INTERVIEWS AND FEATURES

AS OLD AS MY TONGUE

Text: Craig Duncan

A new film about Bi Kidude, one of the world's most unusual and charismatic musical talents, premieres in Prague this May.

No-one knows Bi Kidude's real age. She claims to be 113 years old, though the makers of As Old as my Tongue believe she's no older than 97. She is, at any rate, certainly the world's oldest living performer.

It's difficult to separate the facts about Bi Kidude's life from the myths, but there are certain things we can be fairly sure of. In the 1920s, she was a renowned child singer in Zanzibar, performing taarab, an Afro-Arabian style of music unique to the east coast of Africa. Fleeing an unhappy marriage, she left the island to travel barefoot around East Africa with a band of itinerant musicians.

She returned to Zanzibar in the early 1930s, married again, divorced again, and then left for the mainland again. By the end of that decade, she was one of the most popular dance band singers in Dar es Salaam, playing regularly to packed houses at the city's Egyptian Club.. She returned to Zanzibar at some point in the 1940s, and has lived there ever since. Today, she remains a full-time professional musician, regularly singing and playing drums in Zanzibar and at concert halls and music festivals worldwide.

As Old as my Tongue is narrated in great part by Bi Kidude herself. She's a genuinely larger-than-life character, a tireless performer and a sharp-witted raconteur. The film follows her for four years, both in Zanzibar and on tour in Europe. She talks about life and music, while smoking, drinking beer and flirting with men young enough to be her great-grandchildren. She also lets us into the secretive world of Unyago, the Swahili rites-of-passage ceremony for girls about to get married. She has been a renowned practitioner of the ritual since her teens. Unyago involves an all-night festival of singing and dancing. The bride-to-be learns about all the facets of married life, through songs about topics like monogamy, oral sex and feminine hygiene. The Unyago ceremony is one of the highlights of the film, where Bi Kidude delivers graphic advice on sexual technique in song form, while drumming.

The music for which she is most famous internationally, however, is taarab. This style of music began in Zanzibar in the 19th century, when trading ships from the Persian Gulf had to spend three months a year docked at the island, waiting for the winds to change. Taarab thus developed as a blend of mainly East African and Arabian influences and instruments. Performed by a group of musicians or by a lone singer, taarab's centrepiece is its powerful vocal melodies, sung in Swahili. Bi Kidude claims she learned taarab as a street urchin, sitting beneath the windows of early 20th-century singers and memorising the songs. The music of taarab is in some ways a microcosm of Zanzibar itself. In the Indian Ocean just off the east coast of Africa, Zanzibar has long been a key point of intersection between African and Arabian cultures. Andy Jones, the director of As Old as my Tongue, observes:

"Zanzibar is such a melting pot; there are people from all over. What makes you an African, or what makes you an Arab, is as much to do with how you decide to define yourself as how you look, or what your lineage is. You can meet quite light-skinned people who say they're African, and vice versa."

Where group identity is blurred and one is asked to define oneself, it can provide a space for epic myth-making. And the myths surrounding Bi Kidude are not only concerned with her distant past; they're also alive and active in the present.

"It's a small island where everybody likes to gossip," observes Jones. "With any story in Zanzibar, there are always ten different versions, if not more."

Nowhere in the film is this so clear as in Bi Kidude's "resurrection" scene. While she is on tour in Europe, news of her death sweeps Zanzibar. The island is filled with public tributes to the singer, and citizens throng the airport to await the arrival of her body. The plane arrives, and Bi Kidude - who is very much alive and well - rides through the city on the back of a pickup truck, to cheering crowds and chants of "She has risen!" How did the false rumour of her death gain such currency in her homeland? Andy Jones has a theory:

"Surmising from the various stories, it seems as if some of the people close to her, some of her adopted grandchildren, started the rumour because they were running short of cash. If everybody thought she was dead, they could start getting their hands on some of her property. In the film, Bi Kidude says that she was away for a long time, a long tour, so maybe people just thought she was dead. She's being very generous and diplomatic in saying that."

Bi Kidude's philosophical attitude to money is a recurring theme in the film. A striking scene is where, following a European tour, she finds herself wealthy for the first time, and returns to Zanzibar with thousands of US dollars in cash. She moves back into her ramshackle house, and in the space of a fortnight gives away every penny of her money. People line up at her door asking for help: neighbours, distant relatives, strangers struggling to pay medical bills or school fees. No-one leaves empty-handed, and in less than two weeks she has given everything away, telling the film-makers:

"I was born poor. So if I have something or nothing, I am always happy, you get me?"

Of this part of the film, Andy Jones comments:

"This is one thing in the film that I think makes a lot of people sad when they see it. On one hand, it is kind of sad, in that she should maybe have a little bit more to show for what she's done. On the other hand, I think she draws a huge amount of strength from being able to care for the people around her. And it doesn't matter that those people maybe aren't blood relatives, or that some of them may have spurious problems. She's in a position to put her hand in her pocket and give people what they ask for, I think that's a wonderful thing, and it's a great sign of her humanity."

"By Zanzibari standards she's probably not that badly off, in that she's got a house with electricity and running water, she's got a bed to sleep in. But certainly not rich - if you were to look at other divas around the world, she's on the bottom rung. I just worry about what will happen when she can't sing. When she doesn't get that money from singing, and hasn't got the cash coming in, and maybe has to pay for hospital bills. She's just had a hernia operation, and she can't sing for the next four months and can't drum for the next six months. She's got to take a break for a while, so there'll be less money coming in from gigs. And this is the problem: when she's got money, she's surrounded by people, and when she doesn't, there's no-one."

The film will have its first commercial screening in Světozor cinema in Prague. It's a fitting place, because it's also the first cinema in the world that showed the film, at last October's MOFFOM (Music on Film / Film on Music) festival in Prague. Andy Jones brought the film to MOFFOM literally 48 hours after finishing it. With little in the way of advance publicity at such an early stage, the film nonetheless played to a packed house, and took third place in the audience vote for "best film".

In February, As Old as my Tongue had its official premiere in Zanzibar, Tanzania. Around 2,500 people came to see it in an open-air amphitheatre in Zanzibar's Old Fort. And of course, Bi Kidude was sitting in the front row, loudly supplying a running commentary on the film to those around her. Says Jones:

"She'd seen a preview in November, so she knew what to expect. But she was still quite happy to be able to show it in front of everybody else who'd been in the film. We've finished the film, but in no way does the Bi Kidude story stop here. It'll be fascinating to see what happens in the next few years."

As Old as my Tongue
Světozor cinema
Mon 14 May 2000

www.asoldasmytongue.net

THE WIT AND WISDOM OF BI KIDUDE

On sex:"It doesn't matter if your hair is grey, so long as your machine is still working."

On alcohol:"If you want to get drunk, you should respect people, be cool, you get me? If you fight and abuse people, then that's not being drunk. Drinking should be a pleasure."

On money:"What is money, anyway? I've know money ever since the very first Rupee. By the time they introduced the Shilling, I was divorced already."

On music:"I drink, I smoke and I sing. I don't even need a microphone, I just sing."

On being old:"I could still beat you. I'd trick you. I'd say, come over here and help an old woman. Then I'd knock some sense into you with my stick.'"

On retirement:"Music is my life. If I stop singing, how do they expect me to survive?"