Sounds of Other Shores is an exceedingly well-researched and detailed history of Swahili taarab, a hybridized poetic musical genre developed by Swahili-speaking Muslims on the Kenya coast, particularly amongst the Mombasa and Zanzibar elites—mostly, but not exclusively by men—during the twentieth century, reaching its height between the first and the second World Wars and extending into the 1950s, with some noticeable traces into the twenty-first century.
Swahili taarab is an eclectic mélange of African, Arabic, and Asian idioms from across the Indian Ocean. The unpredictability and the complexity of its manifestations allow the author, Andrew J. Eisenberg, to analyze the formal aspects of the music in detail, and, within the body of his writings, to refer to several salient theoretical frameworks and hypotheses, such as those of Mikhail Bakhtin, Jan Knappert, and Victor Turner, on appropriation, hybridization, mimesis, and ethnogenesis. A major focus of the book is the fabrication of notions of identity, a complicated, ambiguous, and self-reflexive process, both individual and collective (93), affected by a background of longstanding historic pre-colonial migrations and settlements (including from the Arab lands and Portugal in the sixteenth century), slavery, coloniality, shifting social hierarchies, and, in the 1950s, by the turbulence of independence movements. Contributing to the early and ongoing social hierarchy were “[Western] racial categories,” which led to “social and political in-betweenness, ambiguity and disjuncture” (4) on the coast. Reinforcement of cultural identity came from unpredictable sources, such as the proliferation of Hindi films (pages 67 and 73) as well as the import of Indian instruments (73).
Eisenberg inserts some fieldnote bullets at the beginning of several chapters (or, in the case of chapter 7, within the chapter); these attest to the participant observation mode that he adopted, in addition to his extensive research away from the field, during his many visits to the Kenya coast, starting in 2004. Highlighting some of the carriers of these hybridized musical idioms, he devotes a considerable part of his work to tracing the background and trajectory of several established taarab musicians through case studies, many supplemented by interviews with primary sources, including early recordings (His Master’s Voice 27 and 71, for example) as several well-known taarab performers were no longer accessible to him during his stays on the Kenya coast.
Noteworthy within the text are links to musical recordings that are available to readers online (see page xvii, “Companion Website,” www.soundsofothershores.com) as an integral part of understanding some of the detailed analyses of specific poetic songs and tunes, as well as some tables showing linguistic permutations imbedded in these performances, the result of overlapping cultural contexts prevalent in these settings.
During the early twenty-first century, when hip-hop culture, originating mostly in Nairobi in the 1990s, challenged coastal musicians in an internal hybridization fashion, who developed a style that came to be known as the Mombasani style, a musical trend as much as a continued marker of, and an effort to validate, identity in the face of more national and international trends. The shift to urban (Nairobi) and youth-oriented genres was due in great part to increased access to national and global music through the proliferation of and access to recording studios and to radio/TV outlets, many of which are mentioned by the author throughout the text.
Sounds of Other Shores, with its extensive bibliography, is a major contribution to the study of the centuries-long history of successive settlements on the Kenya coast (Mombasa, Lamu, Zanzibar) and their integral connections to the Indian Ocean, focusing on processes of re-adaptive and conscious manipulations of ongoing identity formation through poetic music. The author also engages us in the theoretical frameworks that shape cultural communities through, in this case, performance arts. The book is, of course, of particular interest to (ethno)musicologists, as the extremely detailed descriptions and genealogy of this transoceanic genre and its bearers offer a comprehensive history of hybridization and models for future research in this and other areas.
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[Review length: 640 words • Review posted on March 3, 2025]