FIFTY international music scholars will be in Zanzibar from tomorrow
to discuss the music of Africa. The four-day discussion will take place at the Dhow Countries Music Academy's (DCMA) premises situated within the Stone Town.
According to Academic Director, Professor Mitchel Strumpf, this will
be the largest gathering of international scholars in the study of the
continent's music ever to be held in the country.
"This conference will bring together scholars from Ghana, Nigeria,
South Africa, Namibia, Kenya, Germany, the United States of America,
Canada, the United Kingdom and France, to team up with their local
counterparts and hear 40 academic papers on studies of African music,"
he said yesterday.
He also confirmed that the meeting, entitled "Memory, Power and
Knowledge in African Music and Beyond," has been organized by the World
Music Programme of Hildesheim University, in Germany.
The Volkswagen Corporation is sponsoring this conference. Two major
keynote presentations will be part of the conference, of which one piece
entitled "Song, Memory, Power and the South African Archive", will be
presented by Professor Christopher Ballantine of the University of Kwa-
Zulu-Natal in South Africa.
The other keynote presentation will be by Professor Philip Bohlman of
the University of Chicago in the USA. It comes under the title "Africa
Aporio: Ethnomusicology in Search of Lost Time".
Both scholars have papers that are widely published and are well
noted in the field of Ethnomusicology. It is for this reason that the
DCMA "is honoured to have been selected to host this extremely
high-level gathering" where scholars in the field of African music can
meet.
The DCMA Taarab-Kidumbak Ensemble, who have just returned from the International Africa Festival in German
