ZUHURA SAID KHAMIS

Taarab voice of Stone Town who sang through weddings, monsoons and half a century

At weddings in Stone Town, the moment the oud tuned up, the older women would fold their kanga on their laps and murmur, 'Zuhura is here.' For fifty years the voice of Bi Zuhura Said Khamis carried across courtyards, rooftops and the quiet harbour of Zanzibar: low and smoky at the start of a song, then rising, slowly and without apology, until the whole room sighed together.

She was born in 1944 in Stone Town, the daughter of a clove trader and a seamstress, and grew up in a house in Mkunazini where the neighbours' radios competed with the call to prayer. She sang her first public taarab at fourteen, at a cousin's wedding, and was invited to join the Culture Musical Club's chorus in 1962. By 1970 she was its lead singer, and she stayed for thirty-five years, performing the poetry of longing, jealousy and forgiveness in the polished Swahili of the coast. She wrote many of her own verses, often late at night, and recorded for Radio Tanzania Zanzibar until the cassette era made her a star in Mombasa, Dar es Salaam, Muscat and beyond.

She married Hamad Juma, a dhow captain, in 1968, and for thirty-one years waited for him through every monsoon. She collected kanga, and could say things with them that she would not say aloud: one with a proverb for a rival, another for a bride, another for a friend who needed mending. Her kitchen smelled of pilau with cardamom and cloves, and no visitor left without a piece of sweet halua. From 2005 she taught taarab to girls of the neighbourhood, in her own courtyard, for nothing.

Bi Zuhura died peacefully in her sleep in December 2023, after the dawn prayer, aged seventy-nine. She leaves four children, eleven grandchildren, and a voice that Zanzibar will keep singing.

“Sing it as if the sea is listening, and it will answer.”