They are risking it for the love of music

James and his Compatriot Cholo during their practice session at their neighbourhood in Sinza

They stand in a four-square metre room and sing their lungs out. James Mwigune belts the melody as Hamis Cholo’s guitar fills the room with a powerful sound.

The outside world ceases to exist for as long as the song lasts. The two young musicians formed their band, Tulizo Band, one month ago and like most days they meet to practice in James’ temporary home in Sinza, Dar es Salaam.

The room is almost empty except for a bed and a small desk, a few books assembled on the floor, a guitar tuner and a candle squeezed into a soda bottle.

There is no electricity. The owner has allowed James to stay here for a little while, but his time is almost up. If the owner kicks him out, James will be homeless again. Cholo and James refer to their music as ‘Bongo fusion’ with strong ties to afro-pop, and they sing about their experiences.

“I don’t like Bongo Flava so much, it is always about love. We sing about the real life,” the 27-year-old James says.

They sing about people who work from dusk to dawn doing manual labour, yet at the end of the day the reward is little and at night they drink away their worries at the bar.

 

Hard times

James came to Dar es Salaam alone when he was 19. He has never known his father and his mother died when he was five years old, so when his extended family failed to support him to go to school, he left for the big city.

He didn’t know anyone in Dar es Salaam and he survived off the money he earned from helping carpenters and other craftsmen.

One day while walking around Kijitonyama he came across a certain musician who was singing by the road side

“I thought; if he can play the guitar and sing then I can do the same,” James remembers. He gathered the courage to ask the musician to teach him how to play the guitar, something that he readily accepted.

Even as he learnt how to play the guitar, he still had to pay his rent something that proved a real hurdle.

One day his landlord shamelessly kicked him out. It was a day that James will never forget as it is when he realised that he could pay his bills using his talent.

“After that day I thought; I can do this as a job. It can be my business, my career. When I play in the streets, people come and ask ‘Can you play at my wedding?,” James says.

He now lives off the money he earns from performances, and until two months ago, he was some lone ranger.

Then in mid August, he received a text message from a fellow musician who had watched him play at the Goethe Institute in Upanga, and asked if they could play together.

At first James was reluctant, but the other insisted and when they finally met, he realised that it would be better to form a band than to play alone. Now they are on a mission together – a mission of living off what they love.

“I have decided to live off my music. Sometimes I even sleep in the open, but I can’t live without my music. Music is what I love. Our plan is to find a home together with the money we earn from performances,” James says.

Learning to play

Cholo is the band’s guitarist while James writes the songs and performs as lead singer.

As a teenager Cholo first hesitated to play the guitar. He didn’t look for it, it is the guitar that came to him.

This was at his home in Kinondoni in 2011, just after his mother had passed away. His father didn’t have the money to take him to school even though he wanted to, and instead he accompanied his father to work at construction sites.

Every day when he came home from work he heard the sound of a guitar from one of the neighbouring houses.

One day he went closer to the sound, and his neighbour offered to teach him how to play the guitar.

“Every day for three months I told him ‘I can’t do it’, but he kept asking me until I said yes,” Cholo remembers.

For two weeks the neighbour gave him guitar lectures, but then he suddenly moved, and Cholo began to pay for guitar lessons from another musician in Msasani. For a while he moved between the construction site and his guitar lessons, but the city’s traffic made his days long and tiring.

He then stopped working and asked his father if he could help him with some money.

He used all of it on guitar lessons, then in 2012 he bought his own guitar and started practicing alone. But he couldn’t make a living off the guitar, so he returned to the construction sites again.

One day as he was at work in Kigamboni, laying tiles, he heard the sound of a guitar from one of the nearby houses.

“During our break we sat there in our dirty clothes, and I heard someone playing guitar in the house next to us. When the girl who I thought had played left the house, I went into the house and started to play her guitar.

On her return the girl was astonished that such a talented guitarist was wasting his talent at a construction site. “Why do you do such a work, when you can play?” she asked.

This was to become a moment of breakthrough as the girl’s mother offered to hire Cholo to teach her daughter.

He joined a band that played traditional rumba for a while and then moved on to play with a reggae band.

The upcoming

Today James and Cholo are trying to build their lives as musicians but it all comes with a cost.

They don’t know when they will have their next gig or whether they can find the money to shoot a video and record their songs with proper equipment.

“I want to go to the big stage!” James says and mentions one of Scandinavia’s biggest festivals, Roskilde Festival, as one of them. If he has to sleep on the street for a while to get there, so be it.

There is always a tomorrow, as they sing in one of their songs:

“Every day, every moment, we learn from our mistakes. Today is better”.