Masai Lady Sings the Blues

With her long dreadlocks, angular cheekbones and toothy smile, Carola Kinasha was a notable presence around town. Most striking was her sonorous voice, which patrons at select hotels and restaurants in Dar instantly recognized. I heard her sing at a benefit concert and at diplomatic functions and private parties.

Carola Kinasha singing the music of her soul

Carola told me that singing was the language of her soul. She’d grown up in a home that was always filled with music. Her Masai father, who taught himself how to read and write by studying the Bible, was one of the first missionaries to bring the Christian message to his ethnic group in northern Tanzania. He was an accordion player who impressed upon his children the value of a good education and music. All of Carola’s seven siblings had played instruments when they were growing up, and her mother sang in the village choir in Longido. Carola was a self-taught guitar player who never learned to read music.

She told me that her father had broken with tradition by not allowing his daughters to undergo female circumcision. As a teenager, it was hard for her not to take part in the initiation ceremony with her peers, but later she was grateful for her father’s progressive views. He sent her to a boarding school with her sisters and then to the University in Dar es Salaam where she studied French and International Relations. Because there was no music program at the University, Carola started a country-wide campaign to bring music education to schools.

It was her mission to speak out on behalf of women at cultural events in Tanzania, and to explain Masai cultural practices and the situation of women in her ethnic group. She said that polygamy had both positive and negative aspects for women in semi-nomadic societies like the Masai’s. Women often moved far from their own families, and they formed close relationships with their co-wives. Traditionally, houses belonged to the women as did their children, and men moved between one wife’s house and another’s. The downside of this practice was that men who migrated to cities for work might return to their wives with sexually transmitted diseases like HIV.

Carola and her husband had formed a band in the 1990s called Shada, and they released a handful of albums/CDs over the years. They fused traditional and modern music with Masai rhythms, incorporating Congolese and South African influences to create a unique Tanzanian sound that resonated with international audiences. Carola and her husband composed most of their own music; haunting tunes that expressed the joys and mysteries they found in life.