Versatility of the <i>Taarab</i> lyric: Local aspects and global influences

'Taarab' is a popular music entertainment in East Africa whose origin is 'contentiously' given as Middle East. It is an art form imported to East Africa perhaps in the early years of the 1900s. Taraab has been variedly looked at, but has generally been seen as a uniform body. This essay sets out to show that from its inception in East Africa, taarab has never been uniform as it started to develop its own characteristics and peculiarities as a performing art. It has been undergoing a number of changes in its musical and lyrical structures. It moved outward to become a popular music instead of being court music, and from being coastal music to being a music that has spread out to inland Tanzania, Kenya, Uganda and Burundi, thus approximating musical structures of these regions as it is assuming new roles and functions. Although in our description we do in passing refer to the whole body of the art complex 'taarab', it is on the lyric that we focus on. This article is written on the basis of findings from field work and library research that have been con- ducted from 2000 to date in a project entitled Local and Global Aspects of Taarab: A Popular Music Entertainment in East Africa, under the umbrella topic "Lokales Handeln in Afrika im Kontext globaler Einflüsse", funded by Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG).