Radio Tanzania Archives

Radio Tanzania Archives has more than 15,000 reel-to-reel tapes that are stacked in floor-to-ceiling shelves. Each band, musician and recording date is painstakingly notated. The tapes reside inside three musty rooms of the Tanzania Broadcasting Corp., which occupies the old brick-and-concrete BBC building in Dar es Salaam.

Radio Tanzania was the country's only station from its birth in 1951 until the mid-1990s, when competing stations came on the air and state-controlled radio became irrelevant. The station's archives include poetry, drama, speeches and loads of the music now known as zilipendwa. The word translates literally to "the ones that were loved"; a looser translation would be "golden oldies".

The country's music forms are as varied and distinct as wildlife on the Serengeti plains. Because the arts were state-supported, institutions such as the police, prisons and electric company all sponsored their own choral groups. From the Spice Islands on the Swahili coast there came Arab-influenced taarab music. From the tribal interior came the insistent drums and flutes of ngoma music.

Above all, the archive of Radio Tanzania is a treasury of zilipendwa music. There is the Tabora Jazz Band, the Urafiki Jazz Band, the Kilimanjaro, the Conga, the Merry Blackbird Jazz Bands and dozens more. None of them actually played jazz. The term was appropriated to give bands currency and cachet. One of the greatest singers and bandleaders of them all was Kikumbi Mpango, better known as King Kiki.