ABSTRACT
This chapter suggests that kidumbak was a ngoma style of the taarab music complex 'that was developed by people of African descent as a result of their exclusion, by politics and economic limitation, from the orchestral version'. This plays up a conceptualisation of taarab characterised by ethnic, class and geographic divisions, where orchestral taarab, at its core, is largely Arab, affluent and concentrated in Stone Town. The conceptualisation is useful since it supports the notion that kidumbak has taarab as its origin and that it is a category of taarab; that it is for dancing and thus is more percussively orientated in its instrumentation. Kidumbak seems to contradict virtually everything pertaining to orchestral taarab. Instead of the large orchestra of Arab and Western orchestral instruments, foregrounding melody, the kidumbak ensemble with its two small dumbak drums, cherewa, mkwasa, one or in some cases two violins and a sanduku - has a percussive orientation, with only the violin providing melody.
