Review: 'Brass Bands and the Beni Phenomenon in Urban Eastern Africa'

Hello, classmates... and Jack.

This blog-post is going to be a review of the paper 'Brass Bands and the Beni Phenomenon in Urban Eastern Africa', which can be found in African Music vol. 7, no. 1. It will start with an overview of what the article is about, and end with some of my thoughts regarding articles like this one.
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The paper aims to investigate the impact of European military brass music on Tanganyika, through the rise and fall of beni ngoma. And what was beni ngoma, you may be asking? Beni ngoma was the word used to describe the many different East African dance band traditions.

It is argued that beni ngoma arose from the influence of German and then British military brass music. In the late nineteenth century, German military operations had commenced in Tanganyika, heavily in the city of Dar es Salaam. Musical interplay between the German settlers and local askari bands - African recruits in the German military -led to unique, new sounds. Though, it is worth noting, Europeans tended to be critical of the local music, seeing European music as more elite, and civilising. After the First World War, Britain took control of Tanganyika, and band music enjoyed a similar cultural interplay as it did under German rule. Eventually, a full military band ensemble began performing in 1906, as a part of the King's African Rifles. Eventually, by 1919, band music was coming to the fore of East African music.

The author asserts that, in general, African beni was particularly special because of the cultural interplay it had experienced, and that it "drew upon African, European, and even Arabic elements which were all mixed variously, depending upon where in East Africa this phenomenon was found". Also, due to beni ngoma's military background, the dances that accompanied the music were sometimes military themed. Moreover, unlike when Europeans first encountered African music, they enjoyed the sound of the multi-faceted beni ngoma. In fact, beni ngoma became so popular that various competitive dance associations emerged.

However, the author notes that by the mid-1930s beni ngoma's popularity had begun to decline. The pageantry, flourish and innovation of the earlier days were subsiding. This decline happened for a number of reasons. Firstly, economic depression had hit Tanganyika, and thus organisations no longer had the funds to perform; secondly, beni was simply going out of fashion; and thirdly, as beni slowly lost support, new forms of dance began to take its place.

Ultimately, the author thinks beni ngoma should be lauded as it was the first multi-ethnic form of music in Tanganyika, and that it helped build bridges between different African ethnicities, and possibly between African ethnicities and Europeans.
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Overall, i enjoyed reading this article. I find cultural history like this, which is on such a detailed level, and involves itself with the experiences of people on the ground, humanises the study of history. This, i think is important, as i find history often loses its ability to sympathise with the people it is looking at.

To me, it is this - accounting for the person on the ground, and understanding their unique perspective - that is a requisite of good history. Yes, we can look at the history of economics, and yes, we can look at the history of politics, etc. But, ultimately, these types of history cannot be properly understood without accounting for the people behind them.

Afterall, we make our own history.


-Pala Gilroy Sen