Sukuma Labor Songs from Western Tanzania: “We Never Sleep, We Dream of Farming” by Frank Gunderson (review)

I met Frank Gunderson once in a tiny library in Kisessa, Tanzania, when he was studying a song transcription for this collection, Sukuma Labor Songs. The library was part of Bujora Museum, a notorious initiative by the late Father Clementi to “safeguard” Sukuma culture. It must have been the summer of 1995. He was finishing his main data collection after a year of successful music recordings with local singers. I was about to start my fieldwork and looked in awe at the lively group of scholars (including two American art historians and one Dutch theologian) residing with him at Bujora Museum, where local artists and cult leaders would come from afar to be interviewed. While my fate as an anthropologist was to struggle to get “integrated” in one of their rural communities and internalize the insider’s or emic view on life by (haphazardly) learning the language and by (erratically) participating in anything from daily conversations to the rare initiation, here I found the ordered organization of data collection and analysis in collaboration with local experts. This collection of 335 songs and their interpretations, covering a complete genre known as labor songs and exhaustively indexed according to title, singer, composer, theme, type, location, region, period, and recording session, exemplifies the monumental work that can be done in beneficial circumstances. The publisher, Brill, should be commended for sharing the results with a large(r) audience.

The book’s format is straightforward and a useful guide to any beginning Africanist faced with the challenge of writing up a body of culturally rich data. Based on the main themes of the songs, the book is divided into fifteen chapters. These themes concern significant events or social institutions in the history of Sukuma speakers. Each chapter starts with a brief historical introduction summarizing the literature on that event or institution. Then follow the songs, whose lyrics act as comments, further deepened by the author’s interpretation and the explanation by the singers themselves or other experts. The reader thus obtains a unique perspective on Sukuma cultural history. The chapters cover the songs of the snake, porcupine, and elephant hunters of old, the salt caravaners and longdistance porters, the warriors, mercenaries, and conscripted soldiers, the more recent reciprocal village labor associations and farming dance-groups (with chapter 8 on the Bagobogobo as an absolute highlight), epidemics and famines, Tanzania’s independence, Nyerere’s Ujamaa, the war against Idi Amin, the ruling party CCM, and finally, the Sungusungu vigilante associations that took center stage in the mid-1990s. Five neatly informative appendixes include Sukuma music terms and aphorisms as well as the biographies of ten commentators.

As the reader may gather, the book’s intention is not to defend a thesis. The commentators’ contributions on the themes are brief, presented without further probing by the author. Little or no information is given on the current relevance of the material: on which songs are still sung and transmitted, whether the dance competitions continue or are as lively as they used to be, or what the songs mean to people today. However, for such emic take on culture, conversations with privileged witnesses cannot suffice. Ethnographic studies, especially into belief systems and social structure, would have been extremely useful; for example, they would have helped Gunderson explain one conundrum he mentions: why his Sukuma informants rejected the causal link that historians such as Terrence Ranger see between competitive Beni ngoma dances and the annual dance festivals that oppose Gika and Galu sections of the Sukuma community. The informants seemed to understand the ritual antagonism as structural to their community and independent of historical circumstances: a situation of organized opposition inhering within their culture and mediated by a peace mechanism that takes effect before and after Beni or Gika/Galu competitions.

The book’s main...