Musical Performance in Africa || The Death of Mganda?: Continuity and Transformation in Matengo Music

The Death of Mganda?: Continuity and Transformation in Matengo MusicAuthor(s): Stephen HillSource: Africa Today, Vol. 48, No. 4, Musical Performance in Africa (Winter, 2001), pp. 27-41Published by: Indiana University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4187452 .

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The Death of Mganda?: Continuity and Transformation in Matengo Music Stephen Hill

In the Matengol highlands of southwestern Tanzania, musical changes reflect broad economic and political changes as well as local and gendered decisions made by men and women dancers. By analyzing the important realm of group dances over the preceding century a clearer picture emerges of the frequently unintended consequences of actions and the various ways that Matengo dancers employ music in their strategies to comprehend and command the "modern. " In Matengo music choices to pursue divergent goals for new performative resources led to radically different outcomes for two group-dance genres. In the one case, dancers' decisions coupled with shifting economic and political realities led to fluorescence, and in the other, to almost certain aban- donment.

Introduction

In late September 1997 in the Hagati valley community of Hanga, the men's section of the local dance group, Kimila, hosted the first mganda dance competition of the season.2 Men normally dance mganda in August and September, after the women's chioda season, but in that year the chioda season was overbooked, pushing a much truncated mganda season into September. I had lived near Hanga for the previous year and Kimila kindly accepted me as a member of their group, proud that I had selected it as my kituo cha utafiti, or "research site" in KiSwahili. Immediately before their turn in the competition, dance groups chant a responsorial, boasting introduction with their leader. At this competition, one of only two held in 1997, Kimila chanted:

Leader: Hii ni boma gani? What dance group is this?

Chorus: Boma la Kimila! The Kimila group! Kituo cha utafiti! The research site! Ngoma za asili! An original ngoma!



Leader: Chini ya utafiti ya nani? Under whose research? Chorus: Stivini Hill toka America! Stephen Hill from

America! (Hanga, Mbinga District, 1997)

The members of Kimila well understood that I was researching their dances and they held this competition primarily to show me a "real" competition. However, of the fourteen neighboring mganda groups invited, only two attended. Members of several non attending groups grumbled that they did not want to be Kimila's vibarua, or "day laborers"; articulat- ing the view that I was Kimila's "sugar daddy" and that they hosted this competition specifically to impress me and raise their prestige and wealth. By refusing to attend, the invited groups severely insulted Kimila, a slight with repercussions that will reverberate throughout the Hagati valley for years to come. This example spoke to locally important issues of pride and proper relationships as well as perceptions about Europeans and their social and economic power. At the heart of these complaints, however, was the unprecedented request in Kimila's letters of invitation that the visiting groups return to their homes at the end of dancing each evening rather than stay overnight to enjoy the host's hospitality. By attempting to recover mganda dancing from prohibitively expensive displays of prestige negotiation centered on lavish entertaining, Kimila succeeded in alienat- ing twelve neighboring groups and potentially dooming mganda dancing in and around Hanga for years to come.

Figure 1. The mganda dancers of Kimila. Photo by Stephen Hill.

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During the decade leading up to my fieldwork in 1996 and 1997, Matengo men all but abandoned their male-only mganda group dance. In the same period, Matengo women substantially increased participation in their female-only chioda group dance. Shifting social realities and divergent gendered ideologies reaching back to the 1950s set the stage for this transformation. In this paper I investigate how changing economic, political, and religious contexts, in conjunction with specific choices made by male and female Matengo dancers, conspired to nudge mganda toward oblivion while chioda continues to blossom. I will briefly discuss the history of group dances in Umatengo and then harness together economics, politics, and local epistemologies and decisions to untangle the reasons for mganda's precipitous decline and chioda's fluorescence.

Matengo Group Dances

Group dances are the most important public artistic expression in Uma- tengo, the homeland of the Matengo people in southwestern Tanzania. An identifiable Matengo ethnic identity developed relatively recently. Most scholars (Ndunguru 1972; Mbele 1977; and Kecskesi n.d.) agree that the present-day Matengo homeland was populated slowly over the last millen- nium but without the parallel development of a coherent ethnic identity. The trigger generating a unified identity formation was outside attack. These attacks came first from Ngoni raiders from southern Africa who attacked militarily in the 1850s and 1860s and, second, from missionaries and German and British colonial administrations that attacked culturally and politically beginning in the 1890s. One outcome of their recent amal- gamation is that the Wamatengo are very open to outside influences and adopt and adapt readily. They are likewise quick to abandon older practices no longer relevant to social life and adopt new ones that fit better with contemporary realities.3 Through this openness to outside influences, mganda and chioda came to Umatengo from Malawi in the 1950s and replaced the muhambo dance, then considered passe.

Not all practices associated with muhambo were abandoned. The social organization, called boma,4 defined muhambo dance groups, and also served the new dances. A village boma is a hierarchical voluntary association partially based on location and lineage consisting of over sev- enty members. A village boma has two halves: the women's team dances chioda and the men's team dances mganda. Dance groups are the largest, most important and widely participatory voluntary social organizations in Matengo villages, and personal and group identity formations are closely tied to group dance participation.

Personal identity is so tightly connected to dancing chioda and mganda that well-known dancers are given jina la mchezo, or "a dance name." These nicknames point to the bearer's intimate participation in their village boma. Both sections are nominally governed under a male

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kingi or "king" (referring to the leader of a village-wide music and dance organization), but depending on personalities a chioda group can be very autonomous. Since the 1950s mganda and chioda group dance competitions have been the high point of the Matengo social calendar as well as potent distillations of Matengo lifeways.

In many ways, the chioda and mganda dances are very similar. Both are competitive, single-sex group dances performed by location and lineage-based teams of twenty to forty dancers accompanied by three to six musicians. Both are danced during the dry season, replacing nineteenth- and early twentieth-century harvest festival dances (muhambo and mandyanga). Chioda and mganda teams form the complementary halves of the village boma, and a village's character is largely tied to their boma. Village maboma (plural boma) also function nominally as self-help organizations and form the core of political and economic organizations. Men and women active in dance activities are frequently local economic and political leaders.5

The Wamatengo adopted both dances in the early 1950s from the Wampoto,6 a closely related people on the neighboring shores of Lake Nyasa7 (Kapinga 1996). Ultimately, however, chioda and mganda came to Tanganyika from across the lake in Malawi beginning in the 1920s. Although its history is far from clear, mganda closely resembles the beni dance complex discussed by Terence Ranger in Dance and Society in East- ern Africa (1975). Some important similarities are the use of European- derived movement styles (marching and parading), instruments, costumes (military uniforms or British colonial clothing, particularly white shorts), and military titles and command hierarchies. Ranger even suggests that mganda and beni are related (1975:132-36). A.M. Jones (1945) and Clyde Mitchell (1956) describe similar dances, whose range extended from the Kenyan coast to the Great Lakes region to present-day Zimbabwe. Other scholars, notably Gerhard Kubik, maintain that malipenga, mganda's Malawian predecessor, was a wholly independent creation (Kubik 1998). Gilman (1998) has made a strong case pointing to local roots for malipenga by noting continuity between precolonial practice and malipenga in northern Malawi during the first half of the twentieth century. Regardless of malipenga's ultimate origin, the Malawian version of this dance is strongly syncretic, arose in and firmly reflects colonialism, and was the model for Tanzanian mganda.

Chioda (also chiwoda, sioda, kihoda, and chihoda) has few obviously European musical, sartorial, or stylistic features. Relatively less is writ- ten about Malawian chioda than malipenga, but most authors agree that despite the lack of obvious European influence, it ". . . appear(s) to stem from the military parade of the former King's African Rifles" (Chilivumbo 1971:16). This colonial history has been lost in Tanzania, and Matengo women accept chioda as an entirely African dance.

Both dances reflect important Matengo beliefs and accomplish necessary social tasks including, but not limited to socialization of the young

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and maintenance of social mores, stress reduction, conflict resolution through appropriate competition, promotion of social interaction, and prestige negotiation. The local roots of the radically different trajectories taken by chioda and mganda are found primarily in decisions surrounding the last two of these: promotion of social interaction and prestige negotiation. Social interaction, in this case, refers to a kind of networking that promotes good relations between people and aids life chances through the material benefit those good relations facilitate. Prestige negotiation refers to competition in a hierarchy of prestige where the desire for prestige can outweigh many other social concerns, such as maintenance of family and keeping the peace. Both dances also quickly became the bedrock of Matengo social and artistic life. To a fantastic degree, both have become Matengo. Many Matengo dancers, particularly those born after the 1950s, do not know, or acknowledge, the foreign origin of either dance.

Despite these similarities, mganda and chioda differ in critical ways. Of greatest importance to my argument, and set against a backdrop of social transformation over the last fifty years, is how men and women made different decisions about the kinds of social work they wished their dances to accomplish. For example, during my fieldwork, when I asked Alois Kapinga, dancer, drummaker, and kingi of Kimila to look back and judge the success of past mganda competitions, he typically responded, "It was a very successful competition, our hosts slaughtered many cows and there was lots of beer" (Kapinga 1997). When I posed this same question about a past chioda competition to Menedora Mahay, leader of the women's section of Kimila, she responded, "It was a great success, over twenty groups attended and everyone danced very smartly" (Mahay 1997). Unpacking these different focuses-prestige negotiation through redistributive outlay for men vs. the promotion of social interactions and artistic performance skills for women-will help illuminate Matengo gendered ideologies and the interplay between artistic expression and the changing social realities that swept through Umatengo during the previous half century. It will show how two similar dances followed very different paths.

The Early Years: The 1950s to the Late 1980s

Mganda is a linear men's dance that borrows heavily from colonial military brass band practice in costumes, instruments, movement styles, and hierarchies of command and control. The ensemble accompanying mganda features a military style bass drum, two side drums-local reproductions of snare drums-and the dancers, called askari, or "soldier," play kazoos in imitation of trumpets. Paralleling reasons for beni's immense popular- ity between the Wars, Matengo men found mganda attractive because it represented, in their own terms, "modernity." Their attraction centered on mganda's flashy, European style costumes, military inspired administrative hierarchies, rationalized competition, and general European associa-

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tions, which they saw as kisasa, or "modern/of the present" and represent- ing ustaarabu, or "civilization."

The Wamatengo adopted mganda and chioda during the 1950s, a period of great economic change. During this period, they significantly expanded coffee farming that by the end of that decade had shifted the basis of the local economy away from subsistence and barter toward monetized exchange. Because of coffee, the Wamatengo are very wealthy in com- parison to their neighbors. Further shaping local decisions, from the 1950s until the present, local conceptions of modernity, which frequently con- flate "the new" with modernity, have strongly influenced Matengo society. In the case of musical change, an appreciation of rationality, particularly in reference to new forms of adjudicating musical competition, is the primary component of modernity that operated in Matengo decision making. Since the desire for the modern developed concurrently with a great increase in economic wealth, modernity in Umatengo has a particularly consumerist ethos.

Cash crop farming also led to shifts in household economics, specifically, that Matengo men found themselves in possession of disposable income for the first time. In this context, and building on existing practice, they directed their newfound wealth toward prestige negotiation and chose mganda dancing as the appropriate vehicle for this social phenomenon. By the early 1960s the link between mganda, "the new," and modernity had weakened, allowing the practice of mganda to become doxic and increas- ingly tied to grand redistributive displays of consumption that formed the foundation of a group's prestige.

Prestige negotiation is not new in Umatengo; it was also present in muhambo, a group dance popular immediately before the rise of chioda and mganda. Prestige competition in muhambo was at times so fierce that it spawned a new genre of biting, slanderous song called mahulila. The sole purpose of mahulila songs was to musically attack another group, raising the attacker's stature in the eyes of the audience (Mhagama 1997). Mahu- lila songs were a kind of Matengo cutting contest. Note, however, that prestige negotiation in muhambo hinged on superior performance skills, specifically composition. Prestige competition in mganda focuses on how lavishly a dance group hosts their guests and how broadly they redistribute their wealth. Thus, by the mid-1960s, consumption in mganda replaced compositional and performance skills in muhambo as the most important criteria on which to judge a group dance competition.

Chioda is a circular dance for postpubescent women.8 When dancing chioda, women wave colored handkerchiefs to vigorous hip movements. Chioda competitions are one of the few public arenas where Matengo women have license to act outside the customarily conservative bounds of the acceptable. These behaviors include overtly flirtatious and mildly sexu- ally charged acts, such as women initiating direct eye contact with men and tongue flicking. This feature makes chioda competitions extremely popular and key sites for courting. The ensemble accompanying chioda

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features two to three hourglass-shaped drums with pegged on heads, one to two small kettle drums, and optional percussion including tin can shakers and a worn out grubbing hoe struck with a piece of metal. Matengo women adopted chioda a few years before the men adopted mganda and also found chioda attractive because it was "modern" and "civilized." However, since they did not receive the benefits of the economic prosperity brought by coffee, the way women use chioda and its history in Umatengo has been very different from that of mganda.

The colonial administration was responsible for agricultural development in Tanganyika Territory. Based on British colonial administration and Catholic Church gender bias, they promoted coffee production primarily among men. In the nineteenth and early twentieth century, before cash crop farming dominated other forms of agriculture, Matengo agricultural duties and the economic benefit from excess agricultural production were more equitably distributed. Each sex was responsible for specific duties; men cleared plots and minded livestock while women tended gardens and administered food stores. By focusing their outreach on men, from the introduction of coffee cultivation in Umatengo in 1927 until Independence, the British colonial agricultural service made specific decisions that kept the economy gendered and the economic bounty brought by coffee out of women's hands. Despite the fact that Matengo women historically controlled and sold excess produce from the family plot, Matengo men learned from their colonial teachers that "productive" cash crop agriculture was men's work. Accordingly, they took control of coffee farming and coffee profits (Ndunguru 1972:9-11). In the same period when men's personal wealth increased, women's stayed the same, making their apparent pov- erty bleaker.

However, women were not entirely excluded from development schemes. In the early 1960s the Catholic Church opened a domestic school for girls in Umatengo where the girls learned a home economics curriculum based on a German model from a decade earlier. The message was clear: women's duties were to be domestic and familial, not public and economic like the men's. Clearly, women continued making economic con- tributions to the family, just as men continued helping with domestic and familial duties. What colonial administrators and development workers seemed to have envisioned, however, was a cozy image of a content African nuclear family with the man out in the fields engaged in "productive" agriculture with a wisp of smoke from his pipe dancing across his brow, while the woman, in her tidy starched apron, cooked a nutritious meal, minded the children, and kept the house neat as a pin. Putting coffee in the hands of men did not produce this idealized version of African nuclear familial life, but it did produce economic imbalance in Matengo households, where men controlled relatively huge sums of money when compared to the pit- tance women earned from selling a few extra sweet potatoes or a half sack of corn. This same inequity persists today and colors all social and gender relations, including group dance performance.

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When defining the social valence of their dances, Matengo women also appropriated an older model. In the 1960s, after the allure of "the new" and modernity that motivated the adoption of chioda faded, Matengo women chose to focus on social interaction and performance skills as the chief goals for chioda competitions. While part of this decision rests in the fact that women did not command the same economic resources as men, another important key was that women wanted to mediate the viciousness into which muhambo descended by the beginning of the 1950s. Menedora Mahay related that her predecessor approved of chioda because "it did not bring troubles" (Mahay 1997). In this way, women's dances became vehicles for social integration.

The Late Years: The Late 1980s to 1997

By the late 1980s, prestige negotiation dominated mganda competitions and killing cows became more important than dancing for men in the Hagati Valley. The political and economic context in Umatengo and Tan- zania as a whole had also changed, and by this time Tanzania's first Presi- dent Julius Nyerere's Ujamaa policy of "African Socialism" had amounted to an impressive failure. In response to ever louder and more strident calls for economic and political reform, the Tanzanian government liberalized its economy and allowed multi-party elections in the late 1980s and early 1990s. For the Wamatengo, the most important economic outcome of the economic reforms was the dismantling of the corrupt, inefficient, parastatal coffee marketing board (MBICU, the Mbinga Cooperative Union) and the institution of an open coffee market with private buyers dealing directly with the growers.

In many ways this was a positive change: direct contact between growers and buyers generated more profits for the growers because they demanded prompt payment and sold only to the highest bidder. However, many negatives plague the new system, especially the previously unknown levels of doubt and insecurity in coffee farming. Despite its many failings, the parastatal coffee board did support coffee prices during market slumps, and more importantly, paid three small installments per year, giving farmers a steady income flow at predictable times throughout the year. Although payouts under the new system can double those under the parastatal coffee marketing board, since economic liberalization in the early 1990s, coffee farmers have been at the mercy of an occasionally violently fluctuating global coffee market.

Further, each year farmers receive one large payment for their coffee, an economic windfall many find difficult to manage. Judging by difficulties local farmers have in paying school fees in January, only four months after their September payout, many have spent their yearly income in this short period. The new system makes long-term planning, including planning dance competitions held in August and September nearly a year after their

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coffee payout, difficult and uncertain. Thus, ever-deeper entanglements in the cash economy over the last fifty years complicated by the shift from a heavily subsidized socialist economy to an open market in the late 1990s has left the Wamatengo temporarily monetarily wealthy and economically insecure.

Considering the new economic climate and decisions made by Matengo men to emphasize prestige negotiation, the implications are stark for the future of mganda competitions. In the decade from 1987-1997, the period in which the above changes took place, the number of mganda competitions declined precipitously. My teachers recalled that in the late 1980s, as many as ten mganda competitions per year defined expressive and social life for Matengo men in the Hagati valley. By 1997, the number of competitions in the same area dwindled to two, and one of those was the fabulously unsuccessful competition hosted specifically for me. In reality, only one successful, spontaneously planned mganda competition took place in the Hagati Valley in 1997.

When I noted in my introduction that this one unsuccessful competition might doom mganda dancing for years to come I was not being hyperbolic. Feuds between groups can simmer for years and have deleteri- ous consequences for the valley-wide competition calendar. When Kimila formed in 1978 by splitting off from Kallegi in neighboring Mkuwanyi, their decision was reached amicably. Both sides agreed that the now more populous Hanga village deserved their own boma. When negotiating the ownership of the group's drum, however, the new and old groups quarreled violently. Mkuwanyi claimed possession because one of their members had

Figure 2. The chioda dancers of Kamila. Photo by Stephen Hill.

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actually purchased the drum, while Hanga based their right to possession on having contributed a larger share of the money. After someone-most fingers point to young members of Kimila-smeared the drum with excre- ment and left it with Kallegi in Mkuwanyi, the two groups did not dance at each other's competitions for eighteen years. Ironically, the first time Kallegi and Kimila danced together after the quarrel was at Kimila's unsuccessful competition in 1997. The multiple affronts of not attending Kimila's competition may produce another two decades of bad blood, this time between Kimila and twelve of their closest neighbors.

In the same period that prestige negotiation took control of mganda dancing, social interaction and performance skills became the most important goals for chioda dancers. The number of people enjoying themselves, the number of attending maboma, and the level of dancing at chioda competitions became the paramount determinants of success. The goal of chioda competitions is to gather as many people as possible in a spirit of harmony and fun and to dance well. While Matengo women are also affected by periodic economic downturns, the essence of their dance is not intrinsically linked to economic performance, like in mganda. Although women's performance does parallel men's in direct correlation to prosperity and bad economic times results in a decrease in both mganda and chioda, the women's dance is not fatally tied to economic wealth. Despite the radical shift from state planning and a controlled economy that led to the death of mganda, chioda dancers continue to dance as much-or more-than ever.

The results of Matengo women's decision to emphasize social interaction and performance skills are also stark. The number of chioda competitions in the Hagati Valley rose from an average of ten competitions per year in the late 1980s to fourteen competitions in 1997. Furthermore, the women extended their traditional ten-week dance season an additional three weeks to accommodate all the groups wanting to dance. Chioda has blossomed in the same period that mganda has crashed.

Conclusion

When I asked my male teachers why they had stopped dancing mganda they volunteered several reasons. Frequently they indicated that they were tired and wanted to rest; older dancers often blamed the youth for this leth- argy, calling them lazy (Kapinga 1997). Further, it is not uncommon for a boma to become inactive for a few years, particularly following the death of a leader or prominent dancer. Interestingly, many dancers noted that they were now poorer than before and must save money, pointing directly to an economic justification.

Complicating the picture, the Wamatengo have a history of genera- tional conflict leading to musical change. One explanatory thread for the shift from muhambo to mganda and chioda is that young people in the

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1950s simply replicated their father's and mother's rejection early in the twentieth century of a dance called mandyanga, their father's and mother's music, in favor of muhambo as the most popular group dance. The contemporary rejection of mganda might be the prelude to the adoption of a new, more efficacious, and appropriate dance for today's young men, although further research and time are necessary to validate this hypothesis. These reasons alone, however, do not fully account for the decline.

Without discounting these reasons entirely, I believe that the over- arching importance of prestige negotiation plays a defining role. When I asked my teachers why they did not simply curtail dancing to one day, thus decreasing its physical demands, or hold competitions without slaughter- ing so many cows, thus making their competitions cheaper and the performative aspect of the dance supreme, they typically rejected these ideas as impossible. While this hard-line position is contingent on an ethos of flex- ibility that characterizes Matengo decision making, they do not conceive of a valid mganda competition that does not revolve around consumption- based prestige negotiation. Kimila's disastrous experiment, attempted with the conscious hope of saving mganda from dying out, provides ample evidence that this strategy does not work. To dance mganda simply for the dance would be no mganda at all.

Conversely, the current vitality of chioda in the Hagati Valley is best seen in-the short, three-week dance season held in October and November 1997. This extra season, held during the tail end of the normal mganda season, long after the traditional end of chioda dancing in mid-August, took place primarily for two reasons, the first a product of global economic changes, and the second a product of deep local desire to dance.

Historically, marriages in Umatengo are celebrated in October and November, which brings a close to the dance season. Because of strong links between public weddings, high status, and consumption, marriages are now very expensive. Due to the same kinds of economic pressures that keep mganda groups at home, very few families can afford a public wedding for their children. Due to a slump in world coffee prices in 1997, only one marriage took place in the Hagati valley, leaving October and November free for other activities. Chioda competitions filled this space.

The case of weddings parallels the decline of mganda in even deeper ways, particularly in unsuccessful attempts to salvage these practices. Astery Hyera, the director of Boma la Kimila, Hanga, reported that during the summer of 1997, several middle-aged men in the Hagati Valley approached Father Joseph Mbunga from the Maguu mission to ask him whether he could marry several couples at once. He responded that he could and asked the reason. Indicating their dismay with the astronomical cost of hosting public weddings, they told him that they were searching for a way that their children could get married while avoiding the huge outlay for a wedding. As with Kimila's unsuccessful mganda competition, this attempt to reign in runaway expenses caused by seeking public prestige remained unsuccessful by the summer of 1998 (Hyera 1997).

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Small girls are the deeply local reason why the chioda season was extended in 1997. Typically, chioda group leaders exclude prepubescent girls as too young to master the steps and perform at the high level required for a good showing. Noting the gap left by mganda groups in 1997, these normally marginalized girls formed their own teams under the auspices of their mother's groups and danced purely for their own enjoyment. Matengo dancers call this kind of chioda team chioda wa chipukizi, or "young shoots chioda." Further illuminating the value these teams have for this community, one of the 1997 chipukizi teams called themselves Akiba, meaning "store, stock, reserve" in the sense of something laid away for the future. These young girls are the future of chioda dancing in Umatengo, and their mothers, grandmothers, aunts, and sisters took obvious, glee- ful delight watching the next generation begin the important process of making social contacts through performing chioda.

The shifts seen in chioda and mganda are not the exclusive result of shifting external realities, particularly economic realities, nor are they the outcome solely of the different decisions made by men and women. Rather, the probable death of mganda and the observable growth of chioda are the result of an intricate interchange between global, national, and regional economics, politics and administrative policies, and local ways of perceiving and acting upon these new contexts. In addition, the choices made by Matengo men and women have had long-range, often unintended, consequences, just as the effects of development policies and economic liberalization have had on Umatengo. The radically different trajectories described by mganda and chioda also point to vastly different ideologies surrounding the meaning of performance, social interaction, economics, and personal identity formations; to name a few. However, when these divergent gender ideologies that outline cleavages between Matengo men and women are taken together, they paint a clearer picture of what it means to be Mmatengo at the beginning of the twenty-first century.

Epilogue

Regarding tradition, Henry Glassie asserts, "its character is not stasis but continuity" (Glassie 1995:396). This is certainly the case for the Wama- tengo whose musical life is built around change. What makes the Matengo case noteworthy is that while in the past Western scholars have ignored, looked through, or glossed over the use of "traditional" music for new social uses, Matengo musicians find this condition completely unprob- lematic. It is, in fact, a defining characteristic of their musical lives. In examples ranging from the periodic creation of new musical instruments and genre to an open and inquisitive acceptance of foreign musical influences, the Wamatengo signal a willingness to adopt musical resources-be they of long standing among Matengo musicians, or of recent and foreign origin-and adapt them to contemporary needs such as prestige negotiation or the foundation of social cohesion.

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It would be incorrect, however, to give the impression that tradition is completely unimportant in Umatengo or that Matengo musicians do not harness tradition to signal ownership or confer prestige on musical resources. Terence Ranger noted with surprise in 1967 that young men from Mbinga District adamantly and proudly asserted that mganda-then scarcely fifteen years old in Umatengo-was "as old as the tribe itself" (Ranger 1975:121, n. 2). I noted the same pride in my teacher's assertion that mganda is mchezo ya asili, or the "original dance," for the Wamatengo. Chioda dancers make similar claims. The insistence that mganda and chioda are "the dances of our forefathers," as several of my teachers assured me, fits uncomfortably for Western observers with the verifiable fact that these dances were first performed in Umatengo only in the mid 1950s. This is not the case for the Wamatengo. Just as two individuals have credit for independently inventing the lindeko drum in the 1960s, for Matengo musicians, mganda and chioda can simultaneously be a marker of modernity and "the dances of our forefathers."

This insistence on the fixedness of certain elements must be seen, however, within the broader social practice of renewal through adoption and adaptation. On a day-to-day basis the Wamatengo build meaning and importance from perceptions of permanence and long history-or "tradition." On a larger scale, however, they readily abandon older practices no longer appropriate for contemporary life, replacing them with newer resource that they believe better reflect current social realities. The new resources then become "traditional," but always within a flexible frame- work that allows tradition to serve contemporary needs.

NOTES

1. Matengo is a root meaning, "of the forest." Following Kiswahili orthography, Matengo can be used as an adjective or adverb Mmatengo is a single person from the Matengo ethnic group, Wamatengo is the plural of Mmatengo, and Umatengo is the Matengo homeland.

2. I would like to gratefully acknowledge the generous support of Fulbright-IIE, The Wenner- Gren Foundation, and the Graduate College of the University of Illinois that made possible this research. Further thanks go to COSTECH for providing research clearance and to Aman- dina Lihamba at the University of Dar es Salaam for her constant encouragement and access to her personal library.

3. The Matengo case is interesting because the Wamatengo do not manage history in the way described in Hobsbawm and Ranger's seminal work, The Creation of Tradition (1983). While never asserting that the creation of tradition is the only way that societies deal with history, their cases argue persuasively for the prominence of this strategy. The Wamatengo, on the other hand, minimize the effects of history on present day realities, pointing to alternate modalities not discussed in Hobsbawm and Ranger.

4. Boma is the Kiswahili word for "fortress." Today however, it typically refers to administrative blocks. In either usage, boma refers to a seat of strength and power.

5. This connection should not be taken too far. When a person reaches the political or eco-

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nomic level of ward leader or company owner they typically do not dance mganda or chioda. The agricultural middle class patronizes these dances.

6. The Wampoto are one of several ethnic groups on the Tanganyikan Nyasa littoral

commonly grouped under the rubric "Wanyasa." The Wampoto live on the Nyasa lakeshore directly below the Hagati Valley. Deep historic ties exist between these two groups. Other identity groups included in Wanyasa are the Wamanda on the northern lakeshore and Wamwera on the southern. While all three groups perform mganda and chioda, local history and stylistic difference point strongly to the Wampoto as the immediate source for

Matengo mganda and chioda.

7. While widely called Lake Malawi, the term Lake Nyasa is used in Tanganyika, reflects Matengo terminology, and will be used in this article.

8. As in many parts of Africa, evidence indicates that precolonial, village-based dances in Umatengo were circular and participatory. In this way, chioda likely reflects longstanding practice. Mganda, on the other hand, is linear and presentational, reflecting contemporary contexts and aesthetics. Curiously, the primary contexts for mganda dancing are still village-based competitions, but the style is so tied to European musical practices that it retains its linear dance forms and presentational aesthetic.

REFERENCES CITED

Chilivumbo, Alifeyo. 1971. Malawi's Lively Art Form: Chiwoda Dancers Mirror Their Changing World in a Traditional Frame. Africa Report. 16 (October):16-18.

Gilman, Lisa. 1998. Putting colonialism into perspective: cultural history and the case of Malipenga in Malawi. Unpublished graduate term paper, Folklore Institute, Indiana University.

Glassie, Henry. 1995. Tradition. JournalofAmerican Folklore. 108 (430):395-412. Hill, Stephen. 2000. Mchezo Umelala [The Dance Has Slept]: Competition, Modernity, and Econom-

ics in Umatengo, Tanzania. In Mashindano! Competitive Music Performance in EastAfrica, ed. Frank Gunderson and Greg Barz. Dar es Salaam: Mkuki na Nyota Press.

Hobsbawm, Eric, and Terence Ranger, eds. 1983. The Invention of Tradition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Hyera, Astery. 1997. Interview by author. Hanga Village, Mbinga District, 7 June. Jones, A.M. 1945. African Music: the Mganda Dance. African Studies 4 (4):180-88. Kapinga, Alois Jalowombo. 1996. Interview by author. Hanga Village, Mbinga District, 9 December.

.1997. Interview by author. Hanga Village, Mbinga District, 28 February and 4 July. Kecskesi, Dr. Maria. n.d. Matengoarbeit. Unpublished manuscript, Staatliches Museum fur Volker-

kunde, Muinchen, Germany.

Kubik, Gerhard. 1998. Interview by author. Bloomington, Ind. 13 November. Mahay, Menedora. 1997. Interview by author. Hanga Village, Mbinga District, 14 July and 2

November.

Mbele, Joseph L. 1999. Matengo Folktales, Bryn Mawr, Pa.: Buy Books on The Web. .1977. The social content and function of Matengo oral literature. Master's thesis, University of Dar es Salaam, Dar es Salaam.

Mhagama, Fr. Francis. 1997. Interview by author. Mbinga town, Mbinga District, 3 February. Mitchell, J. Clyde. 1956. The Kalela Dance. Manchester: University of Manchester Press.

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Ndunguru, Rev. Egino. 1972. Historia, Mila na Desturiza Wamatengo. Nairobi: East African Literature

Bureau.

Ranger, Terence 0. 1975. Dance and Society in Eastern Africa, 1890-1970: The Beni Ngoma. Berkeley,

Los Angeles: University of California Press.

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Documents

Musical Performance in Africa || The Death of Mganda?: Continuity and Transformation in Matengo Music