In the narrow lanes of Old Town Mombasa, behind carved wooden doors and beneath veils of clove-scented gossip, a musical revolution once took root. It was not loud. It did not march. But it sang—about cheating husbands, co-wife envy, secret pregnancies, and the quiet wars of marriage. And its fiercest combatants were women.
Kenya’s Swahili coast produced its own strain of taarab: one less refined than its Zanzibari cousin but more raw, more local, and, in the hands of Mombasa’s women’s groups, more scandalous.
The Arrival of Taarab on the Kenyan Coast
Taarab, a musical form mixing Arab instrumentation with Swahili poetic traditions, arrived in Kenya via Zanzibar in the early 20th century. It grew from elite roots—Zanzibar’s first club, Nadi Ikhwan Safaa, was founded in 1905 under the Sultan’s patronage—but in Kenya, the genre found a more populist expression. By the 1930s and 1940s, groups like Jauhar Orchestra and individual singers like Zuhura Swaleh were performing in Mombasa, often with accordion and percussion-based sounds more reflective of local ngoma than Egyptian classical music.
Women’s Clubs and the Rise of Verbal Combat
From the 1950s onward, a distinct scene emerged: women-led taarab clubs performing at weddings and female-only gatherings. Malika Taarab and Jasmin Musical Club, among others, gave voice to Muslim Swahili women who used song as social critique. Their audiences were almost exclusively female; their stages were wedding tents and private homes. Their lyrics, however, were anything but polite.
This was the era of mipasho—songs marked by direct insults, personal revelations, and poetic vengeance. These were not mere jabs cloaked in metaphor. Mipasho lyrics exposed co-wives as witches, mocked rivals for body odor, and questioned the paternity of children. In one notorious line, a singer dared her opponent to remove her pants in public to prove she had no scar on her backside.
Verbal Duels: The Rules of Engagement
Like the West African halo tradition, Kenya’s mipasho was often structured around call-and-response insults. The 1970s saw an infamous feud between Mombasa’s Bhalo and Maulidi, two male singers whose war of words grew so obscene that Mombasa’s Chief Kadhi intervened to end it. Their rivalry, fueled by cassette sales and public anticipation, also set the tone for women’s groups, who mimicked and expanded the duel format.
A similar structure appeared in contests between Royal Air Force and Nuru el-Uyun, both female-fronted Mombasa taarab groups. In their performances, musicians hurled insults through metaphor and satire—accusing rivals of incest, theft, or homosexuality. One Royal Air Force lyric described their opponent as a “shark with three legs” preying on children—imagery that was not only sexually charged but deliberately shocking.
Censorship, Morality, and Collapse
The popularity of mipasho triggered backlash. In a deeply Islamic coastal society, women performing publicly—even behind veils—challenged religious and cultural taboos. As the lyrics became more explicit, Islamic clerics and elders began to campaign against women’s taarab. By the late 1980s, most women’s clubs in Mombasa had disbanded or gone underground.
Unlike Zanzibar, where groups like Culture Musical Club were state-supported and archived, Kenya’s women-led taarab groups were left to fade without institutional memory. No full recordings exist of Malika Taarab or Jasmin Musical Club. What remains are fragments—references in academic fieldwork, oral recollections from aging fans, and scattered songbooks.
Swahili Women’s War Songs
The critical academic consensus is that mipasho in Mombasa functioned as a nonviolent form of social regulation, particularly among women. These were not just songs; they were tools of public shaming and emotional retaliation. In societies where direct confrontation was discouraged, music allowed women to say what could not be said openly. Songs were passed from one gathering to another, often used by unrelated women in their own disputes.
One Khadija Kopa song taunted:
“Uzee umekukumba… mwili unanuka vumba.”
“Old age surrounds you… your body reeks of a foul stench.”
Kopa, who later performed with mainland Tanzanian groups like TOT and Muungano, became emblematic of this lyrical aggression. But in Kenya, such invective was rarely tolerated for long.
Zuhura Swaleh and the Chakacha Taarab Revolution
If the women’s taarab scene in Mombasa had a figurehead, it was Zuhura Swaleh. Born in 1947 in Nairobi’s Pumwani neighborhood, she grew up in a predominantly Muslim environment but found her musical identity on the Swahili coast. After a brief marriage in Lamu, where she absorbed local ngoma traditions and wedding poetry, she returned to Nairobi and dabbled in mainstream music. She performed with artists like Fadhili William and appeared in the film Mrembo, but this urban pop scene did not resonate with her.
Her return to coastal music came through her second marriage to Abubakar Mohamed, a taarab singer. She joined his group and began performing at Swahili weddings across Kenya and Uganda. In 1971, she moved to Mombasa, where she first recorded with Zein Musical Party for the Mzuri label, then formed her own group: Zuhura Swaleh & Party.
What set her apart was her commitment to creating a new, coastal-rooted sound. Collaborating with Mohamed Kombo, a player of the electrified taishokoto (a Japanese string instrument), and accordionist Juma Khamis “Bajees”, Zuhura crafted a fast-paced style based on chakacha—a Swahili ngoma rhythm associated with female dance, sensual movement, and often ribald lyrics. It was a shift away from the Bollywood-inspired taarab that had previously dominated Mombasa.
Her lyrics, often co-written with Kombo and shaped by poets like Sheikh Ahmed Nabhany and Khuleita Muhashamy, were sharp, socially aware, and bold in voicing women’s concerns. The result was not only a musical innovation but also a cultural intervention. Through wedding performances, cassettes recorded at Mbwana Radio Service, and pirated copies that circulated widely, Zuhura’s chakacha-taarab became the soundtrack of coastal women’s defiance.
By the late 1970s, her music had influenced emerging styles across East Africa. In Dar es Salaam, imitators spawned a local version of chakacha that eventually evolved into the high-speed, percussive street genre mchiriku. One of its early exponents, Jagwa Music, even called itself Mvita Orchestra—a nod to Mombasa’s influence.
Zuhura’s impact was cut short by commercial and political disruptions. Her vinyl records—some pressed by Polygram in Nairobi in 1981—failed to take off due to format mismatches and the collapse of the industry after Kenya’s 1982 coup attempt. Yet her legacy survives in pirated cassette dubs, now digitized, and in the stylistic DNA of East African modern taarab.
The Silence That Followed
By the 1990s, the Mombasa women’s taarab scene had largely vanished. Imported music from Zanzibar dominated. Keyboard-based, sanitized taarab replaced accordion-and-drum rhythms. The scandalous poetry of the coastal women—once whispered about in alleys and replayed endlessly on cassette decks—disappeared from weddings and airwaves.
Unlike the male-dominated benga and urban hip-hop that flourished inland, Mombasa’s taarab was ephemeral by design. It lived in live performances and in coded Swahili. It never left behind a catalog of studio albums or glossy magazine features.
Instead, it left scars. And smiles. And silence.
Sources:
- Mosoti, E. (2012). Taarab or Songs of Abuse? Verbal Duels in East Africa. Muziki: Journal of Music Research in Africa, 9(1), 13–34.
- Daniels, D. H. (1996). Taarab Clubs and Swahili Music Culture. Social Identities: Journal for the Study of Race, Nation and Culture, 2(3), 413–438.
- Paterson, D., & Graebner, W. (2004). The Rough Guide to the Music of Kenya. World Music Network.