Profile: UCF fine art student visits Tanzania

Karibu sana Bagamoyo by Natasha Pike

BA(Hons) Fine Art student Natasha Pike decided to enrich her educational experience with a study trip to Tanzania. This is her story...

The first thing that hit me when I stepped off the plane in Dar es Salaam (Tanzania) was a wall of humid heat and the “smell” of Africa. Both were distinctive and unfamiliar at first but I quickly grew to love this…and now I miss it! I was greeted by a throng of smiling faces holding cardboard signs as I left the airport. It is much easier to find your name on a piece of cardboard than fighting through hundreds of taxi drivers, tour operators and hotel touts.

Bagamoyo Town is about an hour from Dar es Salaam, by taxi. The taxi journey from Dar costs anything from 30 dollars to 100 dollars depending on your haggling skills; which by the time you leave should have improved tremendously! It is a small fishing town with a beach that stretches for miles in either direction. The sea breeze makes this place cooler than Dar however the heat knocks you out for the first day or two.

It’s almost impossible to write about Bagamoyo in any formal way as it is such an informal place. The people are extremely welcoming and friendly and they love visitors. I found life here sociable, open, expressive, creative, musical, heart warming, laid back, hot, smelly, friendly and generous with big smiles and big skies.


The people enjoy and celebrate every day of being alive…Hakuna Matata. This mindset made it a timeless, non hurried and enjoyable environment to live. I found it most refreshing - especially coming from England where our culture seems to have forgotten this enjoyment of life and people hurry here, there and everywhere for this, that and the other. Once I had adjusted to this timeless pace of life and “no worries” attitude, I felt totally happy and at home. I got used to it very quickly. However, I found that I was still absorbing it by the time I left. Four weeks was too short! I was leaving with many unanswered questions.

Bagamoyo is home to the only art colleges in Tanzania. Bagamoyo Sculpture School and the Sana Sanaa Art College offer courses in music, drama, traditional dance and drumming, English and Swahili. The result of this has seen Bagamoyo as a centre for creative, musical and artistic people from all over Tanzania.

The sculpture school has 37 students varying in age from 16 to 25. It consists of a large, open sided palm roofed building where we worked and had a gallery space. There was also a small palm roofed kitchen area where food was prepared for the students and a small office building for the headmaster, teachers and secretary. The school is surrounded by concrete sculptures of heads, dinosaurs, larger than life women and a crocodile submerged in a pool of water which took me unawares one rainy day...it looked convincingly real!

I made a clay head from a wonderfully patient model, who became one of my best friends here despite my limited Swahili and her limited English! It took me three days to work out how to say “do you need a rest” pmzica. The poor girl! I also did some wood carvings, a creative discipline where the students already excelled. The students were good teachers of the techniques. In addition, I had some tuition in basic drawing and the anatomy of the face and the figure. This is important for their study as their work is often figurative. At the end they gave me a wonderful certificate and I even got graded!

It was a very positive and rewarding experience being at the sculpture school and being able to connect with a completely different culture through art.

The students were wonderful, happy and very helpful. They tend to adopt you! They were very welcoming and I made many friends during my time at the school. As well as tuition from the three teachers, the students liked to practice their teaching skills on their visitors. Their celebration of life and expressive natures is evident in their work. They don’t seem to take themselves too seriously as artists. I am not saying it’s unimportant to them, far from it. But the act of creation is very much a celebration of skills and enjoyment of producing something beautiful. The students had a great sense of humour and everything deserved a smile.

The sad thing is this group of people believed we have a better standard of living, which is true in some respects but I am not so sure I agree. I thoroughly enjoyed the way they lived. To me, it seemed more real. As a muzungu (white person) you have to be aware of, and get used to, the fact that to people within certain cultures you are a walking dollar sign. You need to adjust to people wanting what you have. There is no malice in this. Due to a history of aid there is an expectancy of aid and this I found difficult.

It was a truly wonderful, challenging, and rewarding experience. I found a satisfaction in getting to grips with this culture. Africa for me had an attractive and addictive ugly beauty about it that I loved. There are distinct images that have stayed in my head: children playing in the dusty streets with a football made of scrunched up plastic bags tied together really made my trip.

It was very sad to leave this place and the people who had welcomed me with such friendliness and generosity. Everyone wanted to accompany me to the airport. When the taxi arrived there followed a typically lengthy African discussion about who would fit in the taxi. After 15 minutes I was beginning to get a bit anxious, to say the least, about making the airport in time. As with everything in Bagamoyo, there is no sense of hurry and time seems to make time for these sorts of discussion! That’s the beauty of it.