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African Affairs, 104/415, 225–249
doi:10.1093/afraf/adi012
© The Author [2005]. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of Royal African Society. All rights reserved
POPULAR MUSIC, POPULAR POLITICS:
UNBWOGABLE AND THE IDIOMS OF
FREEDOM IN KENYAN POPULAR MUSIC
JOYCE NYAIRO AND JAMES OGUDE
ABSTRACT
This article details how Gidi Gidi Maji Maji’s popular song Unbwogable
moved to occupy centre-stage in the political arena of Kenya’s December
2002 general election. The first part of the article deals with the politics
of the song’s production, its entry into the public domain and the politics
of interpretation that influenced the patterns of its consumption. The
second part is a nuanced reading of the text — the lyrics — dramatizing
the shared experiences, memories and socio-economic immobility that
distilled into the Kenyan people’s common voice of defiance and determination to institute change. The third part emphasizes the contingency of
events that culminated in the National Rainbow Coalition (NARC) appropriating Unbwogable, thus completing its movement from popular song to
national popular culture event and, ultimately, to political discourse. After
the elections this discourse of resistance and invincibility was rewritten to
include victory and it is precisely in this close association with the state
that the slogan has run the danger of being colonized by a privileged few
at the expense of the majority. The article concludes by underlining the
elasticity of idiom.
Music does not exist autonomously of other social, economic and political institutions.
Music may still be able to change the world as well as reflecting it, but, when we talk
of music’s politics, we are not just talking of the way in which it articulates ideas and
emotion. We are also talking of the politics that shape it.1
POPULAR FORMS HAVE THE CAPACITY TO FORGE, CLARIFY AND ARTICULATE
the bond between cultural affairs and political existence. Part of the power
of popular music is to be found in the way it congeals into a set of conventions, thereby embodying a tradition. Popular music achieves this in two
Joyce Nyairo is a Lecturer in the Literature Department at Moi University, Kenya. An earlier
version of some of the sections of this paper constituted parts of chapters one and six of her
doctoral thesis entitled ‘“Reading the Referents”: (Inter)texuality in Contemporary Kenyan
Popular Music’ completed at the University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa in 2004. James
Ogude is Associate Professor in African Literature, University of the Witwatersrand, South
Africa. They would like to thank the South African National Research Foundation (NRF)
whose funding for the ‘Popular Literature in Africa’ project at the University of the Witwatersrand made possible their fieldwork trip to Kenya in May 2003 and facilitated the June
2003 seminar at which this paper was first presented.
1. John Street, ‘Rock, pop and politics’, in Simon Frith, Will Straw and John Street (eds),
Pop and Rock (Cambridge University Press, London, 2001), p. 254.
225
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ways. First, through the themes and concerns of the songs, we hear of the
issues and events that constitute a people’s experiences. In other words,
popular music documents a people’s history. Secondly, popular music gets
woven into the soundtrack of events, moments and experiences; it is
mnemonic and therefore certain songs carry the capacity to make one recall
a particular place or specific events. The history of a community can, therefore, be told from or through that community’s collection of popular songs.
This article uses Gidi Gidi Maji Maji’s2 popular song, Unbwogable, to
work out the relationship between popular music and politics. This is
because the discursive practices that coalesce around the expression
‘unbwogable’ are, without doubt, foremost amongst the central defining
features of the 2002 general election in Kenya, and, indeed, of the subsequent operations of the National Rainbow Coalition (NARC) government.
The article will demonstrate two key things. First, we want to dramatize the
politics of generating popular music, to outline the processes by which
songs are made, and the means by which their publics are formed. We argue
that music is a travelling text whose multiple meanings are contingent upon
the politics of its production and consumption. We shall argue that the
multiple meanings that a musical text generates — its layered knowledges
— are tied in with the politics of its production and the way it interpellates
its audiences and how the audiences in turn hail it. Secondly, in interrogating the entry of Unbwogable into Kenya’s 2002 general election, we shall
be showing the ways in which popular music is steeped in contemporary
politics: how politics mediates music and how music can sometimes even
shape a country’s politics. Indeed, we shall even show how, because popular
artistes are masters in the art of communicating with their audiences, politicians often borrow from their repertoire, sometimes going so far as to
become performers themselves, in their bid to win the battle to represent
others.
In examining the competing interests that informed both the making and
the promotion of Unbwogable, we read politics here as the matter of ‘who
gets what, when, how’.3 For as John Street posits in Politics and Popular
Culture, politics is ‘the clash of ideas, identities and interests . . . the distribution of resources and rewards’.4 Indeed, in the contemporary moment,
the making and distributing of popular songs provide sites in which
‘people’s objectives vary’ and compete.5 Within the Kenyan music industry
the process of deciding who gets what, where, when and from whom, entails
working out the dynamics of power-sharing between the various entities
that need to co-operate in order to generate and promote popular music,
2.
3.
4.
5.
Their actual names are Joseph Ogidi (Gidi) and Julius Owino (Maji).
Harold Laswell, Politics: Who gets what, when, how? (Peter Smith, London, 1936).
John Street, Politics and Popular Culture (Temple University Press, Philadelphia, 1997), p. 26.
Stephen D. Tansey, Politics:The basics (Routledge, London, 1995), p. 2.
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namely, the composers/musicians, the instrumentalists, the producers,
publishers, distributors and radio broadcasters. Such were the circumstances that marked the emergence of Unbwogable into the public sphere.
The dramatic entry of Unbwogable
Unbwogable made its entry into Kenya’s public spaces early one morning
in September 2002, ironically on the state-controlled airwaves of the Kenya
Broadcasting Corporation (KBC). It was aired on the General Service
programme ‘Breakfast Club’ by broadcaster Bill Odidi, who introduced it
as the exciting new single from the duo behind the 1999 Luo rap hit, Ting
Badi Malo.6 Odidi says that Gidi Gidi had telephoned him very late the
previous night and told him excitedly about their new single, Who Can
Bwogo Me?7 As Odidi was due on air at 5 o’clock the following morning,
he made quick arrangements to pick up a copy of the new disc, and at 7.45
am, he unveiled Gidi Gidi Maji Maji’s come-back number,8 dutifully asking
his listeners to give him some feedback of their response to the song. At
the time, not even Odidi could have imagined the sheer impact that this
song was going to have on the country over the next couple of months. By
the time it became known as Unbwogable, the song had long crossed the
threshold of entertainment, to become a conduit of political expression
and, indeed, a symbol of resistance and determination. By November 2002,
KBC was no longer airing it,9 for Unbwogable had become one of the main
vehicles within which Kenya’s efforts towards political transition were being
transported at full speed into urgent demands for complete change.
Who Can Bwogo Me? was mastered and produced by Tedd Josiah at his
Blu Zebra Records. Though Josiah states that, by the time the song was
released on the airwaves, his company had issued 1,000 copies to ‘limited
outlets . . . four outlets in Nairobi, and the 1,000 copies disappeared’,10 it
actually took weeks before record stores, even those in Nairobi, readily had
copies of this CD single for sale. And this scenario of a consumer gap —
a time-lag between the moment of broadcasting and that of actual release
of copies for sale — is not unique to Who Can Bwogo Me?; it has happened
with virtually every recent Kenyan popular song. Josiah argues, and both
Gidi and Maji confirm, that the preponderance of these time-lags has been
6. Dholuo for ‘Raise your hands up in the air’.
7. Interview with Joyce Nyairo, Nairobi, 30 October 2002. Odidi also confirms that, in the
early days, Who Can Bwogo Me? was the title of this number.
8. After the commercial failure of the duo’s debut album Ismarwa (2000), rumours
abounded that the two artistes had gone their separate ways and given up careers in music.
9. ‘Unbwogable duo set to entertain at popular city spot’, Sunday Nation, 17 November
2002, ‘Lifestyle’, p. 10.
10. Personal interview with Joyce Nyairo and James Ogude, Nairobi, 6 May 2003. Unless
otherwise indicated, all comments attributed to Josiah in this article emanate from this
interview.
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occasioned by the economic uncertainties of the local music industry. In
the wake of relentless music pirates, selling enough legitimate discs to make
a profit for both musicians and producers is virtually impossible. Consequently, local artistes have become ingenious. As Josiah explains it:
The problem is that Kenyan musicians have been victims too many times. You don’t
want to put a million shillings into your product and nobody buys it, but you still want
to be famous, and you still want to do performances. The only way to be famous and
do performances is by airplay. So release a single, have it out on air, push it as much
as you can, you become popular, you get to do the performances, you charge 15/25
thousand for a 15-minute show. And you’re in a weekend making maybe an average
of 50/60 thousand per weekend, it doesn’t matter whether you’re selling or not, you’re
happy; it’s good enough money.
Were these the sorts of practical, and political, considerations that
operated in the production and distribution of Who Can Bwogo Me? As is
to be expected from any political site, there are competing and conflicting
versions and subversions of what actually took place in the production and
marketing of this song. By their own account, the duo of Unbwogable say
that, once the piece had been mastered and recorded, they demanded from
their producer, Tedd Josiah, that he give them their song.11 The debacle
over sales and royalties from their debut album Ismarwa had taught them
some hard lessons about entrusting other people with the task of selling
their music in Kenya. So much so, that they describe themselves as ‘once
bitten, twice shy’. A little older and a lot wiser now, they were taking no
chances whatsoever with their new single. They made a conscious decision
to take over and manage the cutting of CDs and cassettes from their single,
as well as organizing the actual sales and distribution of their product. To
this end they made the jacket covers for the CDs themselves, thankfully
falling back on the skills of Maji Maji who had been trained as a graphic
designer at Kul Graphics in Nairobi. Using photocopying paper and glue,
Gidi and Maji made the album sleeves and ran off promotional posters,
some of which they placed with those music outlets in Nairobi that were
willing to help them sell their song. Yet other posters they turned into billboards, literally walking in them as sandwich-men do, through clubs and
dance-halls willing and cajoling patrons to buy copies of the CD.
Much later on they perfected the commoditization of Unbwogable by
designing and selling other merchandise, which then worked as promotional
material — T-shirts, bandanas and caps. They made as much as 100 percent
profit from the T-shirts which they sold wholesale and on a cash-on-delivery
basis to commercial merchants in Nairobi. Gidi and Maji thus became the
11. Personal interview with Joyce Nyairo and James Ogude, Nairobi, 6 May 2003. Unless
otherwise indicated, all comments attributed to Gidi and Maji in this article emanate from
this interview.
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first Kenyan artistes not only to realize but also to actually tap into — for
commercial gain — the potential of popular song as cross-referencing
discourse.12 With time, they say, their fans demanded more, inquiring about
an earlier hit single by Maji Maji and Wiky Mosh — Atoti. In subsequent
issues of Who Can Bwogo Me?/Unbwogable they placed the song alongside
Atoti on one disc.
Josiah does not deny that Gidi Gidi Maji Maji took over the sales and
marketing of their single. He says that his production outfit, Blu Zebra
Records, doubted very much that a single disc could do well in the pirateinfested waters of Kenya’s music industry:
we were wondering, ‘Just hold on a minute, with all this piracy, are we really going to
sell one song?’ And I just said, you know, honestly speaking, ‘I just don’t believe it’ . . .
it was one song and we didn’t have the confidence that this song was really gonna be
sold. We knew we could push the song strongly on radio, but the sale aspect of it, we
weren’t really quite sure of . . . So, Gidi Gidi took up the initiative and said ‘look, we
will handle our sales and marketing of our music’, so we stepped down as a record
company and let them handle it directly. But there was a lot of lost opportunity within
that particular project, a lot of lost opportunity. Again, you cannot be the artiste, the
distributor, the management, the you know, and that’s what they attempted doing; and
I’d say they got, they did make, a profit but they would have made a much bigger
profit. . . . the pirates clocked about a million discs but they did not.
So significant was the input of the music pirates in the promotion of this
song that, by mid-October 2002, some confusion had arisen over the song’s
actual title. The Sunday Nation’s ‘Lifestyle’ column, which carries weekly
the lyrics of emerging hit songs, carried both Unbwogable and Who Can
Bwogo Me? as the title of Gidi Gidi Maji Maji’s new single.13 But it was not
simply the actions of Kenya’s music pirates that led to a virtual change of
name for this song. As often happens with popular forms, Unbwogable’s
audiences were both attentive and creative. Karin Barber argues that, as
consumers of African popular genres, local audiences are never passive; they
do not ‘give up their turn in normal patterns of communication’.14 They are
instead ‘interlocutors’, actively ‘constituting the (very) performance’ of the
text; and thus their input is key to its eventual texture and impact.
Even then, in working to understand the phenomenon that Unbwogable
became, a beneficial approach would be one that reads local music pirates
as one of the many publics that acted upon this particular text.15 And,
12. Michael Warner, ‘Publics and counterpublics’, Public Culture 14, 1 (2002), p. 64.
13. Sunday Nation, 13 October 2002, ‘Lifestyle’, p. 4.
14. Karin Barber, ‘Preliminary notes on audiences in Africa’, Africa 67, 3 (1997), p. 347.
15. While Barber (‘Preliminary notes’) uses the terms ‘audiences’ and ‘publics’ virtually interchangeably, Michael Warner (‘Publics and counterpublics’) distinguishes between audiences as
bounded categories that are numerable, and publics as self-organized relations among
strangers, created into a social space by the reflexive circulation of discourses around texts. Our
reading here of local responses to Unbwogable is guided by Warner’s definition of publics.
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whether it was they who initiated the editing of the text for a new title, or
whether that editing sprang from other quarters or publics eager to carry
away for their own uses those parts of the song text that seemed to them
to be most attractive, the fact is that the transformation of Who Can Bwogo
Me? into Unbwogable emanated from the patterns of its reception by
committed and ingenious publics. Here, we are specifically speaking of
imagined publics and audiences constituted in the course of the song’s
circulation via a range of media which includes, among others, local newspapers and radio stations, rumour and gossip, political rallies and social
networks that generate complexly layered public spheres. This editing
underlines Barber’s argument that publics ‘have a hand in the constitution
of the “meaning” of a performance, text or utterance’.16 In the case of
Unbwogable, they chose that one defamiliarized term in the song text as the
focal point of what the song meant to them, as a testimony of how that
word pointed to their own emotions and circumstances. So apt and suitable
was this baptism, that today Gidi and Maji affirm that Unbwogable is the
song’s correct title. And in more ways than one, the ultimate consumption
and utility of the entire song crystallized around that one word, unbwogable,
and so the song came to be known as such.
There is a sense in which the public’s editing of the text was not widely
off the mark in its nuanced reading of the text’s centre. Indeed, it is worth
noting that the creative impetus for the entire song sprang from the word
unbwogable. For close on two years prior to the actual recording of the song,
the word had been part of the duo’s idiolect. They say that it was Gidi who
first started using the Luo verb bwogo in this imaginative way, to capture the
turmoil of their own emotions:
GIDI: I was in college, he was also doing his own businesses, at those times we were
so much stressed especially after doing the Ismarwa which of course, we’re honest, we
didn’t get any payment from that. So we were, we were like, er, we were like almost
giving up with everything. . . .
MAJI: Despairing.
GIDI: . . . we were just despairing.
MAJI: Unbwogable talked about, it put into pictures, a lot about what we felt, what we
went through, and how we are, particularly our belief in who we are. So that really
inspired us to come up with Unbwogable. And before that, er, we’d be in different
places, but we’d still link up. As in Gidi would go, you know, his own business, go to
school, come back he’s stressed, he’d come to my place we’d talk, we’d argue. Then
maybe when we have a little thing, you know, he’d come and say to me ‘Omera’ (‘my
brother’) . . . When he finds me low in my, in my house, thinking ‘now what do we do,
I have to study, I have to pay, I have to do this, I’ve no money, people think we’re
quiet’. There’s a lot of pressure from fans, there’s a lot of pressure from all sections:
16.
Barber, ‘Preliminary notes’, p. 356.
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‘Omera, en ang’oma bwogi?’ (‘My brother what is scaring you?’), then I tell him ‘Ah,
onge gima bwoga, aling aling’a’ (‘Ah there is nothing scaring me, I am just quiet’). Same
way, I’d get into his place: ‘Omera, enang’o ma bwogi?’ (‘Brother what is scaring you?’).
Then he’d say ‘Ah, onge gi ma bwoga’ (‘Ah nothing is scaring me’).
What Gidi and Maji were fighting was the sense of loss — both creative and
material — that was occasioned by the lack of financial accountability in
the Ismarwa project. The politics around the so-called commercial failure
of their album was forcing them to revise their whole perception of themselves as artistes, of their understanding of the making of music. And
though Gidi asserts that ‘the people who were managing the sales were not
straight’, Maji confesses that their naivety at that time also contributed to
their total lack of control. Getting themselves out of the confinement they
were now suffering meant clearing a space for expression and articulating
the limits that they felt were being placed on their operations as creative
artistes. Asking one another ‘who can bwogo you?’, repeating the chant ‘I am
unbwogable’, to themselves and to one another, became the ultimate
bedrock for inspiring them into creativity. Significantly, what on the surface
may appear as the economic woes of two adventurous youths, captures the
bigger picture relating to the difficulties which confront the average
musician in Kenya and those economic hardships that the average youth in
Kenya endures. It is these conditions of loss and deprivation that produced
the track Unbwogable.
As had happened with their earlier hit single Ting Badi Malo, Unbwogable
grew from what was initially a chant. The duo’s producer, Josiah, confirms
that it is precisely within the context of confidence-building and moraleboosting that the catch-phrase ‘I am unbwogable’ entered the domain of
performative art. Back in April 2001, Josiah was in Tanzania with a troupe
of artistes for the Zanzibar International Film Festival. As he recalls, it was
here that Gidi and Maji introduced the chant ‘I am unbwogable/Who can
bwogo me/I am unbwogable/I am unbeatable . . . just to give them sort of
like psyche before they went on stage’. Back then, Josiah was struck by the
inspirational potential of this phrase and by the time they decided to take
it to the studio for recording in September 2002, Maji realized that he ‘felt
the song, . . . so from that, his creativity got inspired’.
The material conditions that gave birth to not just the term unbwogable
but more precisely the very spirit of it, represent a key moment in the lives
of two young individuals. Their ability to express that moment, to congeal
its experiences of pain, anger, dejection, near-despair, and, in the midst of
all these, their sheer determination, translate into an individual’s struggle
for space, for freedom from the pressures and disappointments of daily
existence. The economy of resistance that clothes the moment of
Unbwogable’s birth — and which the duo avow was never, in their conception of the song, a statement of political intent — ultimately travels with
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the term to inhabit all the other sites of its usage. And this is precisely the
point about popular forms. They are creative instances arising from the
individual’s attempts to formulate coping mechanisms, to come to terms
with personal experiences, and the power of popular forms resides in their
extreme portability, in their capacity to inhabit different locales, to link individuals and generate audiences. In terms of what it originally stood for, and
of what it ultimately projected once it was in the public sphere, Unbwogable
demonstrates how popular forms offer a ‘democratic prospect for approaching and transforming everyday life’.17
The politics in music
‘State intervention can turn a work of art into a political gesture.’18 In
the case of Unbwogable, the intervention took place in two ways. The first,
which in any event probably led to the second, was an act of censorship.
KBC stopped playing the song; indeed, it is said that National Service
presenter, Elizabeth Obege, was fired because she aired it, contrary to the
station’s policy regarding politically sensitive material.19 To appreciate the
impact of this censorship, we must first appreciate the close relationship
between broadcasting and the development of popular music. Not only
does radio influence taste, but, as Tedd Josiah’s argument about pushing
for airplay demonstrates, it actually provides ‘advertising services, exposing
the material to the public’.20 The act of banning a song from the airwaves
amounts to denying it and the artistes the exposure they require to ensure
both sales and performance contracts. But interestingly, censorship can
actually be counterproductive. In situations such as that of the ‘new’ multiparty Kenya, a time when people were being reared into the culture of
alternative politics and being weaned off official, state-sanctioned politicized discourses, censorship actually signals an alarm and people happily
tune in to emergent alternative voices. In other words, the censorship
generates curiosity, instantly propelling to new fame that which has come
under state attack.
And in the case of Unbwogable, this was the second act of state intervention. In trying to censor the song, the regime of the day gave a decidedly political interpretation as the only viable reading of the entire text. It
is also worth noting that key to the eventual status that Unbwogable was to
acquire, was the whole question of timing. Against the background of a
17. Iain Chambers, Popular Culture: The metropolitan experience (Macmillan, Basingstoke,
1986), p. 13.
18. Street, Politics and Popular Culture, p. 26.
19. Daily Nation, 6 January 2003, online edition.
20. Roger Wallis and Krister Malm, Big Sounds From Small Peoples:The music industry in small
countries (Pendragon Press, New York, 1984), p. 241.
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looming and critical general election, the government’s action of sidelining
the song gave it the kind of political resonance it might never have acquired
at any other moment in history.
But, we need to ask, have all of the publics been in agreement about
Unbwogable? About what — at that critical moment of ballot-casting, and
even thereafter — it signified? In thinking through this issue, one must take
cognizance of the varying sites of consumption from which the song was
received and also the many different publics that tuned into Unbwogable. It
was heard in the privacy of homes and cars, from across the airwaves and
sometimes from personal discs or cassettes. It dominated the mahewa21 on
matatus, those public service vehicles that carry people of all ages to all sorts
of places. Unbwogable reigned as a dance-hall hit, it blared out in virtually
all public places. By December 2002, this song had become one of those
remarkable and exciting instances in which popular culture and politics are
demonstrably and inextricably linked. It graced nearly every gathering of
the opposition parties and especially the campaign rallies of the NARC
candidates. Popular music was expressing the desire for political agency, it
seemed epiphanic, it had dramatically been translated into political
activism. But what did Unbwogable signify for all these publics in all of their
varying and oftentimes over-lapping locations of reception?
Was Unbwogable a moment of extreme iconoclasm, a vicious attack on
the culture of repression and silence that the Moi regime had virtually
perfected? Did it amount to an attack on the individual person of Moi, or
the corrupt and inefficient system over which he officiated? Was it seen as
actually prompting and embodying political reform? Was Unbwogable
necessarily a celebration of the weak over the mighty? Was it a moment of
rebellion, a cartoon or comic book scene in which the young take over the
reins of power and rule the world, however momentarily? Was it a scene
from hell in which the vulgarity of youth assaults adult sensibilities? Or was
it merely the giddy delight of young people engaging in a discourse closed
and unintelligible to those who stand in authority over them — parents,
teachers, government? And since that election and NARC’s tumultuous
victory, has the concept of ‘unbwogable’ become the blanket bravado that
will veil the actions of a wilful government insensitively wielding its own will
over that of the ruled?
We raise these questions because a text by its very nature and reception
is decidedly a site of politics, since it is a source of varying and sometimes
conflicting interpretations. As Street puts it:
21. A common Sheng expression used especially in matatus to refer to the loud music they
blare out, which has since been proscribed by Kenyan police officers.
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even where the artist is explicit about his or her purpose, and where everything seems
to confirm a single reading, no text escapes counter or multiple other readings . . .
it is the struggle over rival interpretations that is most revealing of the politics of
the text.22
We note that in the case of Unbwogable, one can perceive Street’s point quite
explicitly from the variance of the different interpretations of the song that
are given by the artistes, on the one hand, and their producer, on the other.
Gidi and Maji insist that at no time in the conception of their song did they
have a political design for its future reception. They may indeed have brought
into the song the names of a number of Luo personalities, but, they say, this
was done for the purposes of drawing inspirational strength to confront the
personal tensions that had given rise to the expression ‘unbwogable’, and
which the recording of this song was now meant to exorcise for good.
MAJI: we sang what we felt at that particular time, not for anyone but us, just to please
ourselves; we’re in the studio and we’re recording. And I think that’s, I think also the
country absorbed, got, anyone who is in that situation would really get along with the
music, even not the understanding, but the vocal prowess. The way we sang was ‘I feel
it and I’m doing it, it’s up to you to like it or hate it’. I think that also carried along
and they were like: ‘hey! That song, there’s something in it I don’t understand, that is
not a language, I think it’s the spirit’ . . . it surprised us, we didn’t know ati (that) now
they’ll [politicians] take it up and now start saying they’re also unbwogable . . . our
major concept of this, this song was not politics. And we’ve always said, or we’ve always
defended our concept.
GIDI: In Unbwogable people thought that we wrote the song specifically for politics,
but it was just something that, we just went to the studio and just started recording
the song . . . nobody told us to write a song for NARC because NARC is going to win
the elections, instead NARC took our song.
For his part, producer Tedd Josiah avows that his decision, in September
2002, to record Gidi and Maji doing what had until then served them as a
tonic with which to confront cultural performance, was a deliberate act of
political intervention: ‘one morning we thought to ourselves, “I think this
election is swinging in a very funny way. Er, we need to help certain people
actually feel unbeatable” and er, we released the song.’ Josiah goes further
to state that even in this ‘conscious decision’ to use music to back the opposition, their gaze rested on one individual:
And then, er, they saw what Raila [Odinga] was going through, how he was being, trying
to be sidelined by, er, Mr Moi and they said, no, no, no, we have to rise to the challenge,
he’s going to remain a, a powerful person and we’re going to push him with this. Er, so
it became a tool, it was actually a very good tool for Raila and his whole campaign.
22.
Street, Politics and Popular Culture, p. 34.
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Josiah’s decidedly political reading of the whole objective of fashioning
Unbwogable ties in with the traditional function of song as socio-political
commentary amongst the Luo people, as is demonstrated so well by David
Cohen and Atieno Odhiambo.23 For example, they detail how a number of
Luo songs emerged in the 1950s and the 1960s to address the crisis of
alienated young Luo men who had been separated from their ancestral
homes by the lures of urban life.24 But even beyond these ethnic confines,
it is certainly also true that in modern Kenya, musical protest has been
one of the key ways in which political crises — from colonialism and the
demands for independence, to political assassinations, to ethnic cleansing
and so on — have been documented.25 Josiah traces the political basis of
Unbwogable by explaining how, later on, political pundits approached him
and his crew with suggestions to amplify Unbwogable so that it would carry
a more pointed political message to publics of varying ethnic extraction.
But before we get to the story of how Unbwogable came to occupy a national
political platform, indeed, how it was used to try and reflect the ethnic unity
of NARC, let us try to work out what — beyond the magical catch-phrase,
‘unbwogable’ — Gidi Gidi and Maji Maji were actually saying in this song.
Remembering the heroes
Beyond the introduction of the singers and salutations to their producer,
the song catches the listener’s attention through the portrait of Kenya’s
economic landscape that is alluded to in the provocative opening questions:
What the hell is you looking for?
Can(’t) a young Luo make money any more?
Shake your feet baby girl en ang’o? (‘what is it?’)
23. Siaya:The historical anthropology of an African landscape (James Currey, London, 1989).
Cohen and Odhiambo demonstrate how traditional Luo songs were used in masculine
discourses to define women as a social category, especially in capturing the ambivalent inscription of female identities by men (pp. 85–7). For their use of songs dealing with how women
inscribed certain forms of identity on men while at the same time constructing practices of
resistance, see pp. 98–9. The deployment of song for social commentary among the Luo is
again used by Cohen and Odhiambo in their later text, Burying SM (East African Educational
Publishers, Nairobi, 1992). The caption to the book is framed by a Luo song, Ka Mibetie
Kichiemo Parie Jodala (‘Whenever You Sit Eating, Think of your People at Home’). Described
by the writers as ‘An anthem of Luo in urban centres’, this speaks directly to the alienated
Luo man who has abandoned his mother in the rural home. See also the co-authors’ use of
song in explicating the difference between ‘home’ and ‘house’ among the Luos. They argue
that the song by the musician George Ramogi, which they draw on, ‘anticipates by fifteen years
the confrontation in the High Court over the meanings and implications of “home” and
“houses”’ (p. 40). See also Owino Misiani’s song of lamentation in the same text (pp. 88–91).
These examples demonstrate how both traditional and contemporary popular songs among
the Luos have always been composed as social commentaries.
24. Cohen and Odhiambo, Siaya, p. 57.
25. See Angelique Haugerud, The Culture of Politics in Modern Kenya (Cambridge University
Press, Cambridge, 1995), pp. 29–30 for a discussion of songs that challenged Moi’s one-party
state.
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This opening is decidedly confrontational. For the younger Kenyan audience,
it strikes with all the familiarity of nostalgia, echoing as it does a 1997
number by American hip-hop artiste, Mace. And it is not just the feigned
Luo accent of the persona that adds to the familiarity of the questions by
helping to localize them. Most important of all, it is the experience that it
speaks to that is hauntingly familiar for the Kenyan public. For while in Gidi
Gidi and Maji Maji’s case it may stem from highly personal circumstances,
it nonetheless connects very directly with the lives of so many young
Kenyans, daily caught toiling for a pittance. Sometimes, as the lyrics imply,
the work is not only awkward, it is also unrewarding, and the individual is
perennially frustrated by bureaucracy and corruption. The song gains
emotive power by initially employing anger to fight off the sensation of
being dragged down into oblivion by a decayed economy; the persona then
tempers the outburst of anger with the playful invitation to dance — ‘shake
your feet, baby girl’. In this momentary reprieve through dance, romance
is sought. The listener is being invited to likewise lose his/her frustration in
the urgent query — ‘en ang’o?’ (‘what is it?’) What follows once again is the
drama of self-assertion, in part achieved through the establishment of the
persona’s roots: ‘Maji Maji nyakwar ondijo am a Luo’ (Maji Maji grandchild
of Ondinjo, I am Luo). Later on we shall see the furtherance of this concern
with establishing Luo pedigree for various personalities mentioned in the
song; for now, we note that the outburst of aggression, the struggle for
space, recognition, respect, dominates the text:
But who are you? What are you?
Who the hell do you think you are?
Do you know me?
Do I know you?
Get the hell out of ma face
Because hey, I am unbwogable
I am unbeatable, I am unsueable.
And the most popular part of the song — its chorus — is heralded by a
show of bravado:
So if you like ma song
Sing it for me and say
CHORUS
Who can bwogo me ! 3
I am unbwogable
This bravado is, in itself, an enactment of autonomy, a barrier against any
further interference and intrusion. Later on in the song Gidi Gidi advertises himself as a ‘big name, I’m saleable’, but always with a return to the
roots — ‘Kanyamwar, Homabay ng’ama chalo koda’ (‘in Kanyamwar,
Homabay, who is like me?’) — as not only part of his identity, but as part
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of the proof of his greatness, since he boasts that none in Kanyamwar or
Homabay equals him. What the duo do here is to draw on a common
cultural repertoire of pakruok (self-praise) among the Luo.26 Normally
used in the context of musical performance, pakruok works to inject one’s
social credentials and authority, which are often represented as being
beyond reproach. The speaker here admonishes his listeners to pay attention because he is a voice worthy of status and integrity. In certain ways it
is often directed at imaginary or real enemies to provoke and challenge
them into a verbal combat. It is this challenge that the duo direct at the
Moi regime in order to mock it and to deflate it of its authority and
borrowed power. The question-answer structure of the chorus (and it is
significant that the question is raised three times) is a sure formula for
winning audience participation, inasmuch as it also works to beef up individual spirit. A significant part of this song is informed by its strategy of
invoking memory as the cornerstone of inspiration, as the bedrock from
which the volatile future is confronted.
Ya jodongo nyaka ipar
Jo ma okonyi nyaka ipar
Jo ma Oting’I nyaka ipar
Maji Maji nyaka ipar Ondijo kwaru yawa
Old/great people you have to remember
Those who have helped you, you must
remember
Those who have baby-seated you, you
have to remember
Maji Maji you have to remember, your
grandfather well.
The purpose of the memory work demanded here is, as happens in most
instances, seen to be located in contingencies in the present.27 These
contingencies may be limited to the (re)membering and shaping of the individual’s identity in the present.28 Indeed, it is precisely this desire to revise
and reassert themselves economically, and even more to re-establish their
place in the Kenyan socio-cultural imaginary, that led Gidi and Maji to
generate the term ‘unbwogable’. But it is also likely that the bigger purpose
of the memory project is one of establishing shared pasts as the informing
logic that binds the community — be it the Luo nation or Kenya as a whole
— in the present.
26. See Joyce Nyairo and James Ogude, ‘Popular music and the negotiation of contemporary
Kenyan identity: the example of Nairobi City Ensemble’, Social Identities 9, 3 (2003), pp. 390 and
398n for a discussion of the essence of pakruok in both the traditional and the modern contexts.
27. David Thelen, ‘Memory and American history’, The Journal of American History 75, 4
(1989), pp. 1117–29; Rey Chow, Writing Diaspora (Indiana University Press, Bloomington,
IN, 1993); James Ogude,‘“The truths of the nation” and the changing image of Mau Mau in
Kenyan Literature’, in Atieno Odhiambo and John Lonsdale (eds), Mau Mau and Nationhood
(James Currey, Oxford, 2003), pp. 268–83.
28. Keya Ganguly, ‘Migrant identities: personal memory and the construction of selfhood’,
Cultural Studies 6, 1 (1992), pp. 27–50; Stuart Hall, ‘Negotiating Caribbean identities’, New
Left Review 209 (1995), pp. 3–14.
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From this moment on, to hijack Rey Chow’s expression, ‘we are in the
solemn presence of history, with its insistence on emotional meaning and
depth’.29 Indeed, contrary to readings of Unbwogable that may have sensed
a generational gap — that may have seen in the phenomenon of Unbwogable
an act of youthful defiance — the roll-call of Luo greats that follows affirms
a powerful bond between the young and the old. It actually speaks of the
reverence and respect that the young (embodied by Gidi and Maji) have for
their ‘mentors’. With the mention of each personality — Gor Mahia,
Oginga Odinga, Tom Mboya, Robert Ouko, Raila Amolo, Anyang’ Nyong’o,
Jimmy Orengo, Joe Donde — there follows the testament ‘donge aparoin’ (‘I
remember you’). Included in the catalogue of Luo greats are popular
musicians Okatch Biggy and Princess Jully of Dunia Mabaya fame, now
linked to ‘joluo malo-malo ute’ (‘Luo people [who] are high up there’).
Later on in the song, the call is made to each Luo politician, for instance:
Anyang’ Nyong’o gini tek manade ni
Yawa, gini pek manade ni,
Jo Seme gini lich manade ni,
You are unbwogable!
Anyang’ Nyong’o, this matter is a difficult one
Truly, this matter is a heavy one
People of Seme30 this thing is awesome indeed
The rhetorical questions are an invitation to embrace unity as the only
strategy for escape from the political quagmire. They also invoke the
personality thus named to continue in their role of inspiring and intervening on behalf of the electorate. The song’s political agency is furthered
by its enunciation of Luo nationalism. This is done through a roll-call of
Luo notables which, as we argue elsewhere, works to establish a tradition of
resistance stretching back to the legendary Luo warrior and magician, Gor
Mahia, to the more recent nationalist heroes such as Odinga and Mboya,
and to the more contemporary critics of the Moi regime like James
Orengo.31 What we have here, however, goes against the organicist readings
of ethnic nationalism. It is about how even an ethnically defined text and
discourse becomes a template for national politics.32 It is also about how
the audience can mediate the reception and consumption of a song way
beyond the imagination of its makers. It draws attention to the fact that
29. Chow, Writing Diaspora, p. 151.
30. The home of Anyang’ Nyong’o.
31. See Isabel Hofmeyr, Joyce Nyairo and James Ogude, ‘“Who can bwogo me?” Popular
culture in Kenya’, Social Identities 9, 3 (2003), pp. 373–82.
32. James Ogude writes that ‘The Mau Mau songs, for example, were used by ordinary men
and women to express their identity both as belonging to the house of Mumbi (meaning the
Agikuyu community) and also with the desire for the broader Kenyan nationhood in the face
of colonial oppression. . . . The construction of a specifically Agikuyu identity did not
preclude the imagination of the wider Kenyan identity’, Ngugi’s Novels and African History
(Pluto Press, London, 1999), p. 41. See also ‘“The truths of the nation”’, and Bruce J. Berman
and John Lonsdale, Unhappy Valley, Book Two: Violence and ethnicity (James Currey, London,
1992).
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meaning does not always inhere in a text, but is negotiated, made and remade as the text moves through a set of overlapping ‘scapes’ and ‘presences’,
as Appadurai would have it.33 The shifting ‘scapes’ within Kenya’s ‘presences’ include its shared economic, intellectual, political and social histories
which lend it coherence as a cultural zone.34 It is due to this common
cultural context rooted in shared experiences that a song like Unbwogable
acquires its social agency because it resonates with the political impulses
and anxieties of the moment.
What Gidi Gidi Maji Maji do with Kenyan political history is to work it
into memorable and accessible texts, as entertaining music. Significantly,
and perhaps one of the reasons why oppositional politics related so well to
it, their remembering works counter to the then ruling party’s cultural
memory. KANU had always resisted inscribing Mboya, Ouko and Jaramogi
as national heroes. Indeed, KANU’s official cultural ethos had no room for
maverick critics such as James Orengo and it made no space for legendary
cultural icons like Okatch Biggy and Princess Jully. But it is not just in the
matter of these explicitly political positions that Unbwogable engages with
politics. Much more of its politics lies in its structure, for we find this same
dismembering of the past, the defamiliarization of what we ‘know’, in the
logic underlying the coining of the term ‘unbwogable’. This fusing of
tongues — English and Luo — is a testament to a new Kenya, one that
breaks with the earlier constructed Kenyan past in the sense of separate
ethnic identities, and instead attests to the multiple and fluid identities that
are increasingly defining postcolonial, particularly urban, Kenya. In this
sense Unbwogable is continually located in history, dismembering and fusing
it, reinscribing and rewriting it. For us, the politics of what became the
song’s key text — unbwogable — lies, even more dramatically, in its structure, in the way the word refuses to fit an orthodox restriction of a singular
tongue, refusing to meet our expectations as we are seamlessly thrown from
one tongue to another. As Street puts it, ‘(t)he message is in the mix’.35
NARC’s emergent choruses
If Gidi Gidi and Maji Maji had meant their song to be read as an act of
their individual self-assertion, as a ‘pep talk’ to keep them strongly focused
on the vocation of their choice, then it is more than coincidental that they
draw their courage from the acts of both fellow musicians (Okatch Biggy
and Princess Jully) and politicians. For, in a strikingly reciprocal gesture,
33. Arjun Appadurai, ‘Disjuncture and difference in the global cultural economy’, in
P. Williams and L. Chrisman (eds), Colonial Discourse and Post-Colonial Theory: A reader
(Harvester, New York and London, 2002), pp. 324–39.
34. Hall, ‘Cultural identity and diaspora’, in ibid., pp. 392–403.
35. Street, ‘Rock, pop and politics’, p. 248.
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the NARC politicians took on Unbwogable as their anthem. They were going
to use its appeal not just as Gidi and Maji had — to steel themselves for
the battle of a general election — but, even more importantly, they were
propelling their party’s agenda and their own popularity by riding on the
back of the song’s success. The act of NARC appropriating Unbwogable was
actually a conscious and deliberate intervention, made by international
supporters of NARC. The song’s producer, Josiah, is candid in admitting
that licensing fees were paid for NARC’s use of Unbwogable as its party
slogan. Gidi Gidi and Maji Maji are adamant that they received no money
whatsoever either from NARC as a party, or from any of its supporters, and
perhaps this explains, in part, their denial that their song was ever political.
They claim they were not even paid for concert appearances at Nyayo
Stadium organized by NARC as part of its campaign. Talking about how
the licensing deal was sealed, Josiah says:
Late November [2002] is when friends of, it was friends of LDP who stepped in to
buy the licence. Again, Kenyans didn’t believe in their own music, somebody came
from abroad, paid for the licence and said, ‘now here, run with this’ . . . It was actually
an initiative from the British Government itself.36
Question. And, and they liked . . . particularly this, this song, or they were basically
prepared to back up anything that would . . . ?
Josiah: They liked particularly what this song had done by that particular point. They
had been following er, the cultural trends and they had been looking, er, for marketing gimmicks to help the whole campaign.
Later on, Josiah avows, these same NARC sponsors were to suggest new
versions of Unbwogable. They asked the producer to remove a lot of the Luo
elements, and in their place ‘put Masaai, Gikuyu, Kamba, Luhya and
Kalenjin’ elements to give the song a broader national appeal while all along
retaining Unbwogable’s catchy, assertive and provocative chorus. Says Josiah:
the third and final decision of making it er, er, more Kenyan and more er, er, to
encompass more cultures and languages was actually er, a decision that we would not
have made if, if we had not been approached. I can not, you know, take full glory for
that particular decision. It was something that an outsider said ‘you know what, this
song has huge impact already, but if you want to make it go bigger than it is right now,
create more languages in it, put a diverse section of things in it’, and he said ‘this end,
we shall pay you’. And I think money became a huge incentive ’cos it was like a huge
amount of money (emphasis in original).
Once again, both Gidi Gidi and Maji Maji deny knowledge of such funding
and say they were neither part of the remix project and nor were they paid
36. Although Tedd Josiah was our only source for the allegation of British government
involvement, we had no reason to doubt him. Josiah was also adamant that a British politician
approached him and even recommended changes to the original version of Unbwogable to make
it more national in context.
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any licensing fees for the use of their song.37 What Josiah came up with was
a version of Unbwogable that opens:
What the hell are you stopping me for?
Can’t a young Masaai chung’a ngombe (‘graze cattle’) anymore?
nasimamisha mimi
You restrain me
na Nairobi sio yako
and yet Nairobi doesn’t belong to you
The remix version — known as Unbwogable Remix featuring Mr Ebbo —
goes on to capture, in their respective accents, the socio-economic woes of
a host of Kenyan ethnic groups — Kalenjins, Kambas, Gikuyus and
Luhyas. As impromptu fundraisers, NARC supporters raised as much as
800,000 Kenya shillings [US$10,000] for the duplication and distribution
of tapes with these songs. The important thing to note about the whole
exercise is that, in its conception and distribution, the remix text was a
deliberately fashioned act of political intervention. It constituted part of
NARC’s performative politics in which they struggled through song to
convince the public that they could right all the wrongs that had supposedly
been perpetrated by the Moi regime. In Unbwogable Remix NARC rewrites
KANU’s history, showing it to be behind all of the economic decay, the
corruption, the misappropriation of resources and the overall mismanagement of the country. At the same time, we need to focus on the structural
formation of remixes. Indeed, the very idea of remix versions is centred
around the tropes of destruction and plurality, around the notion of
breaking the known, and of creating something over and over again, each
time building on the old to create a new form. In this particular remix, the
destruction is aimed at not just the original Unbwogable, but, just as important, it is centred on breaking KANU apart.
But Unbwogable was not the only instance in which NARC tried to
employ popular song to its advantage. Indeed, so aware of the rhetorical
power of song to captivate and woo audiences were these politicians, that
some momentarily became performers, all the while exploiting the portability of popular song. Take the case of Honourable Mukhisa Kituyi, later
Minister of Trade in the NARC government. With much wit and versatility, he took tunes from Kenya’s repertoire of Zilizopendwa (‘golden oldies’)
and bent them to carry NARC’s agenda for transforming Kenya. Here is
one of his remixes:
Kweli ndugu sikilizeni niwambie ! 2
Wakati Moi alikuja
Na akaleta hasara,
Kuvunja vunja uchumi
Kuvunja vunja katiba
37.
Truly, my countrymen listen, I tell you
About the time Moi took over
And brought much damage
Breaking up the economy
Breaking up the constitution
In 2003, Gidi and Maji eventually owned up to having been paid 800,000 Kenya shillings.
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Playing on the audiences’ nostalgia for the original, Kituyi would get instantaneous applause, rarely having to move on to the next verse of the old
number and declare:
Ndugu wangu wote walikataa,
wakasema ‘afunge aende’
‘hatutaki hasara’
‘afunge aende kwao!’
All of my brothers rejected her
They said: ‘she must pack and go’
‘We do not want losses’
‘She must pack and go back to her home’
Like Gidi Gidi Maji Maji, Kituyi evoked memory to confront the
predicaments of the new day. His ingenuity lay in using the old and familiar
as a vehicle to carry across the realities of the present predicaments. To do
this effectively, he borrowed from the discourses of romance — which is the
main thematic thrust of the old number — to break down political
dynamics into sizeable and conceivable relations for his varied publics. In
his remix version, then, he implicitly parallels NARC as the dazzling new
bride, capable and efficient in the matter of taking good care of the homestead (Kenya) where the clumsy unschooled wife (Moi) has wrought havoc
and costly destruction, to say nothing of the way her (his) actions have
angered and frustrated the brothers (the Kenyan public). And it was not
just the Zilizopendwa that provided the idioms with which to read the situation at hand. Indeed, NARC supporters also looked to contemporary
numbers to wage the war against their opponents. Once again, romance
provided all the right nuances. Witness their clever editing and reworking
of Saida Karoli’s Maria Salome. A romantic ballad that talks to those who
feel threatened by Maria Salome’s blossoming romance, it ultimately
declares ‘wenye wivu wajiyonge’ (‘let the envious hang themselves/commit
suicide’). Clever NARC activists reworked the line to ‘wana KANU wajinyonge’ (‘KANU supporters can hang themselves’), thus goading the embattled KANU supporters.
Romance truly proved to be a favoured trope in the opposition’s
discourses aimed at wooing voters into finally jilting the treacherous
KANU. D.O. Misiani’s Rainbow was obviously titled as a vote for NARC.
And in a departure from his usual style, in this song Misiani avoided
allegory and allusion, instead directly speaking to the political moment.
Rainbow makes fun of Moi, playing on the stereotype of him as a backward
man who has ‘been blinded’ by Mama Ngina38 and her ‘golden bed’.
Beyond the employment of romance, Rainbow speaks in deeply apocalyptic terms, labelling Raila Odinga the ‘hot iron that burns’ and declaring that
without NARC — whose foremost leaders it names — the country will
irrevocably go downhill. Giving Moi the derogatory name of ‘jater’ (a wife
38. Widow of first President Jomo Kenyatta and mother of Uhuru Kenyatta, Moi’s favoured
KANU presidential candidate in the 2002 general election.
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inheritor), in reference to a Luo tradition of wife inheritance which has
since been left to the deranged in the community, Misiani is out to consign
Moi to the dustbin of fools. He has become ‘kipofu’ (a blind man), blinded
by years of economic plunder and material greed symbolized in the ‘golden
bed’ — or is this the Goldenberg scandal that rocked the Moi leadership?
Misiani reminds Moi that if he fails to heed the call of NARC and the
Kenyan people, he will drive the nation to a bloodbath reminiscent of
Liberian and Ugandan experience under Charles Taylor and Amin Dada
respectively.
Featuring even more prominently alongside Unbwogable at numerous
NARC rallies, was the popular refrain ‘Yote yawezekana, bila Moi’.39 It was
one of those chants that seem to rise spontaneously from the crowd, and
to it they would add apt lines such as ‘Uchumi ita fufuka, bila Moi’ (‘the
economy will be resurrected, without Moi’). These renditions proved to be
incisive and apposite interventions, greatly augmenting Unbwogable’s
message of resistance and perseverance. Again, the key thing to note here
is that NARC’s publics had themselves realized the power of song in articulating common causes. With deft imagination, they ferried texts from the
domain of religion, borrowed the tunes and edited the lyrics, to carry their
message of hope in NARC’s ability to deliver them from the vagaries and
pain of KANU’s many years of misrule.
Another instance of borrowing from religious discourses is seen in the
song Mugithi.40 In recent years, Mugithi has come to represent urban
Gikuyu nationalism, acting as a rallying point of their identity in nearly all
their social gatherings. In coming to occupy this space, Mugithi has travelled through an interesting terrain. The original Mugithi was sung in the
late 1970s as a Christian chorus about the spiritual journey to Zion —
heaven. Like many other Christian choruses, it is difficult to credit any
specific person with its composition. When Joseph Kamaru, the foremost
Gikuyu popular musician of the 1960s and ’70s, turned to gospel music,
he recorded his own version of Mugithi. Perhaps on account of the intensity with which he had dominated Gikuyu popular music, Kamaru’s new
rendition of Mugithi, though still intended as a Christian message, nonetheless found its way into pubs and nightclubs. Here drunken patrons robbed
it of its religious context and accorded it the status of an irreverent popular
tune.41 With the emergence of NARC, Mugithi entered the political
domain, serving the same purpose that Gikuyu hymns served in the 1950s
39. Swahili for ‘All is possible/attainable without Moi’. The original hymn says ‘Yote
yawezekana, na imani’ — ‘All is possible with faith’.
40. Gikuyu for ‘train’.
41. Other tunes like ‘Hutia Jesu’ (‘Touch me Jesus’) and even the funeral dirge ‘Ni Wega
Ngai’ (‘Thanks be to God’) have similarly made this transition from gospel tunes to popular
bar entertainment, performed by so-called ‘one-man guitars’ and often filled with romantic
and even lewd sexual connotations.
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during the Mau Mau struggle for independence.42 Recognizing Mugithi’s
new status, Tedd Josiah quickly assembled a group of musicians — Joel,
Man Wanjohi and Kevin Waire — who recorded a multi-ethnic version of
the song, rendered in Gikuyu, English and Swahili. By the time Kibaki
emerged as victor of the 2002 general election the refrain Yote Yawezekana,
plus Mugithi, and Unbwogable, had virtually been accorded the status of
Kenyan patriotic songs. But more than all the others, it was Unbwogable that
dominated the public space, transforming the national imaginary and
becoming the key to its definition of resistance and victory.
The aftermath
Through the early months of 2003, the discourses of invincibility and
resistance that marked the notion of Unbwogable were rewritten to include
victory and a tremendous sense of achievement. It is in this form that
Unbwogable virtually became official state culture. It came to stand for an
attitude, an approach, an identity, a spirit of invincibility and a pride in the
nation. As such, Unbwogable became so deeply rooted in the cultural memory
of the Kenyan people that it graces nearly all state functions, both public and
private. Incoming President Kibaki officially transported it from the outhouses of resistance to the comfort and recognition of State House. To the
delight of the frenzied Uhuru Park crowds, he uttered the key word at his
installation on 30 December 2002, to reflect the resilience and sense of
achievement that the new government now felt and shared with the Kenyan
people. In February 2003, Unbwogable found its way into the House of
Assembly where the then Vice-President Michael Wamalwa articulately
defended his use of it to Speaker Francis Kaparo who was censuring it
as unparliamentary language.43 At the opening of the Constitutional
Conference on 29 April 2003 and then a few days later on Labour Day, President Kibaki once again talked of the unbwogable Kenyan people. Cabinet
minister Professor Anyang Nyon’go used the term again at the wedding of
the Vice-President, Michael Wamalwa, to Yvonne Nambia on 10 May.
And this new culture is not simply a matter of how the Kenyan people
view themselves, or even of how their leaders were trying to shape Kenyan
identity. It is also about the way others were reading and understanding
Kenya. Thus on the eve of the 27 December election the Washington Post
reported:
42. See Christiana Pugliese, ‘Complementary or contending nationhoods? Kikuyu pamphlets
and songs 1945–52’, in Odhiambo and Lonsdale, Mau Mau and Nationhood, pp. 97–120, in
which she discusses, inter alia, the impact of the first Kikuyu hymn book, Nyimbo cia
Kwarahura Ruriri (‘Songs to Awaken the Tribe’).
43. See East African Standard of 20 February 2003 — ‘Unbwogable not Parliamentary
Language’. Wamalwa argued that the ‘English language is a growing language . . . Unbwogable
captures the mood and soon it will be acceptable’.
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Kenyan presidential hopeful Mwai Kibaki will head into tomorrow’s election boosted
by his wildly popular campaign anthem. The hit song, ‘Who Can Bwogo Me?,’ echoes
the message of Kibaki’s National Rainbow Coalition, bridging tribal differences while
voicing resistance to corruption and oppression.
And on 16 February 2003, Marc Lacey of the New York Times argued:
Until recently, Kenyans felt defeated and downtrodden as they watched their country’s
downward spiral of economic and social decay. But a political transformation with the
defeat of Daniel arap Moi’s handpicked successor in the country’s first real elections,
in December, has given them a new spirit that is best captured in a single word —
‘unbwogable’.
In other words, it is not only the Kenyan state that saw the term unbwogable
as being usefully entwined with connotations of pioneering change, courage,
socio-political correctness and positive nationalism. And it is precisely at
this point that danger lurks — the danger of turning unbwogable into the
badge of patriotic fervour, into the barometer of commitment to the state
and all its apparatus. Worse still, the notion of unbwogable may become the
breeding ground for despotic leadership. An incident reported in the East
African Standard of 22 April 2003 provides an apt example. At a victory
party held at Mulwanda Primary School in Butere/Mumias District and
graced by Vice-President Michael Wamalwa, the Member of Parliament for
Emuhaya, Kenneth Marende, warned local teachers to tread with caution
in their demands for better pay: ‘It’s only MPs who are unbwogable. Teachers
cannot also start claiming they are unbwogable in their demands for a payincrease.’44 Marende’s egoistic boast demonstrates quite clearly that the
new political parlance of Kenyans is very much in danger of being hijacked
for the wrong causes and to achieve ends that are detrimental to the
majority. And this is precisely because, like all discourses of freedom, the
notion of being unbwogable carries within it key tensions and contradictions.
In the same way that it purposefully acted as a counter-hegemonic
discourse to challenge KANU’s autocratic ways, it can nonetheless become
so carried away with creating space and autonomy by defying intrusion, that
it evolves into a site of unyielding bravado. This latter scenario is all the
more probable in a situation, such as Marende demonstrated, where the
discourses of invincibility and resistance are appropriated and owned by a
privileged few, obviously at the expense of the majority.
The appropriation of Unbwogable into official state discourse, together
with its shifting and contradictory conditions of production and consumption within the public sphere, draws attention to the fluid nature of Africa’s
social dynamics. The song, for example, provided a critical matrix through
44.
http:www.eastandard.net/headlines/news2204200309.htm
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which the fluid nature of the relationship between state, class and ethnicity can be understood. The politics of Unbwogable’s circulation in the public
domain demonstrates what Schatzberg has aptly called ‘a triple-stranded
helix of state, class, and ethnicity’, which, he argues, represents ‘the warp
and woof of politics in Africa’.45 Schatzberg’s point is that, to understand
the true nature of African politics, one must pay attention to a ‘braiding’
process — ‘the continual formation and reconstitution of the helix’ by these
three competing strands.46 In a metaphorical sense, then, Unbwogable
became the helix upon which various strands of competing state, class and
ethnic interests in Kenya were woven into a coherent symbolic structure.
But Unbwogable, as a political discourse, also demonstrates the inadequacy of trying to understand postcolonial relations of power, especially
between the ruled and the rulers, through what Achille Mbembe describes
as ‘the binary categories used in standard interpretations of domination’.47
The way in which the song was reconstituted and appropriated across ethnic
and class divides as it travelled over Kenya’s turbulent political landscape,
demonstrates that instance in African politics which Mbembe calls ‘an
intimate tyranny’ that ‘links the rulers and the ruled’.48 Mbembe’s
argument that ‘the logics of conviviality, the dynamics of domesticity and
familiarity . . . inscribe the dominant and the dominated in the same
epistemological field’,49 is best captured in the manner in which Unbwogable
provided the symbolic structure upon which a whole range of ideological
interests were collapsed and Kenya’s mangled past was negotiated and
reconstituted by the ruled and their would-be rulers in a bizarre spirit of
conviviality and familiarity. In a significant sense, therefore, Unbwogable
demonstrates the elasticity of symbolic structures, of metaphors, of words
and of text; it shows how a travelling text will invariably constitute unstable
and multiple meanings that defy their originary discourses and collapse
those simplistic ideological boundaries often used to describe difference in
African politics.
45. Michael Schatzberg, The Dialectics of Oppression in Zaire (Indiana University Press,
Bloomington and Indianapolis, IN, 1988), p. 11.
46. Ibid.
47. Achille Mbembe, ‘The banality of power and the aesthetics of vulgarity in the postcolony’, Public Culture 4, 2 (1992), p. 3.
48. Ibid., p. 22.
49. Ibid., p. 14. Although Achille Mbembe’s seminal paper provides some useful insights into
the nature of power relations within the postcolony, we do not share in its totalizing tendency
to impute a horizontal relationship of equality in powerlessness, zombification, impotence and
violence between the ruled and the rulers. This, in our view, is a major flaw in Mbembe’s
otherwise brilliant article, which critics like Tejumola Olaniyan have pointed out. See Tejumola
Olaniyan, ‘Narrativizing postcoloniality: responsibilities’, Public Culture 5, 1 (1992), pp. 47–55.
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Conclusions
Is it possible to argue that it was the prevailing oppressive conditions for
artistes in the local industry that generated the creative response that was
Unbwogable? Perhaps. But even more than the exposure to the power
dynamics of the local music industry that it gave these artistes, it was the
ability of Gidi and Maji to translate this encounter into shared communicable experience50 that resulted in Unbwogable, with all of its spirit of
resistance. The duo’s ultimate hijacking of the song’s commercial processes
must be seen as the final testimony in their revision of their role as creative
artistes, of their new-found understanding of the mechanics of musicmaking. It is also a statement about the music industry in Kenya, which
works to undermine creativity and the independence of artistes and, as
such, forms a mirror image of the Kenyan political system which is structured around dominance and the annihilation of creativity, free-thinking
and equity. The thoughts and emotions bottled up in Unbwogable spoke to
the experiences of many other people and thus they could be pegged onto
a broad national project, opening new vistas in the articulation of collective freedom. But, as Fabian convincingly posits, and as our analysis of
the aftermath has demonstrated, this freedom generated by the text ‘(a)s a
quality of the process of human self-realization, freedom cannot be
anything but contestatory and discontinuous or precarious’.51 It comes in
bursts, moments, rather than existing as a permanent state of grace.
From our arguments above, it is clear that popular music emerges
from ‘the interplay of commercial, aesthetic, institutional and political
processes’.52 The media in particular play a key role in advertising new
products, and left unchecked, without suitable policies, can easily become
the bane of popular music. For their part, political decisions can impact
either negatively or positively on the development of popular music. As far
as state power is concerned, Unbwogable entered the political domain on a
note of difference, interpreted as being critical of the KANU government
and thus shunned by it. Later, NARC’s licensing sanctioned it as a site of
resistance, a metaphor for the inexorable wind of change and the ultimate
in articulating a deep-seated longing for freedom from economic and
political domination by the KANU regime over the last 40 years.
Unbwogable has since walked away from the path of difference and
ensconced itself as the preferred trajectory of official culture.
And there are lessons to be learnt too from the path of this transition.
First, the singular political interpretation of the song signals the fact that
50. Johannes Fabian, Moments of Freedom: Anthropology and popular culture (University Press
of Virginia, Charlottesville, VA and London, 1998), p. 21.
51. Ibid.
52. Street, ‘Rock, pop and politics’, p. 241.
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Unbwogable was necessarily read within the postcolonial Kenyan tradition
of protest songs such as those that had earlier been made famous by
musicians like D.O. Misiani and Joseph Kamaru. It also speaks of constraints
to interpretation for both the creative artistes and the listening publics. All
of this is given further limitations by NARC’s act of appropriation. Indeed,
the payment of the initial licence fee for Unbwogable by a British national,
as well as the making of Unbwogable Remix and the fundraisers that made
cassettes of these songs available in many, many rural homes, indicates that
the generation and spread of popular forms is not as spontaneous and
informal as we would sometimes wish to imagine. Popular forms can, in fact,
be very deliberately engineered products. And what NARC’s intervention
may ultimately mean is that future creative pieces from Gidi Gidi Maji Maji
will be guaranteed media exposure, commercial leverage and perhaps even
public acclaim, thereby giving them an edge over their compatriots.
The power of popular music as political education cannot be gainsaid.
The NARC government learned early that it shares publics with popular
musicians who are themselves masters in creating and communicating with
these publics. NARC has borrowed from the musicians this logic of
communicating with and representing others. Indeed, acknowledgement of
the role of popular artistes in communicating and sharing key issues and
moments has come from none other than President Kibaki. When he
attended the gala night of the Kenya Music Festival, he commended Gidi
Gidi Maji Maji for giving the nation a new idiom. When he made his first
official visit to the lakeside town of Kisumu on 31 July 2003, he recalled the
baptism of NARC leaders as ‘unbwogable’ and hailed the song from which
the expression was borrowed Ultimately, we must acknowledge that the
phenomenon that Unbwogable became, that it initiated and propelled, was
not simply dependent on the text a priori, it was also made possible by the
timing of the moment of its emergence and initial circulation. At a critical
moment therefore, Unbwogable provided the terms with which to articulate
personal emotions and wider political implications. It provided an idiom and
harnessed the prevalent mood for change and rebirth in the nation.
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