Landmark is level 2 of 4 in the Tanzania Hall of Fame: a first that opened a door, or the pre-eminent figure of their generation in this country. See how the levels work.
Why they are here
She sang taarab into her nineties, barefoot, and was treated in Zanzibar as a living national treasure rather than as a performer.
Fatuma binti Baraka, known universally as Bi Kidude, was born in a village outside Zanzibar Town around 1910 — the year was never recorded and she gave different ones.
She left an arranged marriage as a teenager and travelled barefoot through what was then Tanganyika singing with taarab groups, at a period when respectable women did not perform in public at all. She sang in the tradition of Siti binti Saad, the singer who had first taken taarab out of the sultan's court and into Swahili, and she carried it for the rest of the century — through the sultanate, the revolution, socialism and after.
She was also a teacher of unyago, the initiation rites in which older women instruct young brides, and a drummer, which women were not supposed to be either.
She made her first recordings when she was already elderly, toured Europe in her eighties and nineties, won the WOMEX award in 2005, and was the subject of the documentary As Old As My Tongue. She died in 2013, at somewhere around a hundred, having been declared a national treasure by a country that had for most of her life disapproved of her.
She left an arranged marriage as a teenager and travelled barefoot through what was then Tanganyika singing with taarab groups, at a period when respectable women did not perform in public at all. She sang in the tradition of Siti binti Saad, the singer who had first taken taarab out of the sultan's court and into Swahili, and she carried it for the rest of the century — through the sultanate, the revolution, socialism and after.
She was also a teacher of unyago, the initiation rites in which older women instruct young brides, and a drummer, which women were not supposed to be either.
She made her first recordings when she was already elderly, toured Europe in her eighties and nineties, won the WOMEX award in 2005, and was the subject of the documentary As Old As My Tongue. She died in 2013, at somewhere around a hundred, having been declared a national treasure by a country that had for most of her life disapproved of her.
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