Long before the Voices of Kilimanjaro was born, Tanzania like many other Post-Colonial nations, looked for the means to revive its culture which had been suppressed for more than eight decades by German and then English colonial administrators. What our leaders chose was an experimental educational tool known as the Theater for development. TfD was seemingly well-suited to helping a thinly – populated new nation largely comprised of more than 120 tribes speaking 120 different languages to communicate with one another. The central theory of TfD, advanced by international group of academics, was that traditional theatrical performance tools-including story telling, dance, musical forms, acrobatics, signifying customs-all of them drawn from century’s old traditions, could be repurposed to educate citizens to take an active part in participatory democracy, a foreign concept. For many, including Julius Nyerere, Tanzania’s first head of state, TfD held the key to finding the heart and soul of Tanzania’s suppressed native culture and restoring his people’s identity. Indeed, Nyerere who was popularly known as Mwalimu or Teacher, the highest compliment possible declared early in his Political career, “A country which lacks its own culture is no more than a collection of people without the spirit that makes them a nation”.

To him and his followers TfD made perfect sense as a vehicle for social change and advancement, a huge undertaking even with a strong leader at the helm. The majorities of Tanzania’s population were typically illiterate, had no access to modern communication technology of any sort, and had been injured for generations to a subsistence economy having no access to the great technological strides being made in framing and trade in more advanced countries. The Theater of Development seemed the most efficient tool to move, motivate, even provoke, community audiences to modernize while maintaining their distractive culture.