physical heroic act of killing Chonge, the man acting as an
agent of Harun, the slave master. She is the one who, when she gets a chance to hold
a rifle (the one Harun gave to Chonge), seizes the chance and uses it effectively to
shoot Chonge to death. We should remember that Chonge had already unchained her
when he was trying to win her love. It may be the case that he also taught her how to
use it, or perhaps she just observed how he operated it and secretly learnt it all by
herself. It is also true that at some point in the journey, there were discussions
between Pazi and Ngati concerning the role of Chonge as a traitor and perpetuator of
their servitude. The two also discussed the need to kill him first in order to weaken
Harun’s power and to win back their freedom. For example, Pazi says, ‘Chonge is the
problem. Let’s kill him. He is the one who stands between us and our freedom. If we
destroy him we will have destroyed Harun as well and we will be free’ (Semzaba 1980,
18).8 However, because all the other men were chained, they could not do what they
wished to do. Thus, Edmondson may be right when she points out that Maugwaju lis-
tened to this conversion. But I posit that Maugwaju listened to it as an active participant
in the struggle, a participant who, when she found the opportunity to act, shot Chonge
and unchained the other captives (for example, Pazi and Tendegu). Note that by this time
Chonge had already shot dead Ngati.
Maugwaju’s act of killing Chonge made possible the eventual killing of Harun. Here
is the context. No sooner had she shot and killed Chonge than Harun came back from
a visit to other Arab slave traders. When the unchained slave captives heard his foot-
steps, they hid themselves. Harun was shocked to find Mabruki (Chonge) lying dead on
the ground. Harun quickly realised that Chonge had been killed by the other slave cap-
tives. And because he could not see them, he assumed that they had already escaped
and furiously avowed to recapture and chain them again, ‘They have killed Mabruki?
I am going to hunt them until I find them. Then I will chain them on their necks.
A slave cannot escape from me’ (Semzaba 1980, 24).9 Unexpectedly, he found
himself surrounded by the slaves, and Pazi, who was now holding the rifle, fired at
him without Harun actually seeing him. And it is this act that set all the remaining cap-
tives free at last.
Maugwaju’s heroic acts demonstrate how a minority person, that is, a subject from
a weak position, can fight and win over the majority. As a slave captive, Maugwaju
could only depend on what Michel de Certeau calls tactics. Unlike the powerful individ-
uals and institutions who possess adequate means to win battles, the weak must
depend on manoeuvres, tricks and timing, and they must watch and seize any opportu-
nity that comes their way. De Certeau writes:
 AFRICAN STUDIES 13

I call a ‘tactic’[…] a calculus which cannot count on a ‘proper’ (a spatial or institutional local-
ization), nor thus a border-line distinguishing the other as a visible totality. The place of
a tactic belongs to the other. A tactic insinuates itself into the other’s place, fragmentarily,
without taking it over in its entirety, without being able to keep it at a distance. It has at
its disposal no base where it can capitalize on its advantages, prepare its expansions, and
secure independence with respect to circumstance. […] because it does not have a place,
a tactic depends on time – it is always on the watch for opportunities that must be seized
‘on the wing’ […] The weak must continually turn to their own ends forces alien to them
(de Certeau 1984, xix).

I interpret Maugwaju’s act as a tactic in the sense that when Chonge expresses his love
or desire for her, and when he falls in love with her, she takes advantage of that chance
and requests him to unchain her, which he does (Semzaba 1980, 23). When, again, at one
time he asks her to carry the rifle for him, she also seizes that opportunity. She sees
Chonge busy beating up other slave captives who resist the Arabic names and who
begin to sing the song about Undongi. Maugwaju joins them in singing the song, an
act that takes Chonge by surprise and then she shoots Chonge. In this context, the patrio-
tic song that Maugwaju teaches other slave captives reverberates with all the heroic acts
and tactics that she performs.
In short, I argue contra Edmondson that the acts of the woman in this play subvert
domination by men. Her heroic acts do not only stage a resistance to slavery and the
slave trade as enacted by the Arab trader but also they stage a resistance against phallo-
centric domination as enacted by two men, namely, Chonge and Harun. In other words,
Maugwaju stages a double-headed resistance. Therefore, I interpret the song about
Undongi, as she uses it, to be a ‘contrapuntal refrain’, a refrain in which more than one
liberation struggle takes place and is interwoven. Each thread in this polyphonic refrain
targets and subverts a specific form of ‘becoming’ in the various assemblages to which
she belongs, namely gender, class, ethnicity and race. The assemblages themselves are
rhizomatic in character in the sense that they are connected to one another in
complex fashions. Maugwaju, for instance, belongs to the people of Undongi (ethnic
assemblage) and she is a Black African (racial assemblage) and these assemblages
come into conflict with Harun’s racial assemblage, the Arabs. So too, Maugwaju who as
a young girl (gendered assemblage) comes into conflicting relationships with men, rep-
resented by Harun and Chonge. Unlike Harun, Chonge belongs to the same ethnic and
racial assemblages as Maugwaju. Maugwaju uses the song about Undongi as a ‘contra-
puntal refrain’ to simultaneously perform multiple resistances:

1) she uses it to resist Arab-centrism and the related process of ‘becoming slave’; and
2) she uses it to also resist phallocentrism and the related process of ‘becoming woman’.

Both centrisms in this play are perpetuated by the same characters, namely Chonge
and Harun.

Recapitulation
The play offers a critique of various levels of enslavement as it negotiates between history
and fiction. This article has highlighted how songs are used as musical figures to represent
14 I. SANGA

human assemblages involved in the East African slave trade and slavery more generally.
The role of these musical figures is discussed not only in the processes of psychological
enslavement but also in the struggles to unshackle the shackles of slavery. In all these pro-
cesses, the musical figures shape the aesthetic quality of the play. They also sonically
mediate the audience experience and understanding of the play as well as their under-
standing of and attitudes towards slavery as an historical phenomenon. The play also
sonically mediates awareness of the present-day after effects of slavery at both mental
and physical levels.

Notes
1. Edwin Semzaba (January 12, 1951 - January 17, 2016), was born in Tanga region in the
Eastern coast of Tanzania and received higher education at the University of Dar es
Salaam where he obtained his BA and MA degrees and worked for four decades since
1976. His creative works –all in Kiswahili - include novels such as Marimba ya Majaliwa
and Funke Bugebuge as well as numerous plays such as Ngoswe: Penzi Kitovu cha Uzembe,
Joseph and Josephina, Kinyamkera, and Mkokoteni. With these and other works Semzaba
received a number of awards. For many years Semzaba worked at the University of Dar
es Salaam as a lecturer and administrator.
2. The name Tendehogo is a product of joining Kiswahili words for two food stuff: tende (dates)
and mihogo (cassava). The foods are deployed in the play as representatives, tropes or figures
standing in for particular places, people, and their social status: tende represents the Arabian
Peninsula (place), Arabs (people), and slave master (social status); and hogo (a short form
for mihogo) represents Undongi (place), Africans or people of Undongi (people) and
slave captives.
3. The play uses a fictional village name (Undongi) and its people (wandongi). However, it
seems that the name has been creatively coined through a syllable permutation of an exi-
siting name of the place (Ungindo) and its people (wangindo) who dwell in the southern
regions of Tanzania (namely Lindi and Mtwara). Wangindo are well known in the history
of Tanzania (Tanganyika) because of their involvement in Majimaji up-rising against
German colonialism in 1905–1907. Note that, there are a few places in the play where is
it misspelt as Udongi.
4. Semzaba also uses musical figures prominently in his novel Marimba ya Majaliwa (Majaliwa’s
Marimba) where the musical instrument, marimba is used to represent heroes’ individual
desires, their competition and national identity (Semzaba 2008; see Sanga 2015).
5. This play is written in Kiswahili language, a language, which is currently a national language
of Tanzania and spoken widely in other East African countries: Kenya, Eastern part of Congo,
Rwanda and Burundi. All quotations from the play have been translated by the author of
this article.
6. The Kiswahili texts quoted and translated here are: ‘Unaona basi. Bora sio wewe au mimi bali
Harun. Naye amekuwa bora kwa sababu sisi ni hafifu. Nasisi ni hafifu kwa sababu ya Undongi-
pyenpekifaduro na Undongiwa shushwimahirwa. Hebu undongi tuuache uone tutakavyoufyeka
ubora wake Harun. Tutamfanya hafifu’.
7. The Kiswahili texts quoted and translated here are: ‘Nyamaza! Maimba nini nyie? … Mimi
nasema Bara Arabu nchi nzuri nyie masema Habana. Masema Undongi nchi nzuri Habana
Bara Arabu. Washenzi nyie’. The author creatively uses a broken Kiswahili in all texts
spoken by Harun to evoke the foreignness of this Arab slave trader.
8. The Kiswahili texts quoted and translated here are: ‘Tatizo ni huyu Chonge. Tumuue yeye. Yeye
yuko kati yetu na uhuru. Tukimwangamiza yeye tutakuwa tumemwangamiza Harun, vilevile
tutakuwa huru’.
9. The Kiswahili texts quoted and translated here are: ‘Wamemwua Mabruki? Mimi tatafuta wao
mpaka mapata na kufunga kamba shingoni. Tumwa hawezi kimbia mbele yangu’.
 AFRICAN STUDIES 15

Note on contributor
Imani Sanga is a professor of music in the department of creative arts at the University of Dar es
Salaam, Tanzania. He received a PhD in music from the University of KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa.
He has published on popular music, church music, aesthetics, postcolonial theory, African musicol-
ogy, music and gender, and music and Swahili literature. He is also a composer and a choral con-
ductor. Currently, he is working on a book project concerning the use of musical figures in
Tanzanian Swahili literature. He has been a fellow at the National Humanities Center in the
United States from 2019 to 2020.

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