Ian Brennan
speaker
32 appearances
2 recordings
1 series
first heard Jan 2025
last heard 6 Sep
Ian Brennan’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Sep 2026 with 1.
Appearances
is no respect for nobody.
Yeah.
Zanzibar was united with Oman in the Omani Empire from sixteen ninety six to eighteen fifty six and there was a active slave trade, oceanic slave trade, and the main port was in Oman.
And the musicians continue to sing to this day in Swahili dialect, a feature music with African rhythms and bagpipes.
And they are the descendants, most of them, of the people.
people that work the trade or people that were brought over in the trade.
And they sing the songs of those who were brought forcibly by ship to Oman, many songs about longing for home, longing for East Africa.
We went to Oman last summer, meaning two thousand twenty five.
Most of these singers continue to work as fishermen, so we recorded on the beach.
And it couldn't have been a more peaceful and idyllic environment.
And Oman had invested heavily in tourism and it makes it all the more tragic to see what's happened since with the war in the region has completely shut that down and transformed.
Yeah.
Well the assumption is that the bagpipes were spread globally by the British military.
But what's interesting about the region is that archaeological records show that arguably the bagpipe originated in the Arabian Peninsula and this is a very defining instrument there.
Right.
It's an incorporation of of the two cultures that that were in constant communication with each other through these voyages.
The songs themselves repeatedly reference East Africa with titles like You shouldn't treat the man from Zanzibar that way, he is suffering or the boy has just arrived from East Africa and doesn't know how to speak Arabic.
Almost all of them talk about the journeys, the welcomes that they've received, but also the
Experience of the people once they've arrived in Oman.
I believe that it will survive.
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