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’Bunge’ can be pivotal on the dress question
2006-07-16 10:05:46
By Editor
The issue of a national dress for Tanzania ’’behaves’’ like bouts of malaria or outbreaks of cholera.
It vanishes and resurfaces, and, like those diseases, it has defied consensus, in the same way as the diseases have defied absolute prevention and cure.
A few years ago, a contest of sorts was held to find and adopt two sets of a national dress: for males and females. It didn’t yield the desired results and some critics characterized it a laughable fiasco.
Some people feel, and they have a point, that a national dress, like everything cultural, evolves and cannot (should not ) be imposed, legislated for, or discovered through a contest.
It is indeed a tricky question. A national dress cannot be a product of simple creativity such as is channeled into creating a uniform for primary school pupils, daladala bus crew, bank clerks, hotel waiters and security guards.
We have thus (at least for now) settled for everyone wearing whatever one pleases, insisting, though, that one should be presentable: clean, smart.
Even if a national dress were found, wearing it would largely be optional and not compulsory.
We would not have a national dress code that would in effect ’’uniformise’’ Tanzanians, and possibly non-Tanzanians who would happen to be working or living in our country.
Our august House, the National Assembly (Bunge), is guided and bound by a dress code for male and female legislators.
This is the code over which a honourable lady MP run into brief trouble recently when the Speaker asked her to leave the chamber and return after rectifying some aspect of her dressing that had violated the code.
The Speaker was doing his job by ensuring that the rules, regulations and procedures that govern business in the House are adhered to and enforced.
Under the code, MPs are not ’’uniformed’’, but are confined to a few dressing styles or formats. We wish to submit, humbly, though, that given our fairly advanced age as a nation, the code should be reviewed, to omit or relax some aspects that are carry-overs from the long past.
Importantly, too, some aspects may be incorporated to reflect cultural Africanness and Tanzanianness.
While one MP may fancy a western suit, for instance, another would feel comfortable in, say, a nicely tailored kitenge shirt, but which, Bunge-wise, is now deemed inappropriate.
Our Bunge should, we feel, be instrumental in projecting African, Tanzanian culture, dress-wise.
It could, as representative of the aspirations of the Tanzanian electorate, even act as the agency for evolving a national dress.
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