The Zawose Queens: “We wanted to blend the traditional and modern to create something new”

For generations the only role permitted to women in the music of Tanzania’s Wagogo people was to sing background harmonies while their male folk took the spotlight. The traditional instruments of Gogo music were also an exclusively male preserve, the only instrument women were permitted to play being a small drum known as muheme. Pendo and Leah Zawose, collectively known as The Zawose Queens, have resolutely set about changing all that.

“Women in our music were always behind the men and we were never allowed to take the lead,” Pendo tells Songlines via a Zoom call from Dar es Salaam. “I was ten when I first joined my father on stage as a backing singer as that was all the tradition allowed,” she explains.

Her father was none other than Hukwe Zawose, who died in 2003 at the age of 63, and will be known to many Songlines readers from the albums he recorded for Real World in the late 1990s and early 2000s; his spectacular WOMAD performances; or from supporting Peter Gabriel on his Growing Up world tour.

The Zawose Queens with the Wamwiduka Band, Oli Barton-Wood and Tom Excell

A natural ‘showman with a five-octave voice’ who cut a striking figure on stage in traditional feather headdress, the family patriarch had seven wives and 17 children. He encouraged them all to learn and play Gogo music, but the role of the female members of the clan was still secondary and subservient.

Yet, over time, the role of the Zawose women in the family’s music-making began to expand. Growing up in the Zawose village, a multi-generational commune on the edge of the coastal town of Bagamoyo with eight households spanning six plots of land on a dusty hillside sloping down to the Indian Ocean, Pendo and a younger generation of Zawose women started to question and then challenge the old taboos and prohibitions.

They began playing not only the muheme drum in concert, but the hypnotic metal illimba thumb pianos that are at the core of Gogo music. In addition, they played the traditional marimba xylophone and, when the men were not in sight, they secretly used the bowed four-string chizeze.

The family that plays together stays together, and after Hukwe’s death his nephew Charles Zawose briefly took over leadership of the group – before his sudden death in 2004 – while Msafiri Zawose became a solo star. By 2007, a younger generation including Pendo had regrouped as The Zawose Family to release the Real World album Small Things Fall From the Baobab Tree. They continued touring in various iterations with Pendo up front. “The role of women in our music had to evolve and we are part of the evolution. We decided we had to take it in our own hands,” Pendo explains.

Her niece Leah, who is Hukwe’s granddaughter, did not grow up in the family village but in Dar es Salaam. When she first arrived in her late grandfather’s commune, she was untrained in traditional music but literally pushed her way onto the stage during a performance by the family group for some Japanese tourists. There was much male disapproval, but she held her ground.

Fast forward to 2019 when the UK-based producers Oli Barton-Wood and Tom Excell visited Tanzania on a British Council project merging traditional East African music with electronic stylings, put together locally by Aziza Ongala, daughter of Remmy Ongala, another late Tanzanian artist who recorded for Real World.

“I needed to involve some women, which we always have a problem with in Tanzania as the families don’t allow women to fully express themselves musically and artistically,” Ongala explained. “I knew of the Zawoses because my father was on the WOMAD circuit with Hukwe… I brought [Leah and Pendo] into the project.”

Barton-Wood and Excel were so impressed that they subsequently suggested to Real World that they should return and record an album with the Zawose women. Suitably encouraged, Pendo and Leah began writing the songs which now grace The Zawose Queens’ debut album, Maisha.

Sonically, the 11 tracks range from the stripped-back, traditional-sounding to subtle but bold fusions. “The mix of our traditional music with the power of bringing in electronic music not only makes it more accessible, but it makes the music better and stronger, too,” Leah believes. “We wanted to blend the traditional and modern to create something new and to present our heritage to the world,” adds Pendo. A couple of songs were recorded on the beach in ambient style. “You can hear the wind and almost feel it on your face,” Leah says.

The lyrics are deeply rooted in lived experience. On the title-track (which translates simply as ‘Life’) they sing of the struggle for survival and ‘looking for better life.’ On ‘Fahari Yetu’ (Our Pride) they pay tribute to the rich Zawose musical heritage in which ‘granddad is the roots, father is the trunk and I am the branches.’ Other songs touch on love, motherhood, work and the other daily currencies of life. “To be authentic it was important to write about the things we know – our everyday existence and the hustle and struggle to make ends meet,” Pendo says.

Music retains a central place in daily life in the Zawose village, although the approach is now “less regimented” than in Hukwe’s time. “It’s hard because we sometimes have to seek different ways to find an income, but music is still a family business,” Leah explains. “We have uncles who make the traditional instruments to commission and different members of the family have their own bands.”

The Queens are about to undertake their first international tour and will perform at Glastonbury, WOMAD and Africa Oyé this summer. Asked what we can expect from their live show, they burst into a joyous song that renders any further questions superfluous.

“What we’re doing hasn’t been easy,” Pendo says. “It is expected in traditional circles that women should hold back. But by stepping forward we hope we can inspire other East African women to make their voices heard.”

This article originally appeared in the July 2024 issue of Songlines. Never miss an issue – subscribe today