Storage, Retrieval and the Logic of Passing Time

Any visit to the past—through conversation, photographs, stories, songs—can only be experienced forever presently.

These visits, recounting, singing, only invokes the past; the past is only present only in glimpses, materially present through traces/residues of/in tapes and cassettes and vinyls—themselves carrying sounds pregnant with ideas of/and longing and celebrations and reflection, stories and lamentation—each with their own logic of storage and retrieval: their own mode of legibility.

The central tenet of the idea of recording and archiving is capturing and storing moments, sonic moments in this case, for posterity—for some imagined future. Half a century later—through a combination of sheer luck, an artist residence program, a search on the Library’s database, and a proximity with Kitime’s son at an art center—the sounds recordings of Francis mwa Kitime popped up as a center of discussion connecting diverse strands of interest and curiosity about the flow of time, memory, and our place in it.

Kitime’s father is no longer with us, Redmayne as well. The residues/traces of their encounters live on; as recordings in the British Library Sound Archive, as stories and memories and music recounted and sung by Kitime’s son, and as Kitime's old guitar that his son still keeps at his small office/studio at an art center in an industrial neighborhood in Dar es Salaam.

Past futures, albeit not exactly as the past would have possibly predicted the shape of it.

I have heard Kitime’s speaking of digitization as an aspirational goal—a sort of panacea to beat dust, humidity, and mold (and time?) that works to chip, crumble, and degrade away reel to reel recordings and cassette tapes; gradually unbinding the sound-storing magnetic layer from the clear strip of tape, turning this memory-firm into fine dust of irretrievable sounds.

His office is a hub of various digitization machinery—themselves at different status of a need to be repaired—responsible to turn reel to reel tapes, boxful of cassettes, and VHS into digital files that dust, mold, and humidity can not easily touch; a mostly one-man-shop of machines and desire wrestling to reconfigure the materiality of sonic memory into a format legible to the changing technologies of retrieval.

Wrestling describes just about everything about this space. Wrestling: a forceful stance against entropy forever undoing the order of memory and its materiality. A stance reinforced through rehearsals and recordings, digitization, and keeping the digitizing equipment in working order; a stance against age and its effects on the body of the caretaker and the integrity of the fading voices on the tapes and reels as natural elements work their ways on the physical medium on which the sounds were recorded and stored.

What an archive reveals is more than just the sonic past, but in a-round-about-self-referential-sort-of-way, it highlights the very concept and process of archiving. The realities it uncovers speak to the endless efforts to keep the sonic memory alive—for John as a memory of his father and for the wider local public, perhaps, as a way of chronicling historical moments.

It might seem preposterous to ask why we should care. But this is the question that rings in my mind. Not that I don't care; those almost instinctual impulses to see this living on are there. Yet I still ask a wider community, not only why should we care but more importantly, what will this caring entail? What do these sonic traces make possible? And why should it matter?

At the moment this is some of my first impression of the engagement I have been having with both the material from the archive and the interaction with John. As a starting point.

Siti Binti Saad, born circa 1880 with the given name Mtumwa, meaning a slave or a servant, is an iconic figure in the taarab music genre in East Africa’s island of Zanzibar. Taarab is a music genre popular in Tanzania and Kenya. It is influenced by the musical traditions of the African Great Lakes, North Africa, the Middle East, and the Indian subcontinent.

At the time of her birth, Zanzibar was under the Sultanate of Oman. The Sultanate moved its capital city from Oman to Stone Town in Zanzibar in 1840. It was only in 1873, a few years before Siti Binti Saad’s birth, that the Sultan of Zanzibar Barghash bin Said, signed a treaty with the British to officially abolish slave trade in Zanzibar. Zanzibar was a crucial economic and strategic island linking various regions including the African Great Lakes, the Somali Peninsula, the Arabian Peninsula, Iran, and the Indian subcontinent. This made it a significant hub for trade and cultural exchange. 

Siti Binti Saad moved to Stone Town from the outskirts of Zanzibar, where she ultimately rose to prominence in the 1920s and 30s. Stone Town was bustling Swahili coastal town with deep roots in spice trade as well as being one of the  "one of the world's last open slave markets."  up until 1873. Even today its unique architecture, which blends African, Arab, Indian, and European influences, reflect its over a millenium of cultural interactions.

Siti Binti Saad’s music was widely listened to in various parts of the world. In East Africa, her music was popular in her home country of Tanzania, including Zanzibar, and also in Kenya. Beyond East Africa, her music reached many parts of Africa, India, and the Arab-speaking world.

Siti Binti Saad’s recording career was groundbreaking. She was the first East African vocalist to release commercial recordings in the 1920s and 1930s. Her popularity was recognized by Columbia Records and His Master’s Voice in 1928, and they invited her and her ensemble to record in Swahili at their recording studio in Mumbai, India. This marked a significant milestone in her career, as she recorded over 150 phonograph recordings in India.

Siti Binti Saad was not only a singer but also an activist. Her music often carried messages of social and political significance. Shortly before her death, the prominent Tanzanian author/poet Shaban Robert visited Siti. Eight years after her death, he published her biography, Wasifu wa Siti Binti Saad.

Over the decades, other scholars and prominent local musicians have sung various renditions of her songs. For instance, Bi Kidude, a global taarab star in the 1990s until her death in 2013, covered many of Siti’s compositions such as ‘Mahogo wa Chang’ombe’, ‘Beru’ and ‘Baba Pakistani’.

Siti Binti Saad is referred to as the mother of Taarab, her songs forming a standard repertoire of many taarab performances to date. Her music and legacy continue to inspire and influence the taarab music scene to this day. Visiting Zanzibar and delving into a local music scene reavelas just how deep Siti's influences has been.