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“Crazy W hite Men”

(UN)DOING DIFFERENCE IN AFRICAN POPULAR MUSIC

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I n Nov e m b e r 2 013 , I went to Hamburg for a concert by Mzungu
Kichaa, a cosmopolitan Dane who plays Tanzanian pop music and sings
in Swahili. That night, Mzungu Kichaa, which literally translates as “crazy
white man,” performed together with three members of his backing band,
Bongo Beat, all of them black Tanzanians who had been flown in from
Dar es Salaam to Copenhagen a few days earlier. Their performance was
part of “Danish Vibes,” a promotional showcase financed by a Danish
government agency, which was meant to v Danish musical talent to rep-
resentatives of the German music industry. Of the four bands performing
that night at the Mojo Club, Mzungu Kichaa and his band were surely
the most exotic. I met two young Tanzanians in the audience who were
living in Hamburg temporarily. One of them was Peter Maziku (aka Peen
Law yer), a rapper and graphic designer from Dar es Salaam. He had come
to Germany for half a year of vocational training via the Hamburg–Dar es
Salaam city partnership. The other was a young soccer talent who played
for the junior team of the Hamburg St. Pauli Club. W hile the framing of
the event suggests the majority of the audience was German and Danish
and perceived Mzungu Kichaa above all as a Danish musician, the two
Tanzanian spectators recognized him and his band as part of the Tanza-
nian pop-music scene and had come to celebrate a bit of home away from
home. As I watched them dancing among the crowd and singing along to