There’s only one commercial cassette available, Akamba Drums (Tamasha) it covers many styles and can be ordered from the Zanzibar Curio Shop in Nairobi. The tradition of the Akamba, best known for their skill at drumming, is sadly now all but extinct. Obviously, there’s much more available if you know where to search and what to ask for: essential reading for this is George Senoga-Zake’s Folk Music of Kenya (Uzima Press, Nairobi, 1986). The following is a very brief tribe-by-tribe rundown of more easily encountered traditional music and instruments. Elsewhere, to hear anything live, you need a lot of time and patience, and often a local family’s trust, though there’s a certain amount of recorded music available. Gospel has all but obliterated traditional music, and among the Kikuyu (Kenya’s largest tribe) or the Kalenjin (who comprise much of the government), the old tribal music is almost extinct. Nowadays, however, the majority of Kenyans are Christian, and gospel music reigns supreme – sadly not the uplifting version of the US or South Africa, but a tinny, synthesized and homogenous form. Throughout the country, music has always been used to accompany rites of passage and other events, from celebrations at a baby’s birth to songs of adolescence, warriorhood, marriage, harvest, solar and lunar cycles, festivities, religious rites and death. Kenya has a rich network of tribal (a term used widely in the country) musical cultures, though not all have survived intact into the twenty-first century. Either way, the effects have been devastating – not only the direct loss of talent, but also the loss of musicians who anchored the Kenyan musical scene in its historical context.Ī new generation of musicians and producers is beginning to make its mark, though it remains to be seen where this new direction will lead. Though AIDS may be a factor in many of these cases, it is rarely confirmed more often, we hear about deaths caused by TB, malaria, diabetes or heart problems. Sadly, this is at least in part down to veterans dying away – including a startling number of men in their forties or fifties. However, the music scene in Kenya today is very different from that of only five or ten years ago. This rapid-fire percussion, usually on the snare or hi-hat, quickly took hold in Kenya and continues to underlie a great sweep of Kenyan music, from Kakai Kilonzo to Les Wanyika and Orchestre Virunga. Up to the mid-1990s, the common denominator among all these styles was the prominence of guitars – interweaving with each other, or delivering dazzling solos – and the cavacha rhythm: the Bo Diddley-esque beat popularized in the mid-1970s by Congolese groups such as Zaïko Langa Langa and Orchestra Shama Shama. Many Kenyan musicians direct their efforts towards their own linguistic groups and perform most of their songs in one of Kenya’s indigenous languages, while others, aiming at national and urban audiences, sing in Swahili or the Congolese language Lingala. There is no single identifiable genre of popular Kenyan music, but rather a number of styles that borrow freely and cross-fertilize each other. Doug Paterson, who has been observing and documenting the scene for more than thirty years, provides the low-down.
Yet the immense talent is rarely acknowledged internationally and seldom given the resources it needs to flourish. Kenya has always had one of the most diverse and intoxicating musical cultures in Africa. To keep up-to-date with the best new music from around the world, subscribe to Songlines magazine.
Note that this Rough Guide to World Music article has not been updated since it was originally published.
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