We speak to Marlon Schäder and Tracy Bakala about Why?Not Zanzibar ahead of their visit to Oslo this month for Det Gode Selskab
Just as one season ends another begins for Marlon Schäder. While the rest of Europe hunkers down for the oncoming darkness of the winter season, the Ibiza resident and clubbing figurehead makes the annual trek to sub-Saharan Africa. Every November for the last 3 years, he’s been making the near globe-stretching journey from Ibiza to his 2nd island-home Zanzibar.
“I close the season in Ibiza and I jump on a plane and start the season there,” says Marlon over a video call from Berlin. Arriving in Zanzibar every year, the first thing he does is kick off his shoes and settle into the rhythm of the island. “It’s beautiful, I walk barefoot everywhere,” he says with a reminiscing grin on his face.
“The rhythm of the island is really super slow and amazing,” says Tracy Bakala on the other end of the video call. “It’s a place where I can truly relax; I can sleep, wake up, and not be like I’m here in Europe.” For 3–5 months of the year, Tracy and Marlon are Zanzibar residents and during that time they’ll operate Zanzibar’s first club specialising in European electronic music, Why?Not.
Why?Not has been their winter hideaway since the end of the pandemic, where they’ve planted a flag for some of Europe’s finest DJs, clubbing concepts and dance floor enthusiasts. Concepts like, SlapFunk, Butik gathering, Half Baked and Det Gode Selskab have and will set up camp for extended periods, joining the likes of Magda, Johnny Rock, Enrica Falqui, Sofiane Vial, and JNJS as previous alums to the island’s newest clubbing community.
Located off the east coast of mainland Tanzania, Zanzibar is a picturesque archipelago where the weather stays fairly consistent all year round and the locals have a laissez-faire attitude to life. It always takes Tracy a while to acclimatise every year to the “Pole-Pole” way of life. Literally translated from Swahili as slowly-slowly, Pole-Pole could be the island’s mantra, one which Tracy and Marlon have adopted in their venture together for Why?Not.
*Sofiane Vial plays Det Gode Selskab x Why?Not this Saturday
Distant Family
Now in the 3rd year, Why?Not is Tracy and Marlon’s escape from the European grind. A couple of industry professionals working behind the scenes in many aspects of club culture for years, Tracy and Marlon followed similar career paths before they both found their way to Zanzibar, during the COVID pandemic.
A mutual friend suggested that Tracy and Marlon meet after the pair shared similar experiences in Zanzibar, laying the early foundations for what would become Why?Not. “We actually only met in Zanzibar,” exclaims Tracy, and only just before they first opened Why?Not. Tracy remembers some kind of immediate kismet over those first calls, feelings that were only confirmed when they met in person.
“The moment we met, I knew that we were on this journey together and that we have the same vision. Sometimes you can really connect with somebody in your line of work and become like a family straightaway.” Today, there’s not a single day that goes by without the pair communicating over the phone.
Interestingly, the pair could have crossed paths in the past. Tracy had been working as a go-go dancer in Ibiza in 2000, around the same time Marlon was a little boy on the island.
“I grew up in Ibiza,” explains Marlon. His father had first come to the island in the 70s, running a bar and then various clubs while rock music glitterati like Freddie Mercury (originally from Zanzibar, coincidentally) invaded Ibiza as the first generation of hedonists to visit the future clubbing enclave. Electronic music was still in its infancy, but as the likes of Kraftwerk and then Disco started emerging on the international music scene, DJs Alfredo and Pippi were laying the foundation for the eventual club scene that would emerge by the late eighties.
“I had this music always around me since I was a little child,” says Marlon. “I kind of had it in my DNA from the very beginning, and then I started working.” Similarly to Tracy, although “not like a go-go dancer,” Marlon started working in nightclubs and quickly found his way from glass picker to artist liaisons and public relations in Ibiza’s clubbing milieu. Tracy followed a similar trajectory although ten years ahead, going from go-go dancer to promotion, PR, stage manager and hosting her own events.
“I’ve been working in the industry for more than 25 years,” she says, with the last ten years dedicated to Yoyaku, a record label, store, distribution company and agency. Neither Marlon nor Tracy have been DJs. It’s all about “creating a vibe as well and creating an ambience,” for Marlon, “bringing the right people to the right place. And yeah, I always make the joke like if everything goes wrong I still can become a DJ.”
Getting Away
“We all went to Zanzibar for different reasons,” says Tracy. “I was in Berlin in the winter and it was a really dark time.” She realised: “I need to get out of here.” She went to Beirut, Malta and eventually Zanzibar, and knew immediately when she arrived “that this would change my life forever.”
Similarly, Marlon had made his first trip to the island during a Sunwaves festival. “I had enough of Europe everywhere and I went down there because there were no mask restrictions and no policy about any vaccination.” Like Tracy, it was a life-changing experience. “I bought land in Zanzibar because I fell in love with the place.” Through a budding friendship with one of the employees behind the bar at Sunwaves, he “stumbled across” the skeleton of a building that would eventually become Why?Not. It was “just a raw cement building” at that time, but Marlon already saw the potential.
There were kids swimming in the flooded first floor caused by the high tide, but after draining the makeshift pool and installing some strong windows, Why?Not took on its eventual form with Tracy coming on board soon after.
It became something of a homecoming for Tracy when she eventually made the trek to meet Marlon. Born in Congo, she fled the African continent at one week old with her political refugee parents. Even though Tracy is well-travelled, Africa had never been a continent she “really experienced that much.” Her time in Zanzibar changed all that. After that first experience, it had “become like a necessity inside of me to be in Africa,” and Tracy found that it resolved something of an “identity crisis” for her, where she could feel “part of it” again.
New Ibiza
For many Europeans travelling to Sub-Sahara Africa, there’s always that trepidation, but people like Tracy and Marlon are becoming instrumental in allaying those prejudices through the communal language of music and club culture.
“We are not another coloniser,” insists Tracy. “We’re not there to destroy the land or to destroy the culture and the people of Zanzibar. It’s very important to respect the culture.” There’s a healthy engagement with the local community and although there isn’t much of a scene for this particular style of electronic music just yet, there is room emerging for future collaborations.
Why?Not’s music profile is “more oriented toward the more house and minimal” side of things according to Tracy, but with Amapiano nights every Friday, Marlon hopes there could be some cultural exchange in the form of music on the cards.
For now, however, Why?Not’s sound is largely imported, with so many DJs and artists making their way to the sun-kissed beach on Why?Not’s front door.
A comparison to Ibiza’s early days can’t be helped. Marlon suggests that is not such a far-fetched idea. “The vibe is similar to what I’ve heard from my father about the 70s and 80s in Ibiza. When we opened the club, there weren’t even 10 people in the club,” and he remembers stories from his father talking about Amnesia’s earliest days, where 15 people on the dance floor represented a good night.
The similarities don’t just end there. Both are also open-air establishments; both enjoy a postcard setting, and both have “quite a lot of characters that end up” there. Marlon thinks most nights are made up of “more locals than tourists” and in the intersection between the residents and the transients there’s enough of a scene there not just for the club to exist but for other musical institutions like their own Tribes festival to exist there. This year Det Gode Selskab made the trip down to Why?Not with Det Gode Selskab’s Thomas Refvik finding a kindred spirit behind the club. “What struck us about Why?Not is how close it feels to the way we try to run Det Gode Selskab;” he says via eamil. “The focus is clearly on people first — on the connections that happen in the crowd and between communities and artists across borders. “
Self-Contained Universe
With Tracy’s and Marlon’s background in the industry, operating labels and agencies, they’ve relied on their connections to build Why?Not into this international anomaly on the East coast of Africa. They’ve avoided the usual process of flying international DJs in for a day, utilising instead an extensive roster of DJs from their Interwave agency. “A lot of artists from Interwave are residents at Why?Not,” says Tracy before explaining: “If we didn’t have a booking agency, it would have been more complicated to attract more international artists.” Instead of looking for an individual DJ to headline a night, they are looking to use their connection and connect others to bring “back a club culture that we lost.”
It might be remote, but it hasn’t dissuaded the likes of Dimensions and through all these other projects that both Marlon and Tracy are involved in, there’s a simple “beauty to the ecosystem” they’ve created. It’s taken it back to grassroots with the personal touch of that human connection at the centre of it all.
Det Gode Selskab’s Terje Dybdahl (Tod Louie) suggests “that openness is rare,” in club culture today, and it makes Why?Not unique. It still feels wide open, and somewhat untouched by the weight of expectations. Club culture there doesn’t look backward, it looks forward.”
One of the main challenges? “Electricity,” they say in unison. Unpredictable blackouts and an infrastructure that is waning has caught them out on occasion, but even that is not without its excitement. “You have to think about things that you wouldn’t necessarily be thinking about,” According to Tracy, and with the absence of electricity or the liquidity of ATMs, for example, the problems of the first world seem to disappear. “It’s part of our life there.” Everything is relative to the Slowly Slowly mantra of the island and that’s how Marlon and Tracy intend on building Why?Not.
“Slowly, slowly, we build a team,” says Tracy… “We couldn’t dream of a better team, you know, it’s like everybody that is involved in the project is really involved 100%.”