I have been dying to write this story. Last weekend, I was arrested and breathalysed. I was driving home from cutting at midnight. As usual, the police had mounted their roadblock at the junction of Wangari Maathai and Parklands Road, just next to the University of Nairobi’s law campus.
“I’m the only man, among all these drunks, who hasn’t touched alcohol in three years,” I told them. They would hear none of it and told me to shut up, unwrap the little tube, stick it in the machine and start blowing.
I had entered the roadblock with old school African music thumping in my system. The robot was playing Les Wanyika’s Dunia Kigeugeu. This is not the kind of music that, when it plays, you just sit back and listen.
Not on a cool, busy night on the road, when the universe is full of music and light. It is the lamentation of a man whose wife has run away because he is too broke for life and he is telling her he is never giving up on her and he is never giving up on getting rich.
This is not music for listening to; this is music for performing:
Naamini unaenda utarudi,
Hata kama sio leo wala kesho
Mimi wako mama,
Nawe wangu cherie mama
Mbona hivyo mwenzangu mama…
Sio nia yangu niwe maskini oh
Uamuzi wake Mungu eh mama
Ufukara oh bibi eeh
Si kilema oh cherie mama
Naamini iko siku mama
Nitakuwa kama wale, fulani eeh
And so I was vigorously performing, rooting for this man’s foolish optimism, shoulders pumping, gyrating like a Congolese fiend, taking the lyrics mid-range with my rich baritone and taking it way up to the soprano.
The police did not understand the difference between celebration and inebriation. For East African music from late 1940s to the ’90s is sure worth celebrating.
Spotify is one of the very best things to happen in a while. It allows people to explore music far and wide, and especially music from our childhood and beyond. For me, a former regulator with a deep interest in the industry, it is a wonderful way for us to pay musicians for enjoying the product of their talent.
The music is beautiful. Some of the numbers from the late 1940s sound like Broadway musicals, and the words are often soulful, if naïve, poetry, on love, life, values, of a simple time when the mere fact of living in Nairobi was cause for great pride.
Gabriel Omollo’s 1972 hit Lunch Time is not just an ode to beef stew and chapati; there is a strong under-current of joyful wonderful at urbanisation, the new rhythm of having a job in industrial area, earning a salary and going to a kibandaski for lunch. It is all terribly modern and dashing, nothing like those village bumpkins sucking ugali and fish back home.
The story of the rural-urban exodus and transmogrification of the African tribesman to the European caricature, that painful process of moving from native to some parody of the white man, is written in the songs if we care to listen long and hard. Also indelibly written in this music is what we have lost—African society with its values of family, respect and responsibility.
In Amigo, Issai Ibugu’s concept of masculinity would probably be considered toxic and completely odious today:
Thamani ya mke ni mavazi,
Kula vizuri, kulala vizuri
Ndio siri ya kudumisha ndoa
Mtaishi kwa raha Amigo
Watoto wako wapeleke shule,
Kwa manufaa yao ya baadaye,
Elimu ndio zawadi muhimu
Kwa watoto wako, Amigo
The artiste is telling his friend, whose wife has run away with the children: “We told you so; a wife must be nicely clothed, fed well and provided a decent home, this is the secret to a stable marriage.
If you feed your woman well, buy her nice clothes, you will have a happy marriage.” Well, today this is not even the minimum; it is deeply offensive and not enough.
But Issai also talks about the value of education, respect for in-laws and other things that would hardly be points of conversation today.
The point is, a lot of the music I have listened to from that world was not just about love; it also carried ideas that, at least, were not harmful. What ideas are contained in Meja’s homage to sexual obsession, Siskii?
There is growing up too, not in the societal sense but among individual musicians. I imagine Nimaru, after whom the song is named, terribly young, perhaps in her late teens, left alone to suffer in Tanga by her gangsta of a boyfriend who left for Kenya saying he doesn’t know which year he will show up again, he is sorry, but problems tear people apart, it’s the way of the world.
And I notice, listening carefully to Kwanza Jiulize, how the artiste angrily deals with his wife’s amorous niece who is seducing him to dump her; the absolute certainly of his position—I can’t, I can’t and I can’t, he sings. What makes you think I will succeed where many men have failed to tame you? If Les Wanyika’s was “ngoma ya vijana” (music for the youth), the sound values in their music speak to a society that is simple but oh so noble at times.
There is music today that is equally as wonderful as these old tunes but this body of art is gold as a record of our struggles and growth. And you can get high on it without landing in jail. BY DAILY NATION