Now a disappearing tradition, Tanzanian popular theatre integrates comic sketches, acrobatics, melodrama, song, and dance to produce lively commentaries on what it means to be Tanzanian. In Performance and Politics in Tanzania, Laura Edmondson examines how politics, social values, and gender are expressed on stage. The paper shows that the women's viewing experiences allow them to reflect on their own agency and on their perceptions and experiences of modern young womanhood and the social identifications through which this is framed.
My analytical approach borrows from, but also expands on, Joseph Straubhaar's concept of the hybrid and multi-layered identity formations in the context of media consumption. The paper is an ethnographic study based on narrative reflections and testimonies by Eldoret-based female audiences. I develop the argument that the televisual cinema practice not only improved young women's access to cinema but also influenced the process of young women's social identification. This paper examines the social impact of these televisual cinemas on a community of young women spectators in Eldoret. Television in Kenya has in the recent past been dominated by Nollywood video films and Latin American telenovelas. For over sixty years, Indian media flows have gained traction, broken down, restarted, and flowed in “feedback loops”, dependent on the ways in which Indian media reflect, align with, and at times depart from Dagbamba conservative cultural and religious values. Though Tamale’s Dagbamba viewers understand these three media flows as regionally linked, they are sensitive to changes in format, narrative, plot, and style taking place in Indian film and television over time. In charting histories of these three regionally linked transnational media flows, this article complicates “linear” experiences of Indian media in Northern Ghana. This includes the arrival of Hindi films during the late 1950s, the subsequent (short-lived) circulation of Bollywood films in the early 1990s, and the more recent arrival of contemporary Indian television serials in the 2010s. This article explores the circulation and reception of Indian media (including films and more recently television series) in the majority Muslim city of Tamale, Northern Ghana.
The formal and aesthetic influence of telenovelas has left visible traces on video films as well as on soap operas in Tanzania, which thus contributes to the wider discussion of the two media formats’ transnationalization. For Tanzanian filmmakers telenovelas are important influences on and inspirations for their work. In this way they function as open spaces for the imagination of other possible life worlds. Rooted in the appropriation of early development soap opera, telenovelas are commonly read as educative and as giving moral lessons. Their popularity lies both in their foreignness, as well as their sameness with cultural practices, and audiences take pleasure in comparing the lives of the characters with their own. Although very different from local culture and storytelling in style, aesthetics and language, telenovelas are likewise popular with the Swahili audiences. At the same time, a huge video film industry has developed with local films made in Swahili and released on DVD. Since the early 2000s Latin American telenovelas have become a very popular and widely received genre in Tanzania.