Even if some people discriminate against my profession, I see dance as a way to involve my community and send important messages to society.
Here in Tanzania, dancers and artists in general are not well regarded. Most people around me think that I should just have focused on becoming an engineer, electrician or a doctor. But this is what I love. Dance gives me freedom and makes me feel like I have all I need. It is basically my lifeline.
When I was a kid, my mum encouraged me to develop my talents. She raised me on her own with help from my grandma and my uncle. My dad left us when I was ten and from then on we lived a very difficult life. I never got to understand why he left, but I don’t like to despair. I tend to cherish what I do have and move on. I am grateful that my mum stayed with me. She has always been very supportive, also when I came home and told her that I wanted to go to a dance school. I know she had high hopes that one day I would become a professional dancer. And she turned out to be right!
As a fresh graduate, I wasn’t afraid to take a leap. I wanted to do what I was good at, so when I needed a job and couldn’t find one I liked, I created my own. That is how I founded WakaWaka Dance & Theatre and my own personal brand @Dancer Zingo in 2010. The dance crew I started became my friends for life, but the journey was not easy because we built everything from scratch. It was difficult to find gigs and inspire the team back in the days when we were still unknown. We had no connections or equipment and the environment where most of us came from also made it challenging to keep the group together. People would miss trainings or wouldn’t show up for gigs simply because they couldn’t afford transport. There were times when I really felt the pressure of having to sustain them and pay their salaries.
Step by step we moved forward, taking every small opportunity we could get to invest in our own equipment. Now ten years down the line, we have our own studio in Dar es Salaam and we teach drum, singing, yoga and of course dance classes. In everything we do, we stay very much connected to society. My passion is to write choreographies that teach people about important topics like human rights and climate change. Recently I got inspired by the time I used to live on the streets, so we started a new project that uses dance and music to make society more aware about how street kids live and what their needs are. We hope that through a better understanding, organisations or just anyone in society will be inspired to help them one way or the other.
Now during Corona, I had to be creative to make ends meet. Most of our work has been cancelled because it needs people to come together, so we are now doing most of our dance classes online. It is important for the government not to forget artists like us during these uncertain times. While the work we do is mostly informal, we still contribute to the economy in many different ways. And not only that, I really believe that we inspire and teach new generations. I hope that one day in the future, my team and I will get to do that across all of Africa and maybe even the world. But even if that doesn’t happen, seeing how much each and every of my crew members has grown and knowing that I was able to support them during that journey is enough to make me a happy person.