BI KIDUDE EAST AFRICAN DIVA AND LEGENDARY.. ~ Msongo

Sunday, August 5, 2012

BI KIDUDE EAST AFRICAN DIVA AND LEGENDARY..

2:27 AM No comments


Bi Kidude

It reminds me when Bahati Bukuku called upon her on stage , everyone including me started shouting her name out loud,It was the first time i saw her performing live ,it was at the Busara Festival ..She is a real Legend ,she has an exquisite voice and talented .

Fatuma binti Baraka (aka Bi.Kidude) is a Zanzibari Taarab singer. She is considered the undisputed queen of Taarab and Unyago music and is also a protégé of Siti binti Saad.Bi Kidude was born in the village of Mfagimaringo, she was the daughter of a coconut seller in colonial Zanzibar. Bi Kidude's exact date of birth is unknown, much of her life story is uncorroborated, giving her an almost mythical status.
In 2005 Bi Kidude received the prestigious WOMEX award for her outstanding contribution to music and culture in Zanzibar.

As a child, she was singled out for her fine voice and, in the 1920s, sang locally with popular cultural troupes, combining an understanding of music with an equally important initiation into traditional medicine. At age 13, after a forced marriage she fled Zanzibar to mainland Tanzania. Bi Kidude toured mainland East Africa with a taarab ensemble, visiting the major coastal towns and inland as far west as Lake Victoria and Tanganyika. She walked the length and the breadth of the country barefoot in the early 1930s fleeing another unhappy marriage. In the 1930s she ended up in Dar es Salaam where she sang with Egyptian Taarab group for many years. In the 1940s she returned to Zanzibar where she acquired a small mud hut to be her home. She is known for her role in the Unyago movement which prepares young Swahili women for their transition through puberty. She is one of the experts of this ancient ritual, performed only to teenage girls, which uses traditional rhythms to teach women to pleasure their husbands, while lecturing against the dangers of sexual abuse and oppression.

Bi Kidude has worked with various Taarab groups but her first solo work is called Zanzibar, it demonstrates Bi Kidude at the peak of her performing power .She is now very famous worldwide performing at Brazil ,U.S.A ,German ,Kenya ,Oman ,France and England. No body knows her age but rumors say she is 102 years old ,probably the oldest female singer in the world.