DAR ES SALAAM: THERE is something both funny and faintly alarming about hearing an old Tanzanian song, feeling the dust of Dar es Salaam, Morogoro, Tanga, or Tabora rise from it, recognising the guitars, the brass, the Kiswahili poetry, the dance-floor and sweat of another age.
And then discovering that before you can hear the song, you may need permission from an office in Hamburg, New York or London whose closest encounter with the song’s birthplace might be locating Tanzania on a map after a second cup of coffee, possibly with the map upside down.
It sounds like the setup to a joke. Unfortunately, it may also be reality.
Somewhere along the way, parts of our ‘Muziki wa Dansi’ history appear to have packed their bags, boarded an invisible flight and settled into filing cabinets far from home, first class, no doubt, while the musicians who made them travelled by bus.
The music was born here. It carried our weddings, send-offs, rallies, bars, football victories, heartbreaks and lazy Sunday afternoons.
It belonged emotionally to the people.
Yet legally, in some cases, the ownership trail seems to have travelled much farther than the musicians, their families, or the nation that produced it.
That should concern us. For many Tanzanians, copyright still sounds like one of those subjects that only appears at conferences where everyone wears name tags and speaks in acronyms, nodding gravely at PowerPoint slides nobody asked for.
Yet copyright determines whether a musician’s children receive royalties, or whether someone they have never met receives income generated by their parents’ work.
It determines whether our cultural heritage stays accessible for education and documentaries, or vanishes behind paperwork nobody fully understands, paperwork that, somehow, always seems to have been filed somewhere far colder than here.
The old bands did not sing in legal language. They sang about life, love, migration, betrayal, work, politics, poverty, humour, urban striving and rural nostalgia.
They were entertainers, yes, but also historians with guitars and philosophers with amplifiers. Their songs are archives. Their voices are documents.
Yet today, someone wishing to use a 50-year-old song by a Tanzanian band in a documentary, museum exhibition or magazine project may discover permission must come from a foreign copyright owner.
Sometimes that ownership is legitimate.
Sometimes it is murky enough to send a determined lawyer reaching for aspirin and possibly a stiffer drink.
Sometimes the original musician never understood what he was signing; he just wanted to hear himself on the radio.
Sometimes families don’t even know rights were transferred.
And sometimes the master recording, the publishing rights and the performance rights have wandered off in entirely different directions, like relatives scattering after a wedding buffet once the meat runs out.
That is where the humour ends, and the concern begins.
We must be honest. Many African musicians, including our own, entered studios armed with talent, ambition and excellent rhythm, but not necessarily legal advice.
They understood harmony better than contracts. They trusted producers, broadcasters and record dealers the way one trusts a relative who “just wants to help.”
Recording a song felt like an opportunity, not a negotiation. In that innocence, many rights may have been lost.
A musician could create a song that became part of a nation’s identity yet fail to secure protections for his own family.
Another could die famous but financially modest, while his music kept touring the world, earning money he never saw, and the song apparently more travelled than he ever was.
This is not uniquely Tanzanian.
It is an African story, from Congo to Ghana, Kenya to Nigeria, countless tales of missing masters and artists discovering, far too late, that applause and ownership are not the same thing.
But since this is a Sunday Giggles conversation, let us bring it home.
What is the status of old ‘Muziki wa Dansi’ recordings?
Who owns the masters, the compositions, the publishing rights, the right to remix, sample, and commercialise them?
Are heirs known?
Are contracts available, valid, and fairly entered into?
Are there foreign entities holding rights over Tanzanian works without local accountability, quietly collecting cheques for songs they couldn’t pronounce the title of?
These are national questions.
And then there is the bigger one: Radio Tanzania, Dar es Salaam (RTD), now folded into the broader memory of Tanzania Broadcasting Corporation (TBC).
Since independence, RTD has been the ‘national lung’. It recorded presidents, freedom fighters, taarab groups, dance bands, drama troupes, sports commentaries and the everyday sound of a country learning to speak to itself.
If one wants to understand Tanzania, one must listen to those archives.
But who owns them? This cannot keep hanging in the air like an old microphone in a forgotten studio, gently swinging, picking up nothing but dust.
Is the owner the broadcaster, the Government, the performers, the composers, or the estates?
Were musicians paid as employees or guests?
Were the tapes catalogued, preserved, digitised, and backed up?
Who can license them today, and who benefits if they are used commercially?
A national archive without legal clarity is rather like a bank vault whose keys are missing and whose security guard retired some 20 years ago, and may, frankly, have taken a souvenir reel or two on the way out.
It is not enough to say, “Hizo ni nyimbo za zamani.” Old does not mean ownerless, free, or dead.
If anything, cultural material grows more valuable with time, because it carries memories that cannot be recreated — no matter how good today’s studios are.
The danger is that while we sleep, others catalogue.
While we debate casually over Sunday lunch, others register quietly on a Tuesday morning.
While we treat our music as nostalgia, others treat it as property with a tidy spreadsheet attached.
That is why the Copyright Society of Tanzania (COSOTA) must be at the centre of this conversation.
It exists to protect authors, performers, producers and publishers, to maintain registers and advise the Minister on copyright.
That is not ceremonial work.
So, what is COSOTA actually doing to map the ownership of Tanzania’s historic musical works?
We need an audit, and not another workshop with a group photo beside a projector screen, everyone smiles bravely next to.
A serious national audit should identify the works, composers, performers, studios, contracts, master owners, foreign claimants, heirs, and the orphan works whose owners cannot be traced.
Lawyers, archivists, historians, surviving musicians, families, COSOTA, TBC and the Ministry should sit together… slowly, if necessary, but together.
Is Minister Paul Makonda aware of the scale of this matter?
Is Permanent Secretary Gerson Msigwa prepared to ask TBC and COSOTA for a proper report on recordings made since independence, and to push for digitisation with ownership clarity?
This is not a call for lawlessness.
Nobody should use a song freely just because it is Tanzanian.
Artists must be paid, rights respected, and owners known.
But it is equally wrong for a country to remain casually ignorant about who owns its own cultural memory.
The government should direct a national audit, COSOTA should publish and verify ownership records, and TBC should complete a transparent inventory of its archives.
Where ownership is clear, rights holders should be paid. Where disputed, claims should be reviewed.
Where foreign entities hold rights, the agreements should be examined and publicly accounted for.
The question is no longer who owns our old songs.
The question is whether we are prepared to find out, before another Tanzanian discovers that a song born in Tabora apparently requires a passport stamp from Hamburg, complete with a visa interview the song never asked for.