City Sisters navigating the Glocal Mediascapes in Dar es Salaam

Authors

  • Ylva Ekström

Abstract

While I did research about the changing media scene in Dar es Salaam and its relation to youth in the city and youth culture during a number of fieldwork periods between 1999 and 2005, a topic was “in the air”. The comic strip below by Tanzanian cartoonist Fred Halla serves to illustrate this topic quite well. It narrates the idea that years back, the young Tanzanian woman was expected to obey the strict conventions of society, here symbolically maintained by an older man with a stick, enforcing the performance of proper and respectable femininity. She was expected to live up to the ideals of a ‘traditional African woman’, and as such stay away from things and behaviors regarded as ‘Western’ and ‘modern’.

Author Biography

Ylva Ekström

Ylva Ekström has conducted research in Tanzania about the changing media, youth and gender during a number of field trips during the last decade. She defended her PhD thesis “We are like Chameleons” Changing Mediascapes, Cultural Identities and City Sisters in Dar es Salaam at the Department of Informatics and Media, Uppsala University, and is currently a lecturer in Communication for Development at the School of Arts and Communication (K3), Malmö University College.

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Published

2010-12-01

Issue

No. 15 (2010)

Section

Articles