Sounding the Past: The Use of Zilipendwa in Bongo Boom Bap and Contemporary Tanzanian Popular Music

The purpose of this article is to investigate two uses of Zilipendwa (‘golden oldies’) in newer forms of Tanzanian popular music. The first is Kwanza Unit’s Bongo boom bap hip-hop track ‘Msafiri’ (1999) which digitally samples an earlier song of the same name. The second is a late 2010s pop song titled ‘Zilipendwa’ (2017) by the Tanzanian musician Diamond Platnumz featuring the WCB Wasafi artists. Comparing songs from different eras will address the two primary aims of this article: First, to designate distinctions between types of borrowing/intertextuality in musical examples (including audio-visual components in music videos), and to show why such distinctions matter. Second, to compare two different uses of Zilipendwa in two different eras (1990s and 2010s) and genres (Bongo boom bap and Tanzanian popular music), and utilized via different means (sampling vs. reperforming) to show the ways in which borrowing from the past contribute to their current meanings. We use sampling and intertextuality as a lens with which to investigate how the ‘conversation’ between new and old musical text(s) lend insight into complex meanings of Tanzanian music and politics.