"We are Just Dancing for Simple Fun"
For a small town where locals do not seem to make much money, Iringa is surprisingly not devoid of nightlife spots. Blaring into the town's dark main streets without proper street lighting on Friday nights are sounds of American hip-hop mixed in with distinctive local Tanzanian pop music. Once one walks in, the joyfully dancing local live bands and DJs are joined on the dance floor by crowds grooving to tunes that are often not found in Western clubs dominated by electronic or house music.
The term "dance floor" here does not imply a special setup with step-up stages or bright lighting one would normally find in, well, mega-clubs across not just the West but part of Asia where Western-style clubbing has taken root. Here, nightspots are simply restaurants that open until very late at night and serve alcohol. They put on the music and clear a piece of empty space off their usual dense assortment of dining tables and chairs, allowing enthusiastic diners to congregate in the middle to let themselves loose. Keeping the place dark and the music loud more than makes up for lack of sophisticated sound and light systems.
These restaurants' inventory of alcohol is not spectacular but can also not be called underwhelming. The usual types and brands of hard liquor are very much available, and given the local bottling of the same, the prices are cheap enough that some may doubt their qualities. For instance, a bottle of vodka that can go for at least 20 USD elsewhere can be had, with the same brand, looks, and size for 5-6 USD in the markets. Surely mixing them at the restaurants, with locally bottled juices and soft drinks, which can be as little as 0.5 USD per large bottle in markets, cannot be that expensive.
The beer selection also displays the power of local production. Brands such as "Serengeti," "Safari," and "Kilimanjaro" line the fridges, allowing easy memorization and marketing while getting in touch with the country's famed natural environments. While the tastes are not particularly special in any sense, for the price, at about 1 USD per large bottle, and the sheer availability, they are perfectly adequate companions for a long night out with friends and colleagues. They are the "everyone's drinks," consumable for the least well-off urban residents of this little town.
And it is perhaps the cheap beers gives a low barrier to entry for these nightspots. People from all walks of life seem to converge toward the loud music on a Friday night. My outing in the town's two most popular watering holes saw not just the usual array of young men and women, but also elite-looking middle-aged businessmen in suits, gritty local shop-owners from down the street, and those who look like they are from the rural outskirts motorbiking their way into the town for some fun. A diverse set of people mixing into the dance floor is quite a sight in itself.
It is fortunate that the foreigners remain small in this great mix of different community members. In the more tourist-receiving parts of Africa, nightspots have transformed to the point that they exist primarily to target foreigners with money, especially for girls providing "special services" after dancing. Foreigners frequenting those establishments would not realize just how ingrained the same idea of clubbing is in a, for lack of a better word, primeval stage of infrastructural development. The mentality, however, is absolutely the same, with people letting it loose spontaneously with upbeat songs in the background.
Come to think of it, the belief that clubbing is a Western concept may be an Asian one. Modern-day Western hip-hop and dance music has original roots in the African traditional music brought by the earliest Africans crossing to the Americas involuntarily. The fact that they are modified in the West over course of centuries and only brought to Asia in the last few decades can imply just how little Asians know about the concept of dancing to music. Asian belief that dance music comes from the West ignores their origins in these African nightspots where people have been happily dancing away for millennia.
Of course, Asians had their own dance music historically. But the idea that common people, rather than designated and/or trained dancers, getting together to move to music spontaneously was indeed only present in few remote tribes in the depth of isolated mountains. Even today, nightspots in Asia cannot possibly rival the inclusiveness that one would see here in rural Tanzania. Ultimately, the fashion, the music, the alcohol are not what set a good club apart from a bad one, but the energy and enjoyment of the club-goers. And by these criteria, these little establishments in Iringa have beaten every high-end nightspot that I have been to in Asia.
The term "dance floor" here does not imply a special setup with step-up stages or bright lighting one would normally find in, well, mega-clubs across not just the West but part of Asia where Western-style clubbing has taken root. Here, nightspots are simply restaurants that open until very late at night and serve alcohol. They put on the music and clear a piece of empty space off their usual dense assortment of dining tables and chairs, allowing enthusiastic diners to congregate in the middle to let themselves loose. Keeping the place dark and the music loud more than makes up for lack of sophisticated sound and light systems.
These restaurants' inventory of alcohol is not spectacular but can also not be called underwhelming. The usual types and brands of hard liquor are very much available, and given the local bottling of the same, the prices are cheap enough that some may doubt their qualities. For instance, a bottle of vodka that can go for at least 20 USD elsewhere can be had, with the same brand, looks, and size for 5-6 USD in the markets. Surely mixing them at the restaurants, with locally bottled juices and soft drinks, which can be as little as 0.5 USD per large bottle in markets, cannot be that expensive.
The beer selection also displays the power of local production. Brands such as "Serengeti," "Safari," and "Kilimanjaro" line the fridges, allowing easy memorization and marketing while getting in touch with the country's famed natural environments. While the tastes are not particularly special in any sense, for the price, at about 1 USD per large bottle, and the sheer availability, they are perfectly adequate companions for a long night out with friends and colleagues. They are the "everyone's drinks," consumable for the least well-off urban residents of this little town.
And it is perhaps the cheap beers gives a low barrier to entry for these nightspots. People from all walks of life seem to converge toward the loud music on a Friday night. My outing in the town's two most popular watering holes saw not just the usual array of young men and women, but also elite-looking middle-aged businessmen in suits, gritty local shop-owners from down the street, and those who look like they are from the rural outskirts motorbiking their way into the town for some fun. A diverse set of people mixing into the dance floor is quite a sight in itself.
It is fortunate that the foreigners remain small in this great mix of different community members. In the more tourist-receiving parts of Africa, nightspots have transformed to the point that they exist primarily to target foreigners with money, especially for girls providing "special services" after dancing. Foreigners frequenting those establishments would not realize just how ingrained the same idea of clubbing is in a, for lack of a better word, primeval stage of infrastructural development. The mentality, however, is absolutely the same, with people letting it loose spontaneously with upbeat songs in the background.
Come to think of it, the belief that clubbing is a Western concept may be an Asian one. Modern-day Western hip-hop and dance music has original roots in the African traditional music brought by the earliest Africans crossing to the Americas involuntarily. The fact that they are modified in the West over course of centuries and only brought to Asia in the last few decades can imply just how little Asians know about the concept of dancing to music. Asian belief that dance music comes from the West ignores their origins in these African nightspots where people have been happily dancing away for millennia.
Of course, Asians had their own dance music historically. But the idea that common people, rather than designated and/or trained dancers, getting together to move to music spontaneously was indeed only present in few remote tribes in the depth of isolated mountains. Even today, nightspots in Asia cannot possibly rival the inclusiveness that one would see here in rural Tanzania. Ultimately, the fashion, the music, the alcohol are not what set a good club apart from a bad one, but the energy and enjoyment of the club-goers. And by these criteria, these little establishments in Iringa have beaten every high-end nightspot that I have been to in Asia.
Comments
Post a Comment