2025 SMUS Arts-Based Scholar
Alma Simba is a historian and sound practitioner whose work explores ancestral heritage through both academic research and non-academic approaches. She focuses on how indigenous Black Africans engage with history through oral traditions, memory, and imagination, with particular attention to Tanzanian heritage and oral histories shaped by violence and dislocation. Her artistic practice draws on the textures of urban life—recorded sounds, conversations, and readings of her writing—blending historical research with experimental sound and creative writing. Rooted in Black, feminist, and post-colonial perspectives, her work makes history accessible beyond academic spaces.
In 2021, Alma completed a resisterr workshop at Ajabu Ajabu where her poetic sound piece “the truest archive” explored the gendered worldview of her home city, Dar es Salaam, through field recordings, recited poetry and city sounds.
Alma Simba holds a Bachelor’s in International History from the London School of Economics and Political Science and a Master’s in History from the University of Dar es Salaam.
Her areas of expertise and interest are in: Gender History, Cultural Heritage, Urban Heritage and Women’s Issues.
The Project:
In her multidisciplinary project “Niko njiani…Nimefika” – Transit/Arrival: Women and Being in Urban Spaces, Alma will be exploring women’s histories, realities, and challenges in Tanzanian urban spaces. Drawing on historical and contemporary perspectives, the project examines how women navigate exclusionary city infrastructures, from colonial planning to present-day transport and public spaces.
Focusing on transit (daladala, boda, bajaj) and arrival (access to public spaces and facilities), the work highlights how women use transport systems to access livelihoods and healthcare, while also confronting harassment, unsafe conditions, and gendered exclusions in urban life.
Through poetry, experimental sound, and scholarship, the project will culminate in a public exhibition at the Ajabu Ajabu audio-visual house, Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, in December 2025.
A Selection of Alma’s Past Projects and Links to her work:
Alma Simba is a published poet, with her two poems featured in the recent book publication “African Urban Echoes: A Poetry Anthology” (2025, Griots Lounge Canada). Alma’s poetry explored the dynamic, gendered experience of African cities.
Poet in Residence SAPIENS magazine – 2024. Alma has since January 2024 been the Poet-in-Residence at SAPIENS magazine, an editorially independent magazine associated with the University of Chicago Press where she explores the history of women in remembrance institutions. She uses poetry to explore these silences through the concept of the archive – constructed, imaginary and insubstantial. Alma will also feature as the Guest editor for the upcoming SAPIENS magazine spring collection: “Poems of Resistance, Refusal, and Wayfinding”.
Poetry Ajabu Ajabu audio-visual collective. Alma developed an original poem, “wounded earth” on histories of Ujamaa, language and environmental degradation. The poem was exhibited at the SAVVY Contemporary x Ajabu Ajabu collaboration event in Tanzania under the project, “UNRAVELING THE (UNDER-) DEVELOPMENT COMPLEX” a project that explored the work of Walter Rodney’s seminal text, “How Europe Underdeveloped Africa”.
Poetry – Experimental Sound House of Digital Art, Port Louis, Mauritius. Alma developed original poetry around the theme of memory, slavery and historical legacies and developed an original experimental sound piece, “extensions: weighted compass,” looking at the shared history of slavery between Mauritius and Tanzania.
Poetry – Der Kolonialismus in den Dingen”/ “Colonialism in Objects”at the Fünf Kontinente Munich, Germany. Alma developed poetry based on the history of museums, historical violence and remembrance for the current exhibition.
Poetry – Sound Art Glasgow International Biennale 2024. Alma was commissioned to work on an audio artwork ‘as a point of departure’ for Market Gallery, Glasgow @ Glasgow International biennale – Scotland’s largest festival for contemporary art. The audio artwork featured original poetry and sound work with Darragh Amelia on the theme of identity, memory, woman/sisterhood.
SAPIENS: Poetry Residency
https://www.sapiens.org/authors/alma-simba/
Göttingen Fellowship Sound Work
https://unpacking-colonialism.gbv.de/