In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

T H R E E National Erotica The Politics of Ngoma My first exposure to ngoma on the Tanzanian popular stage was Mandela’s version of sindimba, the most famous—and notorious—dance throughout the country. As a newly arrived researcher on constructions of gender and national identity in popular theatre, I tried to suppress my unease as I watched the women dance in a circle, swaying their hips in a sexually inviting way. Meanwhile, the men of the troupe approached them from behind and ‘‘tried out’’ each in turn. A male dancer with an especially youthful appearance approached one of the older female dancers and ground his hips into hers, eliciting shouts of laughter from the audience: ‘‘She can be your mother! Mind your manners!’’ (Anaweza kuwa mama yako! Shika adabu yako!).1 The women steadfastly danced in their circle, smiling all the while. I dutifully watched as Western stereotypes of the ‘‘bestial sexual license of the African’’ (Bhabha 1994, 66) and the passive African woman played out before my discomfited gaze. In the course of my fieldwork, I saw sindimba frequently performed by all three of the popular troupes in my study, in addition to several other ngoma that accentuated the women’s erotic movements of the hips and pelvis. In contrast, the male dancers vigorously stamped their feet, turned cartwheels, and improvised comic routines around their pursuit of the ever-smiling, hip-swaying women. I learned that this hip-swaying movement, called kukata kiuno (to cut the waist), had become virtually synonymous with the concept of ngoma in the cultural imagination. The ubiquity of this image could be explained as an inevitable result of urban commodification in which African traditional dances are appropriated in order to ‘‘entertain the urban elite and reassure the developing nation that it has not ignored its national culture’’ (Desai 1990, 68). From this perspective, one might argue that the process of appropriation and commodification domesticated a thriving performance tradition into a cultural stereotype of African tradition. In the process, the female body was contained through this repetitive, rotating motion. This containment, however, occurred through a complex process of inventing , counterinventing, and reinventing tradition. In this chapter, I examine the state’s appropriation of ngoma as a national symbol and the transformation of this symbol in the domain of popular culture. Using kukata kiuno as a springboard for this analysis, I find that traditional narratives of top-down and grassroots nationalism are overturned in favor of a dynamic process of collaboration and contestation. Tanzania One Theatre (TOT), Muungano, and Mandela produced gleeful narratives of vigor and sexuality in which boundaries of official and popular culture were repeatedly dissolved. In the midst of these testimonies of creativity, however, the passivity of the hip-swaying, ever-smiling female dancer persisted—as did my sense of unease that this image provoked. On the one hand, to criticize the suppression of female subjectivity in ngoma would simply adhere to a hegemonic brand of Western feminism that seeks to judge rather than to understand.2 On the other hand, to ignore the persistence of this image would overlook the ways in which technologies of power permeate popular culture. In order to negotiate this conundrum , I emphasize the cultural anxiety that sustains this image of the eroticized, passive Tanzanian woman. Ngoma served as a cultural ‘‘sore zone’’ (Herzfeld 1997, 27) between colonial administrators and their Tanganyikan subjects, between the postcolonial state and theatre artists, and, more recently, between the College of Arts and popular troupes. This chapter reveals that the dancing female body provided the terrain upon which these tensions played out. The final section of this chapter employs the concept of agency as a means of counteracting the narrative of subjugation and commodification. In an exploration of two provocative examples of female dancers who seized the ‘‘‘right’ to signify from the periphery of authorized power and privilege’’ (Bhabha 1994, 2), I demonstrate how individual performers use ngoma to script alternative narratives of resilience and creativity. The tried-and-true concept of agency has traditionally allowed Western scholars of African performance scholars to sidestep the academic pitfall of overdetermining neocolonial modes of power through emphasizing the actions of ordinary Tanzanians. In a provocative article, however, Francis B. Nyamnjoh complicates theories of agency in African contexts. He warns that ‘‘[t]oo much of the theory of agency merely asks about the empowerment of the individual and the extent to which individuals are creators or creatures...

Share