Reviving the Radio Tanzania Archives

How would you feel if you discovered an historic collection of African music, forgotten by the world for decades? And what would you do if you learned it was in danger of being lost forever?

The Radio Tanzania Dar-es-Salaam archives contain over 100,000 hours of priceless Tanzanian music on damaged and deteriorating reel-to-reel tapes, and they need our help. This site was created to raise awareness and support for our project to preserve, digitize, and restore this collection and make it available to the world through mp3 downloads, a ‘best of’ compilation CD, and a documentary film. Check out the video below:

Video | About the Archives | Listen | The Team

Our project has two aims: to save and to share the Radio Tanzania archives.

To save the archives, we will digitize the 100,000 hours of East African music recorded from the mid-1960’s through the 1980’s. This will include providing high-quality equipment for the transfer of the music and training Tanzanian employees/interns to perform the bulk of the digitization. We have spoken with a number of audio archival experts, budgeted costs, and put together a small team of people perfectly suited for this job.

To share the Radio Tanzania archives, we will release a compilation “Best of” CD and website dedicated to the history and dissemination of the music complete with background information, translations, and photographs. We will also produce a documentary film about the digitization project, the history of the archives and the evolution of Tanzanian music, and what makes this music significant for contemporary artists and listeners. The film will include interviews with and performances by surviving musicians.

The Radio Tanzania archives contain priceless treasures of cultural heritage with tremendous academic, historic, anthropological, and entertainment value but their very existence is in grave danger. The material at risk includes ethnographic recordings of ngoma drumming from dozens of Tanzania’s tribes, Arabic taarab, energetic Afro-jazz dance music, political broadcasting used to garner support for independence movements across Africa, and more. Essentially, the archives are an audio-musical history of Tanzania’s struggle for independence and its birth as a modern African nation. The digitization of this collection will be a tremendous good as an act of cultural preservation, and will benefit musicians, scholars, and music lovers alike.

The Tanzania Heritage Project is the organization behind this initiative. Please visit the “About Us” page to learn more.