DANCE AND HISTORY

Julie Malnig, an historian of social dance in the United States, argues that dominant social narratives and ideals become embodied in the movements of dancers, making the dance floor a ‘rehearsal ground’ for negotiations over gender roles, racial boundaries, and class divisions. While bodily movement can reinforce hegemonic social norms and values, it can also sometimes stage experimentation or subversion.Footnote ³ In this way, controversies over social dance often index moments of profound historical change. Drawing on the analytic lens offered by dance historians, this article tracks the rise of dansi in order to examine the relationship between shifting notions of the body and debates about racial respectability, a relationship that became especially prominent in public political discourse in the 1950s.

From the outset, dansi's practitioners cultivated an aesthetic that signified their participation in a universalizing cosmopolitanism – hence their use of the English cognate – yet the social significance of the dance was rooted in established linkages between dance and politics in East African history. As T. O. Ranger demonstrates in his classic work Dance and Society in East Africa, competitive dance has long been an arena for attaining and gaining public recognition for new kinds of prestige and authority. For example, Ranger shows that late-nineteenth century town dwellers in coastal East Africa, drawing on regional traditions of competitive dance, created beni: an eclectic dance mode that drew on the style of a military brass band, and was performed in public by rival groups in competition with one another.Footnote ⁴Beni groups competed for prestige, which they often attained through their embodiment of ‘foreign’ or outside knowledge and style.Footnote ⁵ Given this longer history, dansi's embrace of the foreign was one of its most traditional characteristics.

Also significant to historical meanings of dansi is the role of dance in histories of female initiation. Throughout East and Central Africa, female initiation into adulthood involves female teachers conveying to younger women knowledge about sex, hygiene, and comportment through dance.Footnote ⁶ At Swahili weddings, for example, women dance together in groups, moving their hips in ways that suggestively evoke this shared body of kinesthetic female knowledge. Dansi, by contrast, suggested to observers not just a new activity performed in a separate leisure sphere, but a radical new approach to the body, gender mixing, and sexuality in which the movements of the body were learned and practiced not among females with guidance of elders, but rather developed between young men and women in public spaces.Footnote ⁷ When dansi's critics protested that the young participants were undisciplined, wild, and aimless, they likely had in mind a contrast with earlier practices of bodily cultivation and initiation through dance.

Dansi also drew on longstanding generational tensions between junior and senior men in East Africa. In nineteenth- and twentieth-century East Africa, generational relationships between men have been shaped by the ability of elder men to control youth access to resources and privileges, and ultimately, their paths to adulthood. Senior men had to work hard at this in order to maintain their claims on youth labor, economic capacity, and reproduction.Footnote ⁸Dansi, like other forms of cultural capital that came with wider access to colonial and international circuits of style and wealth, represented new forms of knowledge and opportunities that were unavailable to earlier generations. Moreover, the wearing of Western fashions, purchased with wages, flaunted the increasing ability of youth to buy foreign commodities and access resources, often without the mediating authority of elders. Such overt performances of youth sexuality and economic autonomy likely contributed to growing intergenerational tensions.

By focusing on dance as the site of a contested politics of personhood, I both build on, and depart from, the work of historians and ethnomusicologists who have explored the politics of leisure and popular culture in late colonial Tanganyika. Those who have written about dansi have focused predominantly on the years following the Second World War, emphasizing the linkages between the anti-colonial movement and popular culture. Some have argued that what made dansi a source of national consciousness was that it was an urban activity in which participants transcended the ethnic differences solidified by colonial indirect rule, and discovered a wider national sense of belonging in this urban leisure sphere.Footnote ⁹ Further, Tadasu Tsuruta, Werner Graebner, and Kelly Askew point out that the Tanganyika African National Union (TANU), the political party that negotiated the end of colonial rule and went on to inherit the postcolonial state, used commercial dancehalls and private dancing clubs to spread underground political news, recruit new party members, and raise money in the late 1950s.Footnote ¹⁰ However, to interpret these attempts to use dansi spaces for political ends as an indication that dansi fostered a unified Tanzanian nationalist consciousness is to conflate the political aims of a victorious TANU with historical experiences and motivations that were far more complex. The overlap between some of those who participated in the dansi scene and those who organized for TANU does not mean that the majority of dansi enthusiasts were motivated by anti-colonial sentiment, nor that the most salient struggles over urban popular culture were between African nationalists and European colonizers.

While there is little evidence to suggest that dansi was an explicitly anti-colonial pursuit,Footnote ¹¹ there is ample material that suggests other meanings. Colonial newspapers, archives, and oral recollections of former participants reveal numerous dansi songs about love, sexuality, and virtue; detailed dress and behavior codes which were enforced in dancehall spaces; and heated debates about bodily comportment and social ritual occurring both in print media and on the dance floor. In shifting the focus to these debates, I agree with previous scholars that dansi provoked discussion about race and nation. However, I argue that the connection between popular culture and nationalism in Tanganyika is based not on dansi's place as a site of anti-colonial organizing, but rather on the fact that dansi staged critical debates about the body, race, and sexuality. The appearance, pleasures, and comportment of urban youth were a crucial site in the collective imagination of late colonial Tanganyikans and, as recent work demonstrates, young urban bodies continued to be a flashpoint for nationalist rhetoric and urban identity politics in postcolonial Tanzania.Footnote ¹² Approached from this perspective, the kinds of consciousness expressed and experienced through dansi appear less like anti-colonial consensus and more like a shared terrain of debate, with deeper historical roots.

DANSI, MOBILITY, AND TANGANYIKA'S NEW YOUTH

Tanganyikan youth began organizing dansi parties by at least the early 1930s. In the hilly north-eastern region between the coast and the Usambara Mountains, local youth would gather at an appointed time in a field or clearing, each carrying a kerosene lamp to light their way in the dark. The gathered revelers would include a guitar player and percussionist, sometimes a flute, pennywhistle or trumpet player, or an accordion. A local procurer of tembo (palm wine) would sometimes arrive as well, selling the sweet alcoholic drink to participants. The dancers would set out their kerosene lamps in a circle, creating an illuminated dancing ground, and dance together in couples in what was known as the ‘European style’, facing each other with their bodies close, with hands grasping hands, waists, and shoulders.Footnote ¹³ By the early 1940s, young people were getting together for ‘European style’ dancing across colonial Tanganyika, from the island of Zanzibar to the Great Lakes region, and from the northern border with Kenya to the southern borders with Nyasaland and Northern Rhodesia. Dances were held in open fields, in lean-to thatched shade huts on sisal plantations, in train station waiting rooms after hours, in private residences, in hotels and restaurants, in empty copra godowns and shipping containers, and on the grounds of beer markets.Footnote ¹⁴

Popularized in the 1930s and 1940s, dansi was emblematic of the new forms of status associated with mobility, wage labor, and privileged access to international circuits of style. The cosmopolitan connotations of the dance mode is reflected in reports on the dances, submitted by readers in the 1930s and 1940s to the newspaper Mambo Leo:

These regular newspaper reports reveal the organizers’ attempt to gain recognition for their dances. Particularly prestigious was the engagement of itinerant musicians from distant and glamorous places, such as Zanzibar or South Africa, as it associated the dance organizers with wider social networks.

Reactions to the new dance trend varied according to regional context. For example, in 1930s Muheza, the popularity of dansi among young Christians sparked debate within the Anglican community about their modernizing ambitions. In 1934, a European UMCA priest stationed in the region described the spread of the new youth craze with these words:

To make matters more complicated, African Christian teachers who ran UMCA schools and institutions were among the most avid organizers of the dance parties. The crisis over dansi provoked clergy members to distinguish ‘virtuous’ modernity, based on the family, the church, the home, and a wholesome desire for objects like tea kettles, books, and furniture; from ‘delinquent’ or immoral modernity, based on luxury consumerism, individualistic sexuality, and a reliance on urban wage labor.Footnote ¹⁷ While for many of the young UMCA Christians, dancing was a source of pleasure and social status, to church leaders, dansi challenged their role in distinguishing positive from negative foreign influence.

In other regions, dansi reflected tensions over mobility and migrant wage labor. Such was the case in the North Mara district in the north-west region of Tanganyika, near the Kenyan border east of Lake Victoria's shore, where the guitar and accordion dance parties of local youth irritated the elders of the Native Authority to the point that in 1944, they passed the European Dancing and Possession of Accordeons (sic) Order.Footnote ¹⁸ Dance parties had become a popular pastime of youths in North Mara, including the migrant young Luo men from colonial Kenya who came to the region in increasing numbers beginning in the 1930s, when gold mines were opened at Tarime and Geita.Footnote ¹⁹ The opening of the mines led to an influx both of male migrant laborers from throughout East and Central Africa, and of Luo farmers who migrated to the Tanganyika side of the border to farm and take advantage of the infrastructure and population growth to find new markets for their agricultural products.

The elders of the Native Authority blamed the newfound popularity of dance parties on ‘strolling Luo guitar players’ who they accused of coming over the border, enticing local girls into living with them on the mining compounds, and inciting local youth to rebelliousness and debauchery. The ‘blood-heating’ European dances brought by migrant youth, the elders argued, led to adultery, illicit sex, immoderate alcohol consumption, and violence in North Mara. Based on a set of laws that had been recently passed in the Biharamulo region of the western side of Lake Victoria, North Mara European Dancing Rules made it an offense, punishable by a 200 shilling fine and two months imprisonment, to be found in possession of an accordion or to participate in any party where accordions or guitars were played.Footnote ²⁰

What young dancers celebrated as a liberating worldliness appeared to rural elders and authority figures as aimlessness, cultural loss, and a spiritual homelessness, posing a threat to older forms of authority and social reproduction. Dansi's heterosocial choreography in which men and women danced together in pairs threatened family control over youth sexuality, courtship, and marriage, while the new forms of knowledge and wealth the dancers displayed made them appear less reliant on relationships with elders. Anxieties about this youth population were expressed in popular caricatures, in which observers mocked them for their smoking, their tattered Western clothes, and their parroting of English phrases like ‘halo bradha!’ and ‘my dia’.Footnote ²¹Dansi youth were portrayed as arrogant, libidinous, wild, and lacking in self-control, integrity, and sexual morality.Footnote ²² Other observers portrayed them as superficial, taking part in a civilization that ‘has no meaning’ and was simply for show.Footnote ²³ Sometimes, dance parties became scenes of confrontation between dansi youth and elders: for example, one nighttime accordion party near the north-eastern border with Kenya ended when elders arrived on the scene and shut it down, prompting the young organizer to express his annoyance in the territory newspaper.Footnote ²⁴

Meanwhile in the cities, youth migrants – many of them mission-educated – created dancing clubs in which member dues were used to hire musicians or instruments, secure a space, and print invitations. The aspirations of the members to identify as young and modern are evident in their club titles, such as The New Generation Dancing Club, The Tanga Young Comrades Club, Modern Africans, The Singing Cowboys, Honolulu, and Young Girls Fashion Club.Footnote ²⁵ The organizers of the more exclusive dance parties would send out written invitations in advance, specifying the dress code for the event, sometimes including the colors of jackets and shirts to be worn by men, or the specific cut and color of the skirt for women.Footnote ²⁶ Being able to dress up for dansi required a significant monetary investment, unavailable to most urban Africans at the time, and in setting this dress code, the organizers ensured that only men and women of means could participate. Responding to popular perceptions that dancing was for hooligans, drunks, and prostitutes, members of elite urban dance societies took great care to distinguish themselves as ‘respectable’, crafting by-laws and meticulous codes of conduct for their members.Footnote ²⁷ In letters to the editor in the newspapers, club members stressed dansi's exclusiveness, emphasizing the role of the bouncers in keeping out those who did not meet the dress code, or who had too much to drink, from entering. The dances held by these elite clubs became spectacles of privilege.

Urban migrants used dancing clubs as a way of claiming a kind of status to rival that of pre-existing urban elites, whose communal authority rested on their claims to a local lineage or land.Footnote ²⁸ For example, Kleist Sykes, who James Brennan identifies as a leading figure among the urban newcomers of 1940s Dar es Salaam, upset Dar es Salaam's elite Islamic establishment when, in 1940, he cofounded a dancing club that he called the Tanganyika Islamic Jazz Club. The son of a woman from central Tanganyika and a father of Zulu origins, Sykes lacked the family connections that other Dar es Salaam notables could claim and sought to establish alternative sources of authority and status, through business and political affiliations, and by playing an active role in the Jamiatul al-Islamiyya, an organization charged with, among other things, overseeing Islamic education and religious festivals.Footnote ²⁹ When he formed the Tanganyika Islamic Jazz Club, the town elders denounced the move as blasphemy, sending angry letters and petitions to the provincial commissioner arguing that, by associating Islam with jazz music, and especially with a dance style in which men and women danced together, Sykes was destroying the heshima, or respectability, of Dar es Salaam's Muslim population.Footnote ³⁰ The ensuing controversy revealed competing forms of cultural authority.

Through dansi, Sykes sought both to create a kind of social status based on pan-urban cosmopolitan culture, and to link Muslim identity with emerging forms of prestige. Like other Muslims, Sykes may have feared that the Islamic urban establishment was slowly being marginalized as well-remunerated jobs increasingly went to mission-educated Christians. In one of his letters in defense of his dance club, Sykes listed the Roman Catholic Dance Club and the UMCA Dance Club as evidence that dansi was associated with modern aspirations and leisure, rather than with the religious aspects of identity.Footnote ³¹ Sensing the increasing power of a new generation of modern urban dwellers with Western education, he sought, through modern social dancing, to establish a Muslim presence in the increasingly prestigious secular spaces of the city. However, his position put him at odds with pre-existing urban elites, and the controversy escalated until finally, an interlocutor from the colonial administration convinced Sykes and his collaborators to change their organization's name. The name they chose was the African Jazz Band Club, anticipating the growing importance of race as an identity in late colonial Dar es Salaam.Footnote ³²

Dansi was popularized across East and Central Africa by a cadre of increasingly mobile, and powerful youth who brought dansi with them as they moved throughout the territory in pursuit of education, work, and social opportunities. Dansi was the leisure activity of people who were, or sought to be, connected to a wider world either through their own mobility or through their access to circuits of commodities and styles. These young people included musicians, enthusiasts, and patrons who moved between rural and urban areas. It was in the 1950s city, however, that dansi also became a site of an emerging racial politics.

DANSI IN THE 1950S: RACE, CLASS, AND THE RISE OF COMMERCIAL DANCEHALLS

By the end of the 1940s, the inter-rural movement of youth between towns, villages, plantations, and mines gave way to an intensified flow of rural youth into the expanding urban centers.Footnote ³³ As Frederick Cooper shows, this transformation was concurrent with a shift across colonial Africa towards a policy of ‘stabilization’ in which colonial governments attempted to replace a constantly migrating population of male laborers with a permanent urban African working class.Footnote ³⁴ In an attempt to foster ‘civic virtue’ in this emerging African urban cadre, colonial officials and philanthropists built community centers, in what Andrew Burton calls an attempt at ‘social engineering’.Footnote ³⁵ Initially intended for demobilized soldiers who had fought for the British in the Second World War, the community centers offered classes in literacy and personal finances for men, and in assorted domestic skills such as sewing and childrearing for women. The community centers sustained themselves financially by holding dances in the evenings, selling entrance tickets and drinks to urban residents. To the continual dismay of colonial administrators, the weekend dances were consistently packed with enthusiastic participants, while the educational programs were poorly attended, betraying a gulf between state visions and popular urban aspirations.Footnote ³⁶

Meanwhile, African and Asian urban entrepreneurs opened commercial dancehalls, nightclubs, cinemas, and cafes in an attempt to profit from this growing urban consumer class. With the move of dansi from private dancing clubs into spaces of commercial leisure, participation was reframed based on one's ability to pay the entrance fee and wear the proper attire, rather than on membership in an exclusive club. In a limited sense, the rise of a commercial leisure sphere democratized dansi, allowing for cross-class interactions in urban spaces, yet at the same time, growing urban inequalities were increasingly visible both in dance practices and in the urban geography of leisure. These tensions played out in dancehalls through struggles over style, movement, and comportment.

By the late 1950s, businesses attempted to capitalize on dansi's modern connotations by using images of dancing couples to market elite consumer items. Advertisements in the newspapers showed African couples dancing, alongside slogans and vignettes urging them to avoid the embarrassment of looking old at the dancehall by purchasing painkilling joint cream; to use deodorizing powders so they could stay fresh while out on the town; or to drink the brand of beer associated with the hottest spaces of commercial leisure. In these advertisements, dancing and its related forms of consumerism were associated with physical fitness, heterosocial interaction, and upward mobility.

Meanwhile, urban migrants used dancehalls to fashion a sense of cultural sovereignty. In coming to the city, young men and women risked weakening their access to established paths to adulthood available in their rural communities. At the same time, once arrived in the city, colonial racism, pre-existing urban hierarchies, and economic hardship shut many of them out of opportunities to advance in urban society. Most urban migrant youth lived as dependants in the households of relatives, while those without relatives in town typically faced suspicion from landlords who were reluctant to rent to young bachelors.Footnote ³⁷ In contrast with an urban setting in which migrant youth were often presumed by more established urban residents to be wahuni, or ‘hooligans’, dancehalls were spaces of conspicuous self-display where young urban men and women deployed fashion, dance moves, and an elaborate slang vocabulary based largely on foreign loan words from cinema and imported music as a way of claiming a new urban identity based on consumption, romantic courtship, and privileged access to cosmopolitan cultural knowledge.Footnote ³⁸

Dansi was highly open to the incorporation of new movements, like the twist, the foxtrot, the jive, and the tango, but the rumba in particular became emblematic of the era. The rumba's central hip-rotating movement shared much in common with popular street dances and particularly initiation dances, which was likely part of what made the rumba seem controversial and sexually explicit to some observers.Footnote ³⁹ The rumba was popularized further by the widespread dissemination of the Cuban HMV records in East Africa in the 1940s.Footnote ⁴⁰ As a dance mode, the rumba had both intimate and cosmopolitan connotations.

In towns, dance bands functioned as social networks, with musicians at the center. Close to their inner social circle were young men who became part of the band by performing tasks such as collecting money at the door at shows, setting up equipment, acting as bouncers, or walking through the streets of town with a megaphone, shouting the time and location of the dance and singing the praises of the band.Footnote ⁴¹ Patrons and fans were also part of these networks, and many, if not most, urban youth dansi enthusiasts identified as loyal to one particular band.Footnote ⁴² As in other modes of competitive dance in East Africa, the size of the crowd that attended the dances brought prestige on a band and its followers.Footnote ⁴³ In addition to attracting the greatest number of people to their shows, it was important to attract a crowd that was well dressed, and bouncers often turned away or chastised improperly dressed people.Footnote ⁴⁴

Musicians, fitting neither the models of masculinity that had been available in their rural villages nor the new masculinity of the educated elites employed in salaried positions, established themselves as public intellectuals of East Africa's growing cities, drawing on a long Swahili tradition of shairi poetry performance, in which poets expressed moral commentary through verse.Footnote ⁴⁵ By the late 1950s and early 1960s, urban musicians sang about the troubles of urban life; their ambivalence at having left behind their rural homes, the problems of unemployment and chronic poverty, and their love and fear of urban women. Dancehalls were face-to-face communities, and songwriters often wrote songs about particular members of the audience. Sometimes, the songs would take sides in a quarrel between friends, while at other times, songs would contain praises of a beautiful girl that a band member was hoping to impress. Often, these songs would become a public commentary on the behavior of specific people – especially young women – in the neighborhood.Footnote ⁴⁶ This is likely the case with the song ‘Unavunja Utu’, or ‘You give away your humanity’, written and recorded by Salum Abdallah and Cuban Marimba in the 1950s. Abdallah sings:

Here, Abdallah not only publicizes his disapproval of his, or a friend's, former lover's behavior, but also expresses a broader sense of injury that stemmed from African youths’ frustrating experiences in a segregated colonial city, where sources of wealth and prestige seemed disproportionately in the hands of foreigners. Abdallah subtly links the struggles of young African men to attain social status and female companionship with the broader evil of racial inequality.

Indeed, the self-consciously cosmopolitan identification of dansi proved fertile ground for a growing urban racial politics in the 1950s. In 1952, Dar es Salaam businessman Ramadhani Mwinshehe advertised his famous nightclub and guesthouse, located in Ilala, a densely populated African neighborhood in Dar es Salaam, with these words:

Mwinshehe appealed to his clientele as a community connected, across colonial boundaries, by a shared racial identity. In telling his potential customers ‘no person should be afraid’ to arrive in the city, he evoked a shared experience of dislocation and fear, proposing racial solidarity in spaces of cosmopolitan urban leisure. By the mid-1950s, Mwinshehe's guesthouse had become one of Dar es Salaam's most famous nightclubs, featuring such illustrious acts as the Dar es Salaam Jazz Band and Salum Abdallah's Cuban Marimba Band.Footnote ⁴⁹

While part of dansi's appeal had to do with the fantasy of participation in a universalizing cosmopolitan modernity, the variety of establishments created in 1950s Dar es Salaam reflected a stratified urban geography. Dance band musicians carried their instruments and skills across social boundaries, moving from the hotel ballrooms of downtown, where elite couples wore tuxedos and gowns and danced the tango; to the nightclubs by the ports where foreign sailors mixed with local youth; to the neat and tidy poured concrete white-washed government community centers with corrugated iron roofs and a midnight curfew; to bars and nightclubs, like Mwinshehe's, in densely populated African working class neighborhoods.Footnote ⁵⁰ Bakari Majengo, a musician who played in a wide range of Dar es Salaam establishments in the late 1950s, remembers some of the more upscale establishments as having strict dress codes and high entrance fees, catering to audiences that were wealthy and predominantly non-African. In contrast, Majengo told me that Mwinshehe's Ilala nightclub was a place for ‘Waswahili tu’: that is, ‘only Waswahili’, deploying a contemporary usage of the term waswahili that refers to urban African lower classes.Footnote ⁵¹

Sometimes, widening class divisions led to violent confrontations between young men within dansi spaces; for example, a letter to the editor published in Mwangaza describes a dance in the village of Kigongoi attended by young men from the prestigious Tanga school, who were home during their school break. According to the letter writer, the young women would only go with the Tanga School men. Spurned young local men responded by pelting their rivals with rocks. We get this story from the perspective of one of the attacked Tanga School students, C. Gebson, who ends his letter by chastising the young men: ‘do the youth of Kigongoi want to develop, or to stay behind the times? How will our nation get praise from outsiders this way?’Footnote ⁵² Gebson simultaneously expresses scorn for men of lesser means while evoking an inclusive notion of racial uplift. This account captures one of the central contradictions of the dansi craze of the 1950s. On the one hand, dances staged intensifying inequalities among Tanganyikans. At the same time, a number of participants, like Gebson, saw dansi as a site for the articulation of collective African aspirations. Gebson, a student at an elite school whose graduates would go on to occupy some of the highest government positions in postcolonial Tanzania, was looking outward. Observers and participants like Gebson sought to gloss these internal tensions and viewed dansi as staging a unified African racial respectability.

GENDER, DANSI REFORMERS, AND SPECTACLES OF RACIAL RESPECTABILITY IN 1950S NIGHTLIFE

This article began with Kapaya's commentary: ‘If they [foreigners] see this [dancing], they will say that the people of Tanga have not progressed in the slightest.’Footnote ⁵³ Like Gebson, Kapaya, and other middle-class dansi reformers shared a common frame of reference, responding to the objectionable behavior of urban youth in dancehalls with the frequently repeated rebuke ‘what will they [non-Africans] think about us [Africans]?’ While members of exclusive dancing clubs in earlier days set themselves apart through membership requirements and stringent dress and behavioral codes, reformers like Gebson and Kapaya saw their own aspirations to modernity as linked to the broader political and social status of Tanganyikan Africans as a community defined along racial lines.Footnote ⁵⁴ As such, they sought not only to embody racial respectability, but also to shape the behaviors and appearances of others in public and commercial urban spaces in order to meet this ideal. In this context, dancehalls became sites where middle-class nationalist dansi reformers sought to stage urban spectacles of racial respectability in order to make a broader case for African national sovereignty. In so doing, they implicitly defined their own lifestyles, physical habits, and aesthetic preferences as the epitome of progress.

The images of collective racial uplift produced by dansi reformers responded to negative stereotypes of urban youth, certain aspects of which were shared by colonial administrators, urban African elites, and rural elders and parents. Central to most stereotypes of urban youth was the idea of their threatening mobility, both across the territory and within the city. Critics described women's movements in the city as ovyo-ovyo, or purposeless and wasteful. Likewise, mhuni, the word for ‘hooligan’ that was typically used to describe young urban working class or unemployed men, can be reformulated as the verb huni, which is defined in colonial era dictionaries as ‘to wander about for no good purpose’.Footnote ⁵⁵ Stereotypes implied that these suggestible and aimless urban youth were ill-equipped to handle modern urban life, and by implication, were unfit for political sovereignty. Nationalist reformers took these stereotypes seriously and responded by cultivating an aesthetic of self-control and discipline. One writer named Kasembe expressed these aims bluntly when he emphasized, in his illustrated article distinguishing proper from improper dancehall dress, ‘dansi is a dance for respectable people: not wahuni’.Footnote ⁵⁶

Expressions of racial respectability were highly gendered. The fact that many men went out alone or with friends to dance with unmarried women while their wives remained at home exacerbated the popular perception that dansi was a threat to respectable gender interactions. The Swahili press contributed to these stereotypes by featuring sensational tales and letters to the editor describing women who became so enamored with the earthly pleasures of the rumba that they would abandon their husbands and children to become dancing queens, preferring the thrill of alcohol and a rotating cast of dance partners to the bonds of marriage partnership and motherhood.Footnote ⁵⁷ In commentary and in Swahili serial fiction of the 1950s and 1960s, female characters in dancehalls were often caricatured as prostitutes, spinsters, and pickpockets.Footnote ⁵⁸

Some dansi enthusiasts made a conscious effort to establish urban leisure as a source of modern feminine respectability. In response to claims that urban women were immoral and lazy, female dancers drew on emerging discourses about health and physical fitness, sewing long wide dresses that both covered the legs and allowed for a wide range of physical motion. The young writer Lewis Machame described this aesthetic in a romance story in which the heroine, Rosalind, meets her lover and future husband Julias in the dancehall. The author takes care to distinguish her movements through urban space as practical and purpose-driven, rather than as aimless pleasure-seeking, or as ‘ovyo-ovyo’. Rosalind rides her bicycle to work at the hospital each day, where she works as a nurse, and when her lover offers to hire a taxi to take them out to the dancehall – a mark of prestige – she responds that she prefers exercising her limbs by walking. Rosalind spends much of her leisure time practicing and perfecting dances like the tango and jive. Describing their romance in the dancehall, Machame writes, ‘Julias was delighted by Rosalind's quick and efficient breathing. People were shocked by the synchronization of their dance steps, and the entire dancehall watched them.’Footnote ⁵⁹ Machame's description of the dancing couple in the urban dancehall emphasizes physical training and precision, and lacks any suggestion of the raucous sensuality or improvisation that framed popular conceptions of dance prowess. Some women, especially those who were well-off, practiced and mastered international dance moves by paying to attend ‘tango schools’, dance classes offered in the homes of private instructors. In doing so, they purchased a valued kinesthetic knowledge that allowed them to claim participation in urban modernity, reframing popular dancing as an act of precise bodily cultivation, rather than as an unmoored mobility and undisciplined sexuality.Footnote ⁶⁰

Dansi reformers emphasized physical discipline and self-control as a sign of racial respectability, and they defined this bodily regime through Eurocentric aesthetic criteria. For example, a 1961 self-help article called ‘Dada, Tucheze Dansi!’ or ‘Sister, Let's Dance!’ advised the female readership on bodily comportment in the dancehall, stating that all dance moves should be executed with the back completely straight, without pushing the stomach forward or the backside backwards. One should never bend at the knees, the author advises, and the whole body should glide together in an unbroken vertical line, rather than articulate the isolated movements of individual body parts.Footnote ⁶¹ These instructions for respectable dancing contained an implicit critique of many East African popular dances that were performed in the streets or in the homes on weekends, as most of these dances tended to activate the knees and rotate the hips.Footnote ⁶² The competitive dancing common to the working class dance clubs – often between groups of men arranged into circles or lines, or among women who would take turns hip-shaking and flipping their skirts sensuously in the middle of a circle of onlookers – is what gave the writer Kapaya offense during his foray into the Tanga dancehall in the episode presented in the beginning of this article. In this way, the dancing body became a site of contestation, as some dancers would work traditions of competitive and flirtatious dance into dancehall rituals, while others attempted to maintain strict boundaries between the choreography of ‘modern’ dancing in spaces of commercial leisure and popular dances performed in the streets and in homes.

For dansi reformers, making dancehalls respectable involved the staging of chaste monogamy as a spectacle of African modernity. Young male writers defended dansi against charges of illicit sexuality by recasting dancehalls as places for the pursuit of romantic love and companionate marriage, based on emotional bonds, attraction, and individual choice of partner.Footnote ⁶³ Moreover, many participants, especially married women, argued that entrance be restricted to women with a pre-arranged male partner or husband. These attempts to link dansi with companionate marriage played out in dance choreography as well. Chausiku bint Salim, a self-professed dansi enthusiast from Morogoro, argued emphatically in a letter to her local paper against the common dancehall practices of women dancing with other women, men with other men, or groups dancing in circles and lines rather than in individual couples. Framing her argument in terms of racial respectability, she declared that such behavior would make Africans seem incompetent in the eyes of the world and transform the dancehall from a place of respectability, heshima, to a place of hooliganism, uhuni. Footnote ⁶⁴ By casting the image of a heterosexual couple dancing together in a self-contained unit as a sign of respectability, such reformers linked narratives of racial uplift with companionate monogamous marriage and domesticity.

Dance-goers also used fashion to display their facility in an urban consumer culture increasingly influenced by European aesthetics. Showing that one had access to Western fashions was a prerequisite for participation even for those who could not afford to own their clothing, and it was a common practice for young groups of friends to combine their resources and collectively own a single ‘up-to-date’ outfit which they would take turns wearing out to the dancehall on different nights.Footnote ⁶⁵

Singled out for censure was the buibui: a popular garment worn by Muslim women covering the hair and body, and sometimes, held across the face. The buibui had, a few decades earlier, constituted the epitome of cosmopolitan sophistication in coastal Tanzania and Zanzibar, allowing women to associate themselves visually with the prestige of wealth, purdah, and exemption from manual labor that would have required less restrictive garments.Footnote ⁶⁶ In the 1950s, some letter writers in Tanganyika's newspapers portrayed the buibui not only as an obstacle to emerging ideals of female physical and social mobility, but also as an outdated relic of Arab cultural hegemony. In contrast with the buibui, commentators linked the dancehall aesthetic of long A-line skirts, exposed hair and faces, and pearl necklaces with aspirations to African modernity, uplift, and respectability. Moralizing poetry and letters to the editor not only labeled women who wore buibuis in the dancehalls as backwards, but also held them responsible for holding back the collective image and social advancement of all Africans and inviting scorn and derisive laughter from non-African onlookers.Footnote ⁶⁷

Of course, these ideals of respectable dancehall attire were neither accessible, nor necessarily desirable, to all participants. In a passage from a survey of Dar es Salaam conducted in 1956 and 1957, sociologist J. A. K. Leslie described a visible contrast between women who wore expensive tailored dresses in the dancehalls, and those who wore khanga: colorful fabrics cut in a rectangular shape that were worn wrapped, draped, and tucked around the body:

This image conveys how the attempt of dansi reformers to project an ideal of modern and respectable African femininity also became part of a physical performance of class privilege.

While the intention of some of dansi's reformers and participants had been to choreograph spectacles of racial respectability in urban dancehalls, other nationalist intellectuals saw all dansi practices as an obstacle to collective progress. Dancing, drinking, and socializing with the opposite sex, dansi's detractors argued, siphoned energy and attention away from more serious undertakings, like study, prayer, and homemaking, which were considered necessary to African advancement.Footnote ⁶⁹ Still others criticized dansi as elitist and divisive, excluding poor and rural Africans. Dance and leisure was only beneficial to the race, some argued, if all could participate on equal footing. Others criticized dansi for having foreign origins, and therefore precluding the modernization of an indigenous African culture. This argument reflects the position of a growing number of nationalist public intellectuals who believed that the development of African society would come not from sharing in international styles and aesthetics, but from creating a singular African cultural canon that would unite all Africans as a distinct national culture, allowing their participation in a world of other equivalent national cultures.Footnote ⁷⁰ Yet though the position of dansi detractors differed from that of dansi reformers, both sides shared an emerging perspective that urban leisure spaces were microcosms of the nation, along with its ambitions and ills, and therefore, were potential sites for political intervention.