Kibiriti Ngoma: Gender Relations in Swahili Comics and Taarab-music

Kibiriti Ngoma is a Swahili slang expression, which is a despising descip- tion for a woman with the meaning of prostitute. In Tanzania this term became that common in everyday life that it was chosen to be the title of a Taarab song as well as the name of a comic magazine. This arti- cle compares the use of the term Kibiriti Ngoma in these two genres of popular art in Tanzania thus highlightening the popuar discourse on gender relations and sexuality in East Africa. Comic magazines and Taarab music as forms of popular culture serve in this article as an ana- lytcal lens to understand social processes.