Dear friends,

Have you ever heard music so beautiful and so alive that you just had to get up and dance? Two years ago, I was lucky enough to stumble upon the Radio Tanzania Dar-es-Salaam archives and found a priceless collection of East African music forgotten by the world for decades. More than 100,000 hours of unique music are sitting on reel-to-reel tapes in danger of being lost forever. For the past few months I’ve been fundraising on the crowd funding platform Kick starter. Now I have a month left, and still about $10,000 I need to raise to make the project a reality!

Here is a quick summary of what I want to do: I want to revive these archives by digitizing them, making them available for online downloads, producing a “Best of Radio Tanzania” CD, and tracking down the musicians whose music is stored in the archives to interview and record them performing. As you know, I’ve lived in Tanzania twice, for a summer in 2007, and for six months in 2009 – 2010, so I know some Kiswahili and I have lots of contacts in Tanzania. I’ve made arrangements with the Tanzania Broadcasting Corporation to set up a workshop to train Tanzanians to help digitize the archives and permanently preserve them for posterity’s sake.

In order to accomplish this project, I am turning to friends, family, and music-lovers around the world. Like I said, I’ve created a Kick starter campaign. To support the Radio Tanzania project, all you have to do is make a secure donation via the Kick starter website. To sweeten the deal, I’m offering a bunch of awesome rewards for people who pitch in. For example, if you make a $25 pledge, you’ll get you a Radio Tanzania mix CD with 21 of the best songs from the archives! For $100, you can get a Radio Tanzania t-shirt, the mixed CD, digital downloads, and more. Here’s the link to the Kickstarter page!

We also have a website (www.tanzaniaheritageproject.org), a Facebook page (www.facebook.com/radiotanzania), and a Twitter feed (www.twitter.com/radiotanzania). Because of Kickstarter guidelines, if we don’t raise the full $13,000 in the next ONE month, we don’t get a dime. We’re depending on people to spread the word and share this project with their networks! Even if you can’t donate now, telling a few friends would really help our cause.

Thank you so much for your time in reading this letter. If you have any questions or comments, please don’t hesitate to reach out to me. I hope you all are well and I wish you all good things for 2012! Also, I’ll be in Tanzania for six weeks getting this project off the ground starting on Monday. If you email me your mailing address, I’ll send you a postcard (writing real letters is my New Year’s resolution).

Asante sana (thank you very much),

Rebecca Radio Tanzania

– Rebecca Elizabeth Yeong Ae Corey Skype: rebecca.e.corey

You can visit Rebecca’s Blog here.

Source: Life-In-Dar Blog