Many Tanzanians like Bob Marley. His music is very popular with many middle aged Tanzanians, as well as younger Tanzanians, including my students. However, these people – largely – have not realized that he is widely associated with marijuana use. Tanzania is very conservative regarding drug use, and while I am sure some Tanzanians grow and use marijuana, the prevailing opinion seems to be that it is an awful drug that ruins your life. Indeed, have an informative leaflet printed in Swahili with a guy in tattered clothes smoking a joint under a tree, which seems to suggest that marijuana is the root of his troubles. Given this, it is very amusing that a very large percentage of my students have Bob Marley bags that depict him, variously, smoking a large joint, exhaling a cloud of marijuana smoke, or hanging out next to a giant marijuana left.
These bags – screen printed black backpacks that cinch at the top – are widely available for purchase throughout town, and at the market. Where they come from I am not sure, but someone is making a lot of money from Bob Marley’s drug image, which is ironic, because the bags are bought – largely – in ignorance of their promotion of stoner culture. Indeed, as far as I can tell these bags are either printed with a Bob Marley stoner theme, or a picture of Obama and his family (this one is far less popular than Bob Marley), and are bought because the bags are cheap, and the faces recognizable.
The bags – which would be banned without a second thought at High Schools across the United States (even in Washington State where the recreational use of marijuana is now legal) – are by far the most popular bag type at Ngara Secondary School, and do not create any problems because of the ignorance of what exactly they represent. So, students walk around in their regimented school uniforms with various deceptions of drug culture hanging from their backs.
I have yet to mention this to another teacher for fear of how they would respond to what is really a completely harmless phenomenon, but I can’t help but to wonder what would actually happen. Would the bags be banned, forcing the parents of many of my students to find them new bags? Or, would the teachers simply shrug it off and say that they are just bags? I have no way of knowing if that has already happened, though given Tanzanian’s overall ignorance to drug culture, I suspect the first scenario represents a likely eventuality when the true meaning of these bags is discovered.