HIP-HOP LIFE AND LIVELIHOOD IN NAIROBI, KENYA

By

JOHN ERIK TIMMONS

A DISSERTATION PRESENTED TO THE GRADUATE SCHOOL OF THE UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT

OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA

2018

© 2018 John Erik Timmons

To my parents, John and Kathleen Timmons, my brothers, James and Chris Timmons, and my wife, Sheila Onzere

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The completion of a PhD requires the support of many people and institutions.

The intellectual community at the University of Florida offered incredible support

throughout my graduate education. In particular, I wish to thank my committee

members, beginning with my Chair Richard Kernaghan, whose steadfast support and

incisive comments on my work is most responsible for the completion of this PhD.

Luise White and Brenda Chalfin have been continuous supporters of my work since my

first semester at the University of Florida. Abdoulaye Kane and Larry Crook have given

me valuable insights in their seminars and as readers of my dissertation.

The Department of Anthropology gave me several semesters of financial support

and helped fund pre-dissertation research. The Center for African Studies similarly

helped fund this research through a pre-dissertation fellowship and awarding me two

years’ support the Foreign Language and Area Studies Fellowship. Another generous

Summer FLAS Fellowship was awarded through Yale’s MacMillan Center Council on

African Studies. My language training in Kiswahili was carried out in the classrooms of

several great instructors, Rose Lugano, Ann Biersteker, and Kiarie wa Njogu. The

United States Department of Education generously supported this fieldwork through a

Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Award.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS page

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS .................................................................................................. 4

LIST OF FIGURES .......................................................................................................... 7

ABSTRACT ..................................................................................................................... 9

CHAPTER

1 INTRODUCTION .................................................................................................... 10

Preface ................................................................................................................... 10 Introducing MC Blak................................................................................................ 11

Introducing Dandora ............................................................................................... 15

Background and Description of Research Methods ................................................ 19 Theoretical Relevance ............................................................................................ 29 Music and Time ...................................................................................................... 39

Structure of the Dissertation ................................................................................... 42 Ethnographic Interludes .......................................................................................... 43

Dandora Hip-Hop Archive ....................................................................................... 43

2 WATCHING TIME ................................................................................................... 45

Introduction ............................................................................................................. 45

Structure of the Chapter .......................................................................................... 50

Colonizing Time ...................................................................................................... 54 Hip-Hop, Nation, Time ............................................................................................ 60 Mau Mau and Revolution ........................................................................................ 67

Analyzing the Visual Aesthetics .............................................................................. 74 Matigari Doesn’t Even Have a Plot of Land ............................................................ 91 Conclusion .............................................................................................................. 97

3 TRANSLATE THIS ............................................................................................... 101

Revolutionary Hip-Hop and Civic Virtue ................................................................ 102 Zakah, “Native Son” .............................................................................................. 104 Wenyeji and the Mau Mau Program ..................................................................... 106

Texts, Publics, and Time ....................................................................................... 112 Revolution and Translation ................................................................................... 114 Generation and Translation .................................................................................. 117

Translation and History ......................................................................................... 119 Hip-Hop History in Dandora .................................................................................. 124 Origin and Imitation ............................................................................................... 127 Translation and Difference .................................................................................... 132 Conclusion ............................................................................................................ 136

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Postscript: The End of the Beginning .................................................................... 140

4 KAH’S VISION ...................................................................................................... 149

Introduction ........................................................................................................... 149 Universalism and Global Hip-Hop ......................................................................... 151 “That Ghetto is Just a Hellhole” ............................................................................ 155 All Over the World ................................................................................................. 163 “The Nairobi Sewer” .............................................................................................. 167

Translation and the Remainder ............................................................................. 176 Kah’s Vision .......................................................................................................... 178 Conclusion ............................................................................................................ 180

5 NAIROBBERY ...................................................................................................... 185

Interlude: Night Session ........................................................................................ 185 System of Thugs ................................................................................................... 189 Rada ..................................................................................................................... 197

This is How We Livin’ ............................................................................................ 200 Interlude: Electricity .............................................................................................. 219

6 BLAK..................................................................................................................... 224

7 GAZA .................................................................................................................... 246

8 CONCLUSION ...................................................................................................... 256

LIST OF REFERENCES ............................................................................................. 264

BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH .......................................................................................... 275

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LIST OF FIGURES

Figure page 1-1 MC Mutant on top of the roof of a residential building in Kitengela, inside of

which is the Higher Linxxs studio. Photos taken by Erik Timmons, while Mutant and Timmons were writing a song together. ........................................... 27

1-2 Erik Timmons idly sitting in front of a “No Idle Sitting” sign. ................................ 32

2-1 Digitally rendered film leader from Angalia Saa. ................................................. 75

2-2 Six images used at the beginning of Angalia Saa............................................... 76

2-3 Three alternate images of Dedan Kimathi. ......................................................... 79

2-4 Mural of Dedan Kimathi in Dandora “Base Camp.” Photo taken by author in 2012. .................................................................................................................. 82

2-5 Images of Kama and Kimathi from Angalia Saa. ................................................ 84

2-6 Image of actor hiding in video, Angalia Saa. ...................................................... 92

2-7 Images of actors in the video, Angalia Saa ........................................................ 92

2-8 Actor running through Nairobi streets in Angalia Saa. ........................................ 94

2-9 Kama points to his wrist in Angalia Saa. ............................................................. 96

2-10 Dedan Kimathi (left) and actor superimposed over Kimathi (right). .................... 97

3-1 Images the fictional “Daily Mapupa” newspaper from the Wenyeji video for “Mizani”. ............................................................................................................ 109

4-1 Image from “All Over the World.” Pictured on the left is Dutch manager, Nynke Nauta, gazing at the tower of trash erected in the Dandora dumpsite. .. 159

4-2 Image from “All Over the World.” This image offers a parody of “National Geographic” in the form of “National Ecographic,” which proclaims the construction of a “New Tower of Babel” on its cover. ....................................... 163

4-3 Rah Goddess in front of plane in All Over the World. ....................................... 167

4-4 (Left) MC Kah rapping in “All Over the World.” (Right) an image of the tower of trash being built in the Dandora dump.. ........................................................ 171

4-5 Newscasts in video “All Over the World.” ......................................................... 176

4-6 Newspapers in video “All Over the World.” ....................................................... 176

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6-1 MC Blak from 2014 documentary, “Maono Ya Kah” ......................................... 224

7-1 Mbombrace Christopher, an actor from the Civo neighborhood in Kariobangi South, prepares to shoot a scene for the music video “Who We Are.” ............. 246

7-2 Railway line that goes from Dandora to town everyday. To the right is the Civil Servants (Civo) section of Kariobangi Souty, which borders Dandora’s southern edge. .................................................................................................. 247

7-3 Director, Johnson Kyalo, prepares to shoot a scene for the video, “Who We Are.” In the background, a typical-looking apartment building in Civo. ............. 248

7-4 Mbombrace Christopher acting during a scene for the video, “Who We Are.” .. 249

7-5 Mombrace Christopher preparing for a scene for the video, “Who We Are.” In his lap is a bag of glucose powder intended to mimic the heroin that is often rolled up into joints and smoked in Nairobi. ...................................................... 250

7-6 Local children pose for a photograph in Civo. Notice the building in the foreground (right) has rebar sprouting from it. In the background (left) an unfinished apartment building. .......................................................................... 251

7-7 Erik Timmons playing guitar for several local children on the concrete slab where a faceless corpse had appeared one night. ........................................... 252

7-8 Mbombrace Christopher during a break entertaining us with his story. ............ 253

7-9 Mbombrace Christopher making everyone laugh as he tells his story of the faceless corpse. ................................................................................................ 254

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Abstract of Dissertation Presented to the Graduate School of the University of Florida in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy

HIP-HOP LIFE AND LIVELIHOOD IN NAIROBI, KENYA

By

John Erik Timmons

May 2018

Chair: Richard Kernaghan Major: Anthropology

Throughout the dissertation I use ethnographic narratives of relationships and

encounters with hip-hop artists to illustrate and analyze how notions of time imbricate

themselves in the activities, self-understanding, and aesthetics of hip-hop practitioners

in Nairobi, Kenya. In particular, I focus on young Nairobians from disadvantaged socio-

economic backgrounds to examine the daily social, discursive, and aesthetic practices

they deploy while pursuing temporal autonomy. Despite the fact that most Kenyans view

it as a “waste of time”, Hip-hop in urban Kenya is both an economic strategy and an

important forum for youth to discuss issues significant to them. While the national

unemployment rate is 12.7 percent, in urban areas such as Nairobi youth

unemployment is estimated to be between 35-60 percent (UNDP 2013). In light of these

demographic and economic trends Kenyan youth and their future are frequently the

center of debate amongst development organizations, policy makers and scholars. This

dissertation uses the language and practices of hip hop in Kenya to shed insight into

how Kenyan youth experience and respond to the challenges presented by making a

life in Nairobi.

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CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION

Preface

This dissertation examines how the creation and performance of hip-hop

music in Nairobi provides a vocabulary for young Kenyans as they attempt to

claim a measure of control over everyday uses of time. Specifically, it asks how

the sub-genre of Kenyan hip-hop, which I refer to as “revolutionary hip-hop”,

directs attention to multiple temporalities in the city as they come to be

experienced, shaped and transformed by the young musicians who are the focus

of this ethnography.

The broad theme of time and its relationship to revolutionary hip-hop is

present throughout the dissertation. The first three chapters of the dissertation

explore how revolutionary hip-hop, and its creation of a shared revolutionary time

establishes an “imagined community” for young Kenyans. Drawing on

Anderson’s key insight that national “imagined communities” are possible

because members have a shared apprehension of time, I argue that

revolutionary hip-hop creates its own original, emergent temporality, through

which its members imagine themselves to be part of a larger community, a

historical movement. I then complicate the notion of temporal autonomy by

showing how hip-hop interacts with other modes of time, including those

associated with the Kenyan nation and generational debates.

By contrast, in Chapter’s 4, 5 and 6, I begin a more narrative ethnographic

approach that seeks to point out the ambivalence at the center of this temporal

boundary making. By giving ethnographic narratives of my respective encounters

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with hip-hop artists, MC Kah (Chapter 4), General Chizee (Chapter 5), and MC

Blak (Chapter 6), I attempt to show where the ideals of a shared revolutionary

movement meet material realities of life in Nairobi. In particular, these chapters

look at the social aspects of community, when issues of crime, insecurity, and a

lack of economic resources create strains on interpersonal relationships. The

central event in this discussion is the robbery that took place after I had been in

the field for about three months. As I describe in these chapters this event, which

happened while I was walking with hip-hop artists to a concert in Nairobi,

changed the dynamic of our relationships. The description and discussion of the

robbery is used to analyze how our relationships changed and what that

discloses about the limits of maintaining a revolutionary hip-hop community in

Nairobi.

Introducing MC Blak

It wasn’t until several weeks after I was robbed at knifepoint in downtown

Nairobi that I felt comfortable going with my friend and hip-hop artist, MC Blak, to

his mother’s home in the infamous Nairobi slum, Kibera. Blak had been with me

during the robbery and, despite frequently describing himself as a “revolutionary,”

a “soldier,” and my long-time friend, had run away leaving me to fend for myself

against three machete-wielding thieves. It was an upsetting reality I was still

grappling with as an ethnographer and a person. Blak’s actions didn’t seem like

those of a “soldier,” a “revolutionary,” or a “friend.” But those categories are

knotted in cultural meaning (the unraveling of which is a task I undertake in the

course of this dissertation). The robbery turned out to be a central event in my

fieldwork experience, opening up new relationships and opportunities for

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ethnographic fieldwork, while closing off others. In Chapter 4 “Nairobbery” and

Chapter 5 “Blak”, I describe in greater detail the robbery and its aftermath as I

came to reflect upon it with the passage of time.

In the immediate days following this event I felt unsure about how I should

interpret Blak’s flight. Was it an act of betrayal? Cowardice? What kind of

“soldier” leaves a comrade in trouble? Or was Blak just demonstrating street-

smart common sense – an unwritten rule in a city nicknamed “Nairobbery” that I

simply hadn’t learned yet? Worse still, I had lingering suspicions that Blak had

orchestrated the robbery, intentionally taking me on foot to a part of the city

where he had alerted shady acquaintances to waylay us. Several friends had

independently suggested this possibility to me, and there were several aspects of

that night that began to look suspicious in hindsight.

Given my sense of uncertainty and lingering fears about being victimized

again, I felt extreme trepidation about going with Blak into an unknown (to me)

and potentially dangerous slum in Nairobi. But I’m glad I accepted the invitation

to visit his mother’s home in Kibera. It went a long way in repairing whatever

sense of trust had been broken in the robbery. It was also in visiting his home

and meeting his mother that I came to understand something surprising about

Blak and about his life as a hip-hop artist. What I learned during that visit was

that Blak kept his home life and his identity as a hip-hop musician completely

separate. I knew Blak as one of the elders of hip-hop in Kenya - a formidable

lyricist who was proud of his place in Kenya’s hip-hop landscape. Now in his mid-

thirties, Blak had been a hip-hop artist since he was a teenager, when he won a

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poetry contest run by a Dutch NGO. This event in Blak’s life allowed him to travel

to Amsterdam for three weeks and partake in poetry workshops, presentations

and, as Blak points out with a chuckle, lots of premium marijuana.

Yet, when I explained to his mother that I was in Kenya to research hip-

hop, she stared at me blankly. She didn’t know what hip-hop was, let alone that

her son had anything to do with it. She knew her son had travelled to Holland for

some reason, but it didn’t amount to anything she could identify as a career or

lifestyle defining moment. Later Blak confirmed that his mother had no idea about

his life as a hip-hop artist explaining, “it’s not something you can be proud to

say.” This was a realization I only came to find out when my relationship with

Blak had matured to a certain point, and after our bond had been forged in the

shared experience of the robbery. As time passed, I came to realize that it was

the robbery, the aftermath of rumor, suspicion and mistrust - and our eventual trip

to his mother’s home - that he became comfortable letting me into a world he

guarded with intense privacy. As Blak made sure to tell me on our walk, I and our

mutual friend, MC Kah, were the only people from Blak’s hip-hop circle that were

ever invited to the home he shared with his mother and sister at the bottom of the

Kibera valley.

My relationship with Blak, which will be discussed in further detail in

Chapter 6, highlights several key issues in this dissertation. Among these

questions are: what does it mean to be “revolutionary”? How and why is

revolution deployed by hip-hoppers in Nairobi? How do shared experiences of

crime and insecurity influence cultural production and social relationships in

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Nairobi? What is disclosed about generational relationships in Kenya when

young hip-hop artists can’t feel pride in telling their elders what they do?

In the following chapters I lay out an argument about hip-hop and youth in

Nairobi, which views revolutionary hip-hop as a way that younger Kenyans

engage with debates over the nature and flow of time. My central argument is

that hip-hop is used by its practitioners to assert their own temporal autonomy in

the face of multiple forces trying to exert pressure on how they structure their

time. Throughout the dissertation I use ethnographic narratives of relationships

and encounters with hip-hop artists like MC Blak to illustrate and analyze how

notions of time imbricate themselves in the activities, self-understanding, and

aesthetics of hip-hop practitioners in Nairobi. In particular, I focus on young

Nairobians from disadvantaged socio-economic backgrounds to examine the

daily social, discursive, and aesthetic practices they deploy while pursuing

temporal autonomy. Despite the fact that most Kenyans view it as a “waste of

time,” hip-hop in urban Kenya is both an economic strategy and an important

forum for youth to discuss issues significant to them.

Approximately 80 percent of Kenya’s population is under the age of 35

and Kenyans aged 18-34 years old represent more than a third of the national

population. While the national unemployment rate is 12.7 percent, in urban areas

such as Nairobi youth unemployment is estimated to be between 35-60 percent

(UNDP 2013). In light of these demographic and economic trends Kenyan youth

and their future are frequently the center of debate amongst development

organizations, policy makers and scholars. This dissertation uses the language

15

and practices of hip hop in Kenya to shed insight into how Kenyan youth

experience and respond to the challenges presented by making a life in Nairobi.

Introducing Dandora

As an imagined community revolutionary hip-hop in Kenya has members

spread throughout Nairobi, other Kenyan urban centers like Kisumu and

Mombasa, upcountry areas, and among Kenyans living abroad. The number of

people that are included in this community is hard to quantify, but including artists

and producers, the amount of people who consider themselves part of Kenyan

revolutionary hip-hop is not large. There is a broader listenership that consumes

this music, but the membership of people for whom revolutionary hip-hop is a

lifestyle is probably less than one hundred. This dissertation focuses primarily on

the eastern Nairobi estate of Dandora and its association with the most influential

and well-known revolutionary hip-hop groups, Kalamashaka and Ukoo Flani Mau

Mau. The reason that Dandora and, in particular these groups, are central to this

research is because of the significance they have in the birth and relevance of

revolutionary hip-hop. Dandora is commonly referred to as the birthplace of hip-

hop in Kenya (see Chapter 3), and the Dandora-based group, Kalamashaka, as

Kenyan hip-hop’s founding fathers. Dandora is therefore central to the

establishment of the imagined community of revolutionary hip-hop in Kenya.

Chapter 3 of this dissertation focuses on the narratives of the origin of

revolutionary hip-hop and Dandora’s centrality in these stories.

It was a result of this lore that I was drawn to Dandora as a fieldwork site.

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I first visited Dandora, known locally as “hip-hop city,” in 2011.1 I was hoping to

link up with a group of rappers, learn about how their lives and lyrics intertwined,

and understand what this intersection reveals about how young people from

disadvantaged socio-economic backgrounds navigate a major African metropolis.

Long before I had ever visited this corner of eastern Nairobi I came to know

Dandora through the songs and videos of Kalamashaka and the artists of Ukoo

Flani Mau Mau.2 In this music from Dandora there is a poetry of place that is both

loving and critical. Listening to their songs and watching their videos from afar I

became acquainted with a representation of Dandora that was aggressive,

dangerous, difficult and dirty; but also creative, energetic, positive and conscious

of the global order of political and economic structures that kept them poor.

Rappers I knew from Dandora attributed the name of their estate to a British

settler couple named Dan and Dora, who owned a nearby sisal plantation during

the colonial era. While I’m unable to verify the truth or falsehood of this seemingly

improbable story, there was indeed a sisal plantation in Dandora during colonial

Nairobi and, as David Anderson writes, the plantation was used as a recruiting

base for Mau Mau insurgents camped out in the nearby Dandora Swamp

1 So far as I know the term “hip-hop city” was coined by MC Kah and Zaka in their song, “Dandora L.O.V.E.” This appellation is now commonly used by the hip-hop community when referring to Dandora, and is also the name of an organization founded by Dandora rapper, Juliani, called “Dandora Hip-Hop City.”

2 Technically, the name Ukoo Flani Mau Mau represents the collaboration of separate Kenyan hip-hop entities. Ukoo Flani was the name of a group of several rappers from Mombasa who formed and existed entirely separate from their counterparts in Nairobi, who called themselves Mau Mau, which was itself an umbrella name under which several different rappers and groups of rappers were associated. Therefore, Ukoo Flani Mau Mau became the name under which several different rappers (but mainly from the Dandora neighborhood in Nairobi and the Magongo neighborhood of Mombasa) were categorized, after the release of two popular albums under the name Ukoo Flani Mau Mau helped to cement the brand. These two albums were called “Kilio Cha Haki” (Cry for Justice) and “Dandora Burning.”

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(Anderson 2003). The fact that there was a Mau Mau camp in Dandora during

the Emergency appears to be serendipitous, and not a direct cause of the

creation of the latter day hip-hop Mau Mau camp in Dandora (see Chapter 3). In

other words, as far as I know, rappers associated with the Mau Mau hip-hop

group in Dandora did not create their “Base Camp” with knowledge of the Mau

Mau who had camped in the Dandora Swamp in the 1950s. Rather, they learned

of this happy coincidence much later.3 Nevertheless this historical fact adds

another layer to the aura that Dandora holds in Kenya’s revolutionary hip-hop

mythology.

While hip-hoppers from Dandora relate to American hip-hop songs that

describe life in the “inner cities” or “urban ghettos” of United States, Dandora is

the product of its own historical urban development. Far from an “inner city

ghetto” Dandora is located approximately ten kilometers northeast of downtown

Nairobi and is home to a population of 141,696 souls. Comprising five

developmental “phases,” Dandora is one of the largest estates of Eastlands. The

sprawling estate stretches out across the swampy waterways of the Nairobi River

basin into the dusty savannah. Dandora is part of the large area east of

downtown called Eastlands, which was designated by colonial authorities as

suitable for African inhabitants – the laboring class of the urban colonial

economy. In their segregated city the Asian population - Nairobi’s merchant class

- lived in slightly better conditions close to the central business district, while the

3 See for example a tweet from Juliani, an original member of the Dandora Mau Mau hip-hop collective, dated December 26, 2013: “Learnt today Dandora was a swamp and in 1954 there was a battle between the Mau Mau and the colonial rulers, home guards”.

18

whites made their homes in the shady hills west of downtown (see White 1990

for a detailed account of colonial housing and labor policy in Nairobi).

In post-colonial Kenya, Eastlands remains Nairobi’s urban working class

section, and places like Dandora provide low-income housing for workers in

nearby factories. In the 1980s Dandora was chosen as a location for one of the

World Bank’s “Sites and Services” schemes to provide low-income family

housing for Nairobi’s urban poor. But while the sites remain, the services mostly

disappeared in the wake of 1980s structural adjustment programs.

One afternoon in 2014, I sat in a Dandora hip-hop studio with one of the

co-founders of Kalamashaka, Rawbar. We had been friends since meeting in

2012 and our conversations had long since lost the formality of the ethnographic

interview. While discussing a new song being worked on in the studio, I asked

Rawbar if he knew about the “sites and services” scheme that had created

several of the living quarters in Dandora. He said he did and then mentioned that

back then each home had a tree planted in the yard, something one rarely sees

now in the crowded residences of Dandora. Rawbar, who grew up in Dandora at

the time recalled a new development on edge of the savannah still close enough

to see passing antelope. He nostalgically remembered walking a short distance

on days he wasn’t in school to fish and swim in the nearby creek, and he spoke

of his childhood with a defiant reverence. It was a good place to be from, and

even with all of its challenges there was always a sense of community, shared in

the memories of those who grew up in the tough Eastlands estate. This

remembrance of a difficult but enjoyable childhood in Dandora was common to

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many Dandora rappers I spoke with, especially those who had since moved

away.

As infrastructure crumbled in the 1980s and 1990s and the population

rose sharply, violent crime became an increasingly difficult problem (See Chapter

4). In 1975, the World Bank-funded Dandora Municipal Dumpsite was opened.

The landfill was declared full in 2001, but continues to be filled with trash from all

over the city. So, as Rawbar and his fellow members of Kalamashaka were

growing up in the 1980s and 1990s, Dandora was transitioning from a lower-

middle class estate for a working population, to an overcrowded, crime-infested

area, which was known primarily as the “dumpsite” of Nairobi. This particular

history informs the experience of these pioneering rappers from Dandora and the

issues they chose to rap about. I will return to the link between Dandora and

revolutionary hip-hop in Chapter 3, where I recount the origin story of this genre

and the centrality that Rawbar’s group, Kalamashaka, plays in this narrative

history of revolutionary hip-hop in Dandora.

Background and Description of Research Methods

As with many other African countries, liberalization of the Kenyan media in

the 1990s was an important factor in the rise of Kenyan hip-hop (Charry 2012;

Eisenberg 2015; Kidula 2012; Odhiambo 2002).4 Beginning in the 1990s, young

4 Liberalization of the Kenyan media entailed a switch from government-controlled television and radio stations to a mediascape that included several privately owned stations. As Eisenberg (2015) points out of Kenya’s music industry revival in the late 1990s: “one of the primary catalysts for this revival was a change in Kenyan media policy in the mid-1990s. As part of a broader set of ‘liberalisation’ measures under President Daniel Arap Moi, private radio was introduced through the sale of FM frequencies to Kenyan media houses and some well-connected entrepreneurs. The move came on the heels of the introduction of multiparty politics, and was driven by the demands of Kenyan citizens and business interests as well as international actors” (4).

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people had increased access to media as both producers and consumers.

Through these changes in the media landscape hip-hop groups from Nairobi

were able to participate in defining issues of importance to young Kenyans and

imagining alternative futures (Kidula 2012). At the same time that liberalization of

the media was opening new forums for urban youth to express themselves,

neighborhoods in eastern Nairobi experienced other changes associated with

neoliberal economic reforms. Structural adjustment policies, which reduced state

funding for education and health services, coincided with a dramatic increase in

violent crime (Anderson 2002; Smith 2008). In 1997 the Dandora rap group

Kalamashaka released their hit single Tafsiri Hii (“Translate This”) which implored

the broader public to listen to (i.e. “translate”) the struggles happening in the

slums and ghettos of eastern Nairobi. Alluding to the well-known tourist slogan,

“hakuna matata” (no worries) popularized by the Kenyan band The Mushrooms

(and made famous in the United States through Disney’s The Lion King) one of

the lyricists rapped that in Africa, “kuna matata” (there are worries). Lyrical

examples like these offer insights into how urban youth frame experiences of

change associated with the extended effects of structural adjustment and

subsequent impacts associated with neoliberal capitalism.

Recognizing that the studio is a space which generates its own sociality

(Porcello 1998; Meintjes 2003) a large part of my fieldwork was spent conducting

research at the following hip-hop studios in and around Nairobi: Maono in

Dandora, Mandugu Digital in Jerusalem, Timam Records in Mathare, Higher

21

Linxss in Kitengela. Located within a half hour drive from city center and

accessible through public transport, I visited each these studios regularly. I

interviewed musicians and producers about thematic and stylistic content viewed

as most marketable and which distribution strategies they intended to use. Using

a combination of participant observation, and interviews with musicians,

producers and others who populate the daily life of these studios, this

dissertation seeks to elaborate how their personal values and social interactions

in the studio frame the writing and recording of hip-hop songs.

In addition to ethnographic work conducted in hip-hop recording studios, I

frequented public spaces where young Kenyan hip-hop artists hang out. While

conducting fieldwork I regularly visited The National Theatre, the Goethe Institute

and Alliance Francais. These three venues in downtown Nairobi provide a place

where young Nairobi musicians and fans congregate and socialize. These are

known spots where young aspiring hip-hop artists may go to have access to a

stage where they can present their work to their peers and sell their recordings.

In addition to these informal gatherings, the Goethe Institute and Alliance

Francais frequently hold formal events such as concerts, CD release parties or

documentary screenings that promote local artists and musicians. I used

participant observation and informal interviews at these locations to understand

how these urban spaces are used to generate social and economic relationships

and opportunities.

Analyzing youth in public and studio spaces lends insight into how shifting

relationships of power play out within the urban landscape. Weiss (2009) points

22

out that the iconography of hip-hop personalities on the entryways and walls of

Tanzanian barbershops demarcate spaces in the city where youth socialize and

come to grips with their place in the global order. Diouf (2003) writes, “Excluded

from the arenas of power, work, education and leisure, young Africans construct

places of socialization and new sociabilities whose function is to show their

difference” (5). Hip-hop plays an important part in making these places of

socialization and differentiation, both within African society and within the larger

global world. This dissertation builds on these insights about young Africans

constructing autonomous spaces by examining how hip-hop also offers a

structure for making their own temporalities.

Another line of inquiry within scholarship on African youth focuses on the

body as a site of power contestations. De Boeck (2004) argues that in Kinshasa,

the capital city of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, politically and

economically marginalized youth exert agency on the world through bodily

practices in public spaces. Following Foucault’s insights on subject-making

processes through bodily discipline (Foucault 1977), de Boeck and other

anthropologists argue that one of the features of neoliberal capitalism in Africa is

the increasing inability of governments to assert control over the bodies or

desires of young people (Comaroff and Comaroff 2005). This important work on

disciplining young African bodies focuses on bodies in space. Yet one of

Foucault’s critical insights about disciplining bodies was to point out how

temporal regimes are incorporated into structures of power, and exerted upon

bodies. These reflections on time and the disciplining of bodies echo earlier

23

insights by E.P. Thompson (1967), with whom the notion of “time-discipline” is

most closely associated. This dissertation seeks to build on the already existing

work on bodily discipline in African public spaces as well as the work inspired by

Thompson, by focusing on the temporal aspect of power in African society.

Young Africans are subject to regimes of power that seek to control their time. In

turn they seek to create their own forms of time-discipline. One of the key

findings of this research is that hip-hop is far from the “time-wasting” activity

many Kenyans take it for. It is not evidence of undisciplined time. Instead it is a

way for young Kenyans to structure their own time in a way that affords them

some sense of autonomy.

Take for example the plain concrete walls of the Maono studio in Dandora.

Sparsely decorated - a couple of half-hearted scribbles of graffiti, a sheet of

paper noting the pricing of the studio’s services, a newspaper article about the

famous local hip-hop crew, Kalamashaka.5 The wall directly adjacent to the

sound booth contains a pertinent clue as to the importance of hip-hop and time-

discipline. Dominating all other decorations is a large piece of flip chart paper

containing handwritten rules and regulations of the studio:

1. STUDIO OPENS AT 8:00 AM AND CLOSES AT 5 PM SAT - (FROM 10AM TO 2PM)

2. NO IDLING - The studio is out of bound [sic] to unauthorized personel [sic] 3. MAINTAIN SILENCE - Whether the recording is in session or not 4. RESPECT STUDIO EQUIPMENTS - Do not tamper or touch studio

equipments [sic] unless authorized 5. MAINTAIN CLEANLINESS - No foodstuffs in the studio 6. DO THOROUGH PRACTICE BEF PRIOR [SIC] TO YOUR RECORDING

SESSIONS - This is to make work easier perfect vocals and clear mastering 7. NO FREE SERVICES - Every service will be charged a fee (CHECK AND

5 See “Chapter 4: Kah’s Vision” for a description of this newspaper article.

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INQUIRE FOR STUDIO RATES AMOUNTS) 8. Every artist will be treated equally regardless of the status 9. No alcoholic drinks or smoking is allowed inside the studio 10. REMEMBER AND FOLLOW RULES 1-9. Zero tolerance to those who break

the rules above By Management 32 Studio6 Notice that the first two rules are explicitly focused on instituting a time-discipline

for all visitors to the studio. From what I observed none of the above rules were

followed very closely, but an attempt was nevertheless made to make the studio

a space in which time was to be structured and “productive.” The discourse over

time and time-discipline appears in many aspects of the lives and artistry of hip-

hoppers in Nairobi. Another example can be seen in the song “Juu Ya Doh” [For

the Money]. This song is on MC Mutant’s inventive album “Campus Diary”, which

was written by Mutant while a university student, and explores many poignant

themes to young Kenyans struggling to find their place in Kenyan society. One

line in particular describes a true event from Mutant’s life:

Yesterday I made a mistake My boss said, “boy7 you are so stupid!” And it’s only because I was two minutes late! I was about to ask him, “who needs this check!” Then I remembered it’s the end of the month And the landlord needs his rent.

6 “32 Studio” is what I refer to as the “Maono Studio” in this dissertation. Maono is the organization the operates the studio and what the studio was most commonly called. “32” is a reference to the number of the Matatu route that serves this area of Dandora.

7 Boy is my translation of Mutant’s word “Kijana” which in Swahili means “young person” or “youth”. The word Kijana is not typically derogatory, but here the boss uses the term in a disparaging sense.

25

In these lines Mutant relates a common experience in which two different

temporal pressures are mentioned: the time-discipline of the factory (this

encounter is based on Mutant’s experience working in a Nairobi garment factory

where he pressed men’s trousers), and recurring monthly rent payments. Both of

these are unwelcome pressures on Mutant’s time and his choice to relate them in

his song reveals that struggles over time-discipline and the monthly rhythms of

rent are pertinent issues taken up by hip-hop.

Mutant, who has a degree in horticulture from Moi University, has thought

and written a lot about the internal conflicts he has faced when confronting

societal expectations about work and hip-hop. Mutant’s lyrics and the very name

he has given himself seem to echo remarks made by John and Jean Comaroff

(2001) about the position that youth find themselves in at the dawn of the new

millennium. They write that across the world there are striking similarities

amongst young people experiencing the effects of neoliberal capitalism:

These similarities seem to be founded on a doubling, on simultaneous inclusion and exclusion. On one hand is their much remarked exclusion from local economies, especially from shrinking, mutating blue-collar sectors…On the other hand is the recent rise of assertive, global youth cultures of desire, self-expression, and representation (307)

Given this “doubling” and the sense of simultaneously being left out of local

economies, while also included in transnational expressive youth cultures like

global hip-hop, the Comaroffs ask, “is it surprising, then, that so many juveniles

see themselves as ironic, mutant citizens of a new world order” (309)? Mutant’s

song, Alter-Ego, seems to provide evidence of what is described here by the

Comaroffs. In the nearly eleven-minute song, which concludes his “Campus

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Diary” album, he literally pits himself against himself. Alter-Ego imagines a battle

between “Mutant the Scholar” and “MC Mutant.” Throughout the course of the

song the two “alter-egos” go back and forth trading insults as if they are battling

to decide once and for all who is the “real Mutant.” While a full analysis of the

song is not within the scope of this Introduction and will have to be taken up

elsewhere,8 it is instructive to briefly draw attention to the theme of time as it is

played out in the confrontation between Mutant’s two personas.

In the “first round” of the fight Mutant Scholar throws his first blow with the

line: “If time fly’s, then I’m the pilot!” The rest of his verse takes several pointed

shots at MC Mutant for “wasting your time” and “only being able to feed yourself

[from hip-hop] for a couple weeks.” In these lines, Mutant Scholar claims that he

is in control of time (i.e. he is the pilot). His education and focus on a career give

him a sense of mastery over his future. On the other hand, MC Mutant is

described as wasting his time with hip-hop. He may earn a little money from a

show, but it will only feed him for a couple weeks and then he will be broke again.

The poetic back and forth between Mutant’s two alter-egos is a creative and

poignant expression of the internal conflict than young hip-hoppers like Mutant

face between their dreams of being rappers and the demands of earning a

livelihood. The concept of time, how it is used and what counts as a waste of

time, are central elements in this debate that Mutant has with himself.

8 This song is in the process of being transcribed and translated. I hope to interview Mutant about this song and his unreleased follow up album to “Campus Diary” call “Tarmacking Diary.” In Kenya, “tarmacking” refers to searching for a job. I hope to later develop a publishable paper around this song and issues of higher education and the (in)ability of young Kenyans to find work, even with a good university degree. Mutant is particularly well-positioned to speak to these issues because he is one the only hip-hop artists I met who had completed any college coursework, let alone received a degree.

27

Throughout this dissertation I examine how poetics of time in Nairobi hip-hop

express these internal dilemmas and what they disclose about the temporal

rhythms that young urban Kenyans confront, as well as, create.

Figure 1-1. MC Mutant on top of the roof of a residential building in Kitengela,

inside of which is the Higher Linxxs studio. Photos taken by Erik Timmons, while Mutant and Timmons were writing a song together.

For this research I spent hours sitting with musicians on street corners,

basketball courts, Kitengela rooftops (see above), and numerous other locations

where one can listen to the “invisible but very audible city of whispers”

characteristic of the city’s public eyes and ears (de Boeck 2004 p.50). Participant

observation at these locations was used for listening and making detailed notes

of everyday language – what Bakhtin calls “speech genres” – in order to

understand the broader social context of communication which informs Kenyan

hip-hop aesthetics (Bakhtin 1986). However, it was not only in these fixed

locations, but also in the movement between them that yielded insight into the

experience of my hip-hop collaborators. More conversations pertinent to my

research took place in Kenyan public transport vehicles, known as matatus, and

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walking through the city than in any other fixed location. One reason for this is

that when artists were in fixed spatial locations such as the studio or in public

spaces, they were focused on work. In the studios they were making beats,

writing lyrics, recording vocals, or offering commentary to other artists who were

doing these things. In public spaces hip-hoppers were frequently trying to sell

their merchandise. Therefore, they had less time to speak to me, and I was

reticent to impinge upon them and their time. These are important activities and

spaces to observe, but not a good environment for striking up extended

conversations, which to my mind yielded the most interesting insights on the

experiences of young hip-hop artists in Nairobi. By contrast, concerts were loud

and distracting. If the artists were performing or selling merchandise they were

focused on work. If they were just attending the concert as a fan, they were

distracted by the performance, by women, or were quite frequently drunk.

Mobility between places interrupted the work and leisure experiences of the hip-

hop artists I spent time with and gave us a chance to speak. When we were in

the matatu – usually it was just me and one or two others sharing a seat – there

was no other work to be done except make conversation to pass the time. Since

matatu rides in Nairobi tend to be long and full of traffic jams, there was plenty of

time to talk. Throughout the dissertation I provide ethnographic narratives about

walks or rides in which I learned much from hip-hop artists.9

9 Chapter Four of this dissertation, for example, centers around a matatu ride I took with an artist named, MC Kah. Chapter Five describes a walk through Dandora I took with the hip-hop producer, General Chizee.

29

Theoretical Relevance

Livelihood and Social Reproduction: Understanding the diversity of ways

that young people imagine and reimagine spatial and temporal frameworks has

become a significant area of concern for scholars of youth in urban Africa, as

African youth themselves have become central to studies analyzing globalization

and impacts of neoliberal economic policies (Katz 2004; Mains 2007). These

studies demonstrate how young people have engaged these changes in very

diverse realms of social experience, including war (Utas 2003), religion (Shaw

2008), education (Stambach 2010) and development (Masquelier 2007; Piot

2010). Quite a number of studies have demonstrated the impact economic and

political processes have had on forming a class of young Africans, who appear to

remain unincorporated within acceptable social structures.

Marx’s notion of the “lumpen” as it operates in The Eighteenth Brumaire

(1963), provides a useful analytical focus connecting the themes of youth and

revolution. As Marx points out, in societies undergoing revolutionary political

change the “lumpen” are those aspects of the social order that cannot be

incorporated into the new revolutionary order, and thus threaten to become part

of the counterrevolution. I argue that in Kenyan society youth are often perceived

to be unincorporated into acceptable temporal order, and even sometimes a

threat to it. As I discuss in Chapter 2 of this dissertation revolution is a central

theme in Kenyan hip-hop precisely because it embraces the idea that youth are

capable of subverting predominant temporal orders and causing a social

revolution.

30

Other scholars have also drawn on Marx’s concept of the “lumpen” when

looking at the current predicament that many young Africans face. The term

“lumpen youth” has been used to describe the situation in Sierra Leone where

the young and unemployed have been mobilized to fight on all sides of the

devastating civil war that country has experienced (Abdullah 1998; Hoffman

2006). “Lumpen youth” also seems to aptly describe the situation that many

young Africans face as changes associated with neoliberalism and structural

adjustment policies have closed off previously available economic opportunities.

Describing this process, John and Jean Comaroff (2000) write: “Denied full,

waged citizenship in the nation-state, many [unskilled youth] take to the streets,

often the only place where, in an era of privatization, a lumpen public can be

seen and heard” (307). Drawing on these analyses, and Marx’s lumpen concept,

this dissertation focuses on how young Kenyans from disadvantaged socio-

economic backgrounds are situated as unincorporated threats to prevailing

temporal orders, and how they use this to imagine themselves as part of an

alternative revolutionary temporality.

One of the most influential scholars on the social and cultural conditions

that have accompanied developments within “late-capitalism” is David Harvey.

His major contribution to academic debates about neoliberal capitalism is the

concept of “space-time compression” (Harvey 1990). Harvey proposes that

capitalism has profound impacts on ways that modern societies experience a

shrinking of space and time. But anthropologists have critiqued David Harvey’s

universalist notion of space-time compression by asserting that the effects of late

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capitalism are felt unevenly in different locales (Cole and Durham 2008; Chua

2011). Daniel Mains’ ethnographic work on young men in Ethiopia supports this

view. For young men in Ethiopia, Mains points out, neoliberalism has entailed an

expansion of time rather than a contraction (Mains 2007). Rather than feeling

that time along with space is compressed in the neoliberal order, Mains argues, it

seems that time has expanded, that there is too much of it. These critiques of

Harvey’s concept of space-time compression do not refute its relevance to

understanding the cultural dimensions of neoliberal capitalism, but they do

complicate it. Evidence from this research shows that neoliberalism can be

shown to cause both a shrinking and an expansion of temporal horizons.

In Nairobi, like the situation described by Mains for young men in Addis

Ababa, there is a prevalent social discourse that too many youth in the city are

unable to find productive uses of their time. For young men, in particular, being

seen as an “idler” is a social transgression. Take, for example, the sign posted

outside a shop just in front of a maskani (local hangout also typically referred to

as a “base”) where young Nairobians hang out in the “Gaza” neighborhood of the

Kariobangi South estate.10 The young Kenyans who congregate on the steps of

the shop everyday openly flout the sign, which reads “No Idle Sitting”. It was a

place I hung out with them several times, laughing one afternoon as I asked a

local hip-hop artist to snap a photo of myself “idling” in front of the sign. For the

hip-hoppers who I hung out with in front of this sign, they were not sitting by idly

wasting their time. They were working to make connections that might lead to

10 Gaza is an unofficial name given to this section of Kariobangi South. For elaboration on this place, please see “Interlude E: Gaza” at the end of this dissertation.

32

opportunities to perform, or record. The maskani served a critical social and

economic purpose. Similar to Sasha Newell’s analysis of young men in Abidjan,

keeping in touch with one’s social network by visiting these hangout spots

ensures young men that they will be included in critical gestures of reciprocity

(Newell 2012).11

Figure 1-2. Erik Timmons idly sitting in front of a “No Idle Sitting” sign.

In this dissertation the important question is not whether hip-hop is a

waste of time. Rather, what is an idle use of time and what is a meaningful use of

time for young people in eastern Nairobi, and who gets to decide which is which?

Hip-hop, for example, is for many Kenyans, especially older Kenyans, a perfectly

useless pursuit. “Hee-poh,” as older Kenyans often pronounced it, was

synonymous with time-wasting and idleness. As an ethnographer trying to

explain to older Kenyans that I was in their country to do research on hip-hop, I

nearly always met with an attitude somewhere between incredulousness and

bemusement. The hostile attitude of most parents of younger Kenyans who

11 Also see Kivland’s ethnography of “bases” in Port-au-Prince, Haiti (Kivland 2015). She locates the “base” as a central gathering spot for young men to participate in community politics. She writes: “Forming a base marks a localized effort to fashion particular subjects as those with the power and respect to defend the community and its interests. This is accomplished through the public display of force and by contracting with multiple producers of ‘state effects’ in globalized Haiti” (7).

33

would like to pursue hip-hop was played on in a commercial that was popular

during my fieldwork. The commercial is an advertisement for a Kenyan telecom

company that was promoting an offer to “earn” free minutes if you use a certain

amount of airtime. The commercial shows a young university student calling his

parents to inform them of his plans to become a rapper, then setting the phone

down while his parents take turns yelling at him and the minutes pile up. Finally,

he reaches the threshold of minutes and is able to use the minutes he’s earned

to call his girlfriend. While the commercial is meant to be humorous, the butt of

the joke is obviously hip-hop and how it is perceived as an idle use of time.

But for practitioners of revolutionary hip-hop in eastern Nairobi, their

passion is anything but an idle use of time. To the contrary, the studio provides a

space where time is managed and “waiting” is transformed into a productive

meaning-making activity. Writing about the temporalities of youth in Niger,

Masquelier (2013) argues that “waiting” is not merely an unproductive use of

time, but offers a space in which value, exchange and affect emerge. The ritual

of taking tea in Nigerien Fada’s (conversation groups) is a form of time

management in which “youth who are otherwise temporally suspended transform

waiting into a goal-oriented, meaningful practice, lessening its burden” (472).

Masquelier discusses the term “waithood” but finds that while it superficially

describes the conditions young Nigerien men find themselves in, “it is not

adequately nuanced to address the specific temporalities emerging out of their

attempts to confront the mixture of ennui, detachment and trepidation that is

inevitably part of the waiting” (475). Citing Makhulu et al. 2010 and Weiss 2009,

34

Masquelier argues that waiting is not the passive activity that it is often made out

to be in scholarship which views youth as a category in “crisis”, but creates a

social space where young people manage time through rituals such as the

preparation and consumption of tea.

Like tea-drinking youth in Niger, hip-hop provides an activity for young

Nairobians to give structure and meaning to their time, which may otherwise be

characterized as lacking both. The continuous work of going to the studio to

record, going to concerts to perform or support their friends, selling CDs and mix

tapes, and the many other activities that make up the day-to-day regimen for the

members of the hip-hop community I spent time with in Nairobi, represented a

strategic use of their time, far from the idle time-wasting that many other Kenyans

assumed they were engaged in. In this way, young Kenyan hip-hop artists

asserted control over their own time in a way that - in many cases, though not all

- contradicted expectations of their parents and of Kenyan society more broadly

as to how their time should be spent.

Engagement with temporal practices and their relation to the production of

possible futures has been identified as a much neglected, yet critical theoretical

direction for anthropology (Munn 1992; Guyer 2007). This dissertation shows that

Kenyan hip-hop musicians use their art and livelihood practices to confront social

expectations of the way time should be structured. These include: generational

expectations about how and when an individual should transition through life

stages; societal expectations of Kenyan “development” and the role youth will

35

play in creating Kenya’s future (Smith 2008); economic expectations of how time

should be patterned in a productive labor force.

A common expression amongst young Kenyans describes Nairobi as

“shamba la mawe” (garden of stones). In this agricultural metaphor, Nairobi is

portrayed as a farm whose soil is too rocky to produce an adequate subsistence.

The hip-hop group, Washamba Wenza, draw on the farming metaphor to

describe hip-hop as their livelihood. Washamba literally translates as “farmers.”

But in urban Nairobi to be called mshamba (singular form of washamba) is often

an insult similar to calling someone a “hick” or “bumpkin.” By calling themselves

Washamba Wenza (Us Farmers), these rappers show deference to their

upcountry background as cultivators and turn the insult into a point of pride. “My

parents were farmers,” explained one member of Washamba Wenza, “but hip-

hop is where I till the soil.” This example shows how young hip-hop artists in

Nairobi navigate ideas about hip-hop and work. Attempting to link what they do

with respectable labor, they engage generational debates about work. Citing hip-

hop as a legitimate livelihood, they compare it to the hard agricultural labor of

their parents and grandparents.

Hip-hop is also used to comment upon national ideologies of progress, of

which youth are all too often cast as stumbling blocks. One example of this

discourse from the Nairobi hip-hop archive can be seen in rhymes criticizing the

government’s development scheme called “Vision 2030,” which was launched in

2008 by then President Mwai Kibaki. The plan, which according to the

government’s website “aims to transform Kenya into a newly industrializing,

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middle-income country providing a high quality of life to all its citizens by 2030 in

a clean and secure environment,”12 has been met with skepticism from hip-

hoppers. In one memorable verse in a song called Mahesabu (Mathematics), MC

Mutant “does the math” on the government’s development plan:

If you do the calculations properly Vision 2030 won’t appear until 2060 Because [the government] didn’t calculate properly How much money would be lost from thievery And how much would be lost from fishy deals

In another song called “Kazi Kwa Vijana” (Work for the Youth), hip-hop

artist Kaktus gives another critique of the government’s vision of the future

through reference to another arena for social debates over the flow of time

– that of generation:

There are only two tribes The tribe of the old and the tribe of the young And now is the time for the young 2030 is just dumb!

In both the lines from MC Mutant and Kaktus the temporal vision offered by the

Kenyan government is contested - firstly on the grounds of the government’s

corruption and secondly, on the grounds that the time of the youth is now and to

buy into the elders’ vision that gradual change will come in the future is

nonsense. Since “Vision 2030” is a government-sponsored rendering of the

gradual unfolding of time, such critiques of this vision are also essentially

arguments about the flow of time and represent the effort of hip-hoppers to

challenge this view of temporality.

12 http://www.vision2030.go.ke/about-vision-2030/ - accessed 12/8/16 at 4:33pm.

37

Scholars argue that African youth now appear to live in a state of

“waithood” in which old paths of achieving social adulthood are closed (Honwana

and de Boeck 2005; Hansen 2005; Honwana 2012). The inability of African

youth, especially young men, to secure steady employment has prohibited them

from fulfilling social expectations required to reach adulthood. These include

buying land, building a house and providing food, education and health expenses

for dependents. This represents a common and recurrent concern in African

societies that goes back much further than the current historical moment (Blunt

2010). Contests between the authority of elders to assert control over younger

members of society, in particular their ability to progress through prescribed life

stages, have long been characteristic of African social structures (Burton and

Charton Bigot 2010). During my research I found that these contests remain

prominent sources of conflict in the lives of Nairobi hip-hop artists.

One day I was chatting with a hip-hop artist who I had known for several

years. We were sitting outside of the Nairobi Museum on a crisp July afternoon,

waiting for his wife to finish conducting a workshop on hip-hop as part of a

cultural festival. He and his wife are both accomplished hip-hop musicians in

Nairobi and have been part of the hip-hop community since its inception in the

1990s. They have three children and have lived together for more than a decade.

As we were talking I brought up a personal story about how the family of my

Kenyan wife was insisting that I pay bridewealth to them. Traditionally, an

appropriate bride wealth would be several dozen head of cattle as well as several

dozen goats. This was something I resisted for many reasons, not the least of

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which was the question of where I could even find cattle. My resistance caused a

difficult strain to emerge between myself, my wife and her family, who refused to

recognize the marriage until negotiations were held and a proper bride wealth

payment agreed upon.

It was in telling my friend this story that he commiserated with me, telling

me that he was having similar difficulties. In fact, even though he had always

referred to his partner as “my wife,” they had never been officially married

because the meager living he received from hip-hop never came close providing

the necessary capital to bring her parents the appropriate gift to consummate the

marriage. Indeed, in Kenya and throughout East Africa, it is commonly

understood that a marriage is only officially recognized when the cattle are

brought to the bride’s family.

Learning that my friend and his “wife” were never officially recognized as a

married couple by her family came as a surprise to me. Even more so since I

knew her father, who is a well-known Kenyan Benga guitarist and professor at a

major university in Nairobi.13 Having known her father and played music with him

on a number of occasions, I was surprised that he would demand that the custom

of bride wealth be adhered to with his daughter and his not-yet son-in-law. But

what this example shows is that contests between the authority of elders and

younger Kenyans are still fraught and cause a great deal of frustration on all

sides. My friend, who considered himself a full-time hip-hop artist and

13 Benga is a popular genre of guitar music typically associated with western Kenyans. It came to prominence in the 1960s, but has stayed popular over the decades and is probably the most recognizable Kenyan popular music. Because of the personal nature of this story, I prefer to withhold the names of the personalities involved.

39

breadwinner for his family, was not able to earn enough money for his wife’s

family to recognize him as a suitable husband for their daughter. He had not yet

been recognized as an adult man capable of marrying and taking care of a

family. Even though he was in his thirties, had raised three children and been in a

monogamous relationship for over a decade, he was still viewed as a “youth” in

the eyes of her family and in broader Kenyan society.

While struggles between the authority of elders and the autonomy of youth

are not new, the particular shape that they take in public discourse is shaped by

contemporary concerns. The chapters of this dissertation put a focus on how hip-

hop is used by young Kenyans to recast these debates in their own terms by

asserting their own revolutionary temporal autonomy. If my friend had not met the

obligations of an adult man according to customary rules, he could draw on his

music and the hip-hop community to inhabit a different temporal horizon, one that

is not subject to the discretion of what elder Kenyans deem appropriate. Indeed,

his music, as well as many other hip-hop songs, frequently refer hip-hop as “kazi”

(work, or a job), highlighting their desire to be recognized as productive laborers

in contemporary Kenya’s moral economy.

Music and Time

In a recent review of the literature within the Anthropology of Music

Faudree (2012) notes that, “although processes reconfiguring place have been

an area of active research, the temporal dimensions of these processes have

been explored less fully” (524). She cites a productive body of literature that has

drawn on the “soundscape” concept, but suggests that as Samuels et al (2010)

40

have warned, “one limitation of the soundscape concept…is its tendency to

foreground theorization in geographic terms, leaving temporality aside” (524).14

Musicologist Georgina Born (2015) similarly argues that a lack of attention to

temporality in ethnographic studies of music has amounted to a significant hole in

the literature. She draws on the anthropology of time to suggest pursuing a more

complete approach to understanding how music, as a cultural object, relates to

and also produces a plurality of temporal rhythms. In this dissertation I follow a

similar approach, arguing that the production and consumption hip-hop music in

Kenya must be understood in relation to the multiple temporal rhythms that it

interacts with and helps to produce.

One of the temporalities that Born identifies is related to the internal

structure of music – “rhythm, meter, tempo, duration, phrasing, the architectonics

of form, and so on (372).” While these are critical aspects of understanding the

relationship between music and time, an analysis of the musical qualities of

Kenyan hip-hop is not within the purview of this dissertation. Nevertheless, there

are a couple of important aspects of the music itself, which I will touch on briefly

here. Almost invariably, when I asked a Kenyan hip-hop musician, producer, or

fan what made the great hip-hop artists great, they would point out two factors:

“their flow” and “their punch lines.” Both of these aesthetic values relate to

14 Faudree suggests that one possible concept that may be useful for remedying the lack of attention to temporality in recent anthropological analyses of music is Bakhtin’s “chronotope.” Indeed, several ethnographies of music and musical cultures have used the concept of the chronotope in their analyses (e.g. Fox 2004; Swinehart 2008; Dent 2009). Bakhtin’s chronotope concept is not engaged as a central analytical concept in this dissertation, however. Partly, this is due to the fact that it has already been used extensively by anthropologists over the last thirty years or so. But the main reason this dissertation doesn’t engage the chronotope concept in depth is because it draws on other theoretical lines of inquiry that seem to more closely relate to the issues raised by this research.

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musical timing, and both are subjective judgments, which prove difficult to

analyze with any precision. “Flow” refers to the rhythm in which an artist delivers

his or her words over a beat – almost always a 4/4 time signature in Kenyan hip-

hop. “Flow” is a central aspect of how a hip-hop artist is judged. How poetic lines

get woven on top of a steady beat, when delivery of those lines gets sped up or

slowed down, when a pause is made for effect – these are the dimensions of

“flow” that, in the ears of listeners, set great MC’s apart. The second value

judgment that consumers of Kenyan hip-hop point out is the “punch line.” A

punch line is a particularly well-timed line within the context of the overall flow of

the song. The punch line in hip-hop is not dissimilar from the punch line in

comedy, where the old axiom is “with jokes, timing is everything.” Similar to flow,

the mechanics of what makes a good punch are difficult to assess. The ability to

perfectly time a punch line so that it has the maximum impact is an ineffable,

almost uncanny, skill that some MC’s possess, and which sets them apart from

others.

While an analysis these two critical musical qualities undoubtedly offer a

fruitful arena for looking at the relationship between music and time in the context

of Kenyan hip-hop, it is a job better left to a trained musicologist or

ethnomusicologist.15 The scope of this dissertation is limited to a concern with

discourses about the “flow of time” within Kenyan hip-hop and within Kenyan

society. These are the other temporal rhythms that Born suggests scholars

15 An analysis of the musical structure of hip-hop music in Kenya would be a very interesting study. I lack the formal training in ethnomusicology which such an approach requires and therefore do not attempt one in this dissertation. Andrew Eisenberg, who is a trained ethnomusicologist, is the only scholar I’m aware of to analyze the musical qualities of Kenyan hip-hop (cf. Eisenberg 2012).

42

attend to when trying to understand the relationship between music and time.

Born (2015) urges scholars to look at “how music produces time through the

contingent articulation of its several temporalities, while in turn the variant

temporalities immanent in social, cultural, political, and technological change

mediate the evolution of music and musical genres” (371).

Understanding the production of revolutionary hip-hop within the context

the multiple temporal rhythms associated with social, cultural, and political

change is what this dissertation hopes to achieve. Kenyans and Kenyan hip-hop

artists are subject to temporal structures and also argue about the nature of time.

These debates about the flow of time, as Smith (2008) has argued, are central to

Kenyan understandings of the past, present, and future of their country. It is the

goal of this dissertation to trace how hip-hop artists and their creative works

speak to these temporal concerns. Looking at Kenyan hip-hop as a phenomenon

that arises within a plurality of temporalities and also produces it’s own sense of

time is the central theme of this dissertation. Each chapter, therefore, represents

an attempt to describe and analyze how “imagined communities” (Anderson

1991) – referring to the Kenyan hip-hop community as well as the broader

Kenyan nation - are formed and maintained through arguments about - and

experiences of - time.

Structure of the Dissertation

This dissertation contains three core elements: 1) the Introduction and five

Chapters; 2) A series of short ethnographic interludes; and 3) A curated

collection of songs and videos with subtitles uploaded to Youtube. The chapters

(which are described above) each take up specific topics, but the broader theme

43

of how the flow of time gets discussed, debated, and produced is present

throughout. Each chapter looks at a different aspect of temporality to discuss

how hip-hop gives young Kenyans their own vocabulary for reckoning the nature

and flow of time. I argue that all of these serve the fundamental goal of what

Kenyan rappers call revolutionary hip-hop: to give youth a sense of autonomy

when confronting external temporal structures and expectations.

Ethnographic Interludes

Placed within the chapters are ethnographic interludes, which aim to

describe scenes, issues and people that are not necessarily integral to the

arguments of the chapters, but nonetheless contribute critical ethnographic

insights into a) what I experienced as a temporary participant-observer in the

Nairobi hip-hop scene; b) how different individuals tried to make a livelihood

through hip-hop in Nairobi; and c) how features of everyday life inflect the lives

and lyrics of hip-hoppers in Nairobi. Each of the interludes contributes important

descriptions of life and hip-hop in contemporary Nairobi. My hope is that these

interludes provide readers of this dissertation with a more robust sense of what

life is like for those young hip-hoppers

Dandora Hip-Hop Archive

At the outset of this dissertation research one of the stated goals was to

produce a collection of songs from the catalog of Dandora hip-hoppers, which

would have transcriptions and translations. The hope was to make these

available online where scholars, artists, and fans of Kenyan hip-hop could access

the hundreds of songs produced by Dandora hip-hoppers since the late 1990s. I

have only begun this project, as much of my time has been focused on a few

44

songs that have the most relevance to the themes in this dissertation. Over time,

I hope to continue to work on the larger project of curating a “Dandora Archive” of

hip-hop songs.

For this dissertation, however, I have curated a small collection of songs

and videos, which have been uploaded to an unlisted YouTube channel called

the “Dandora Hip-Hop Archive.” Using the “Unlisted” setting ensures that only

those given the appropriate hyperlink will be able to view the videos I’ve

uploaded. I have done this to avoid any perception from the artists whose work I

have subtitled, that I am gaining undue profit from their songs by publicly posting

their videos without permission. This list is only to be used by readers of this

dissertation and in my own classroom presentations. In these videos I have

provided subtitles in English and in Sheng (an urban slang spoken in Nairobi

derived from Swahili, English and some other vernacular languages). My hope is

that readers of this dissertation will watch and listen to these videos before or

during the reading of the chapters in which they are discussed so they can hear

and see what I can’t describe in words.

45

CHAPTER 2 WATCHING TIME

I’m dedicating this to all the heroes of Kenya

Everyone who has struggled but never been repaid This is the time to get repaid, Revolutionary Comrades!

- Kama, Angalia Saa

Introduction

During an interview for the 2007 documentary, Hip Hop Colony (Wanguhu

2007), Kamau Ngigi, a pioneer of Kenyan hip-hop and henceforth referred to by

his stage name, Kama, describes why he and a group of rappers from the

eastern Nairobi estate of Dandora identify themselves as “Mau Mau.” Sitting

down in a shady Dandora courtyard known as the “Base Camp,” Kama refers to

Mau Mau as their grandfathers – he means this in both an ideological, and in

some cases, a literal sense.16 The original Mau Mau was an armed rebellion

against British occupation, which shook colonial Kenya during the 1950s. Kama

points out that he and his fellow artists honor that historical struggle by taking the

Mau Mau name, but argue that their own revolution is “mental one” waged with

hip-hop music and art.17

From the perspective of Mau Mau historiography, Kama’s claim that he

and his fellow rappers are 21st Century inheritors of the Mau Mau struggle begs

an obvious question: which Mau Mau struggle? As historian John Lonsdale

16 For example, G.Rongi, the hip-hop artist whose family owns the compound that the Base Camp is located in, writes in his autobiography that his grandfather was a Mau Mau rebel (G.Rongi 2015).

17 Also see Koster (2013), who cites an interview with Kamau Ngigi in which he says, “Our Mau Mau forefathers fought a physical war, but ours is a mental war” (82)

46

(1997) writes, “there never was a single Mau Mau” (xix). Indeed, arguments

about how unified Mau Mau was, what it achieved, and what its legacy should

be, have long been central to Kenyan history, politics, and nationalism. In this

chapter, I show that by drawing on the contested history of Mau Mau, Kama and

his fellow rappers seek to enter into these debates and assert their own

revolutionary temporality.

In order to illustrate how related notions of time, history, and revolution are

utilized in Kenyan hip-hop I focus on the song, Angalia Saa, which was released

in 2007 by Kama and fellow Dandora rapper, Kitu Sewer. Several scholars have

recently made Angalia Saa a focus of analysis by connecting it to the experience

of marginalized youth in Kenya (Atieno 2007; Mwangi 2010; Nywalo 2013; Mose

2013; Koster 2013; Githuku 2015; Wanjala and Kebaya 2016). Most of these

studies have focused on lyrical analysis, but few have given an in-depth reading

of the visual qualities of the music video for Angalia Saa (with the notable

exceptions of Mwangi 2009 and Githuku 2015). And even fewer have remarked

on the theme of time, which I argue is central to the film’s aesthetic, and to

revolutionary hip-hop more broadly. This chapter contributes to this literature by

analyzing the film’s visual aesthetics and the linkage they demonstrate to a

pressing societal discourse on temporality and the place of younger Kenyans

within the flow of national time.

The song’s name, Angalia Saa, which Kama informed me (personal

communication) is best translated as “Watch the Time,” suggests a thematic

relationship to temporality. The meaning of the phrase “Angalia Saa” is hard to

47

interpret, and is not a commonly used idiom in Kenya, at least not that I heard. I

asked different Kenyans what they thought the meaning of the phrase “Angalia

Saa” was and I received a variety of answers. Some thought it meant, “watching

time,” as in someone who is bored or waiting for something to happen. Others

suggested it should be translated, “look at the times,” as in be aware of what is

going on in these times we live in. It seems to me that both interpretations

resonate with the overall message in the song and with revolutionary hip-hop. As

I show in this chapter, Angalia Saa uses the historical imagery of Mau Mau to

create a visualization of the tension between the flow of Kenyan history and its

arrest. Temporal disjuncture – or the arrest of time - is central to the notion of

revolutionary time in this film. It is also resonates with a key insight from Walter

Benjamin’s (1969) “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” in which he writes,

“The awareness that they are about to make the continuum of history explode is

characteristic of the revolutionary classes at the moment of their action” (261).

The insight that revolutionary movements seek to stop the flow of history and

thereby create an alternate temporality is an important theoretical contribution

that I draw on in my interpretation of Angalia Saa. I argue that what I refer to as

the “revolutionary hip-hop aesthetic” central to the video for Angalia Saa,

represents the effort of young Kenyans to engage in essential discourses about

time and their own relationship to it. Moreover, the attempt to use images from

the past to interrupt the flow of time (e.g. the continuum of Kenyan history)

discloses their desire to create a revolutionary temporality in which they are

central protagonists.

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Given the title of the song, which specifically mentions time, it is surprising

that so few of the works on Angalia Saa have made a serious effort to look at the

relationship between hip-hop, youth, and temporality.18 Evan Mwangi, whose

2009 article gives the most in-depth commentary on the visual aesthetics of the

video for Angalia Saa, demonstrates that the video’s creative use of imagery

helps establishes a connection between Kenyan history and contemporary

concerns of Kenyan youth. Although Mwangi doesn’t engage specifically with

theories of time, his reading of Angalia Saa offers some very important insights

on how the authors of this work speak to temporal issues in contemporary

Kenya. He writes:

In the video version of [Angalia Saa], the group uses montage and collage, where black-and-white images of their acting blend with documentary images of Mau Mau fighters being harassed in the 1950s. This collage creates a machinistic flow, in which the past and present blur inseparably into each other. The perpetual rhythm and juxtaposition signals the position that life has not changed much, but the struggle must continue.

In this chapter I seek to build on Mwangi’s critical approach to the visual

aesthetics of Angalia Saa, while further analyzing how this video speaks to

debates about the nature and flow of time in Kenyan society. This chapter also

offers an alternative reading of the film’s visual imagery. The aspect in which my

analysis differs from Mwangi’s is not in his conclusion that, for young hip-hoppers

who have appropriated the “Mau Mau” name, “not much has changed” since the

Mau Mau war. Indeed, all my research indicates that they see themselves as

fighting the same essential struggles against oppression that the Mau Mau fought

18 Although, see Mwangi (2009) and Githuku (2015).

49

against British colonialism. The major difference being that whereas the Mau

Mau waged an armed struggle against physical colonialism, revolutionary hip-

hoppers see themselves as fighting an ideological struggle against “mental

colonialism.”19

Where my interpretation differs from Mwangi’s is in our views of what

makes this video “revolutionary.” As I describe below, Mwangi has a skeptical

view of the revolutionary claims made by Kenyan hip-hoppers. But the criteria he

uses to judge what makes the video “revolutionary” are different from mine.20 We

also differ in the way we read the use of imagery in Angalia Saa as it pertains to

the connection between Kenyan history and the present moment (as it was in

2007 when the video was released). Rather than see the collage of still images

and videos as communicating a past and present that “blur inseparably into each

other,” as Mwangi does, I argue that the visual artistry of the video plays on the

tension between motion and arrest. This aspect of the film is critical to

19 The notion of mental colonialism with which revolutionary hip-hoppers engage is drawn from the influential work of Kenyan writer, Ngugi wa Thiong’o, particularly his work “Decolonising the Mind” (Thiong’o 1986). I return to this work and it’s connection to revolutionary hip-hop in Chapter 3 of this dissertation.

20 One of the criteria Mwangi uses to cast doubt on the “revolutionary” nature of this hip-hop song is the fact that the authors draw on exclusively male heroes, while presenting women in the song as passive suffers even though, as Mwangi points out, women were extremely important to the Mau Mau struggle. He writes: “Ukoo Flani’s video ignores or misrepresents the women’s experiences, even when it offers a strong gender-liberation message. It presents the oppression of women in glib summaries, which invoke the idealized figure of mother Africa” (105). Mwangi’s critique of the portrayal of women within Angalia Saa (as well as other works he cites in his article) opens up an important question about gender. However, based on my interpretation of Angalia Saa and my fieldwork with revolutionary hip-hoppers, I don’t agree with Mwangi that this video (or revolutionary hip-hop in general) attempts to offer “a strong gender-liberation message.” Nothing from my fieldwork or song analysis makes me believe that “gender-liberation” is prioritized in the discourses and art of revolutionary hip-hop. Since gender equality is not a particularly strong marker in the revolution these rappers are imagining, I am not convinced by Mwangi’s argument that the video’s portrayal of women contradicts their revolutionary message. In my view, the women’s struggle for gender equality is of little concern to most male hip-hoppers I knew, and they never claimed it was.

50

understanding the notion of “watching time” and what this production reveals

about the attempt of its authors to create a revolutionary temporality through the

visual aesthetics of this video. As I argue in this chapter, for the hip-hop youth

who have resurrected the Mau Mau, it is Mau Mau’s threat to the flow of history

and to generational authority that makes Mau Mau revolutionary.

Structure of the Chapter

The lyrics and video for Angalia Saa are produced primarily for an

audience that has a deep familiarity with Kenyan history. Therefore, in order to

analyze what the images in the video are trying to communicate it is necessary to

provide some historical context and discussion about the issues at stake here.

Before beginning to analyze the song itself, the following sections will attempt to

give the appropriate context within which the analysis must be framed. In the first

background section, I demonstrate that Mau Mau was threatening to the

temporal authority of colonial officials, and the authority of elder Kikuyu men. This

is because Mau Mau was seen as autonomous from extant temporalities

associated with colonial power and gerontocratic authority. It is in this sense –

the perceived threat that Mau Mau posed to authoritative temporal orders in the

1950s – that the Mau Mau was “revolutionary.”21 I argue that hip-hop youth, who

21 I discuss this theoretical conception of revolution as an interruption to dominant temporal orders below. In particular, I draw from Walter Benjamin’s famous “Theses on the Philosophy of History” (Benjamin 1969). Although I hesitate to make too direct a connection between Benjamin’s incisive commentary on Europe in the 1930s and my own reflections on Kenya in the present day (there are many historical, political and social differences that make a direct comparison impossible), some of his statements regarding revolution and history seem to relate to the work that Angalia Saa does. For example, Benjamin writes that, “The awareness that they are about to make the continuum of history explode is characteristic of the revolutionary classes at the moment of their action” (261). In my interpretation, Angalia Saa gives evidence of this principle. It is the video’s intent, I argue, to bring these images from the past into the present as an attempt to disrupt the “continuum of history” and create their own revolutionary time.

51

in many ways see themselves as dealing with similar temporal pressures, have

seized on the imagery of Mau Mau precisely because of this threat to the flow of

history and to generational authority.

In order to contextualize this argument, the first background section briefly

discusses colonial attempts to create an ordered and “modern” African society by

controlling certain aspects of temporal experience.22 Here, following the work of

Smith (2008), I focus on how controlling the flow of time was a significant activity

in colonial ideology and policy.23 In particular, there were two aspects of temporal

experience that colonial officials wished to assert some control over. The first

was the institution of workplace time-discipline. The second was in discourses

about “development” and colonial attempts to steer Kenya, especially its urban

areas, towards a preconceived vision of a “modern” society (cf. Smith 2008).24 I

draw on Kenyan historiography to show that when Mau Mau erupted into Kenyan

history in the 1950s, it was conceived of as a contest to existing these temporal

authorities. By discussing the colonial discourses surrounding time and African

society, it becomes possible to demonstrate the significance that Mau Mau had in

22 Here I follow the work of James H Smith (2008) who argues that discourses about the nature and flow of time are central to Kenyan society. Smith’s work looks at one aspect of what he calls “tempopolitics” during the colonial era, which is the notion of a progressive linear development. I add to this discussion by incorporating work from the historiography of African labor and time-discipline.

23 Modernization Theory came to dominate colonial thinking about African society in the 1950s, at the same time that Mau Mau emerged in Kenya. Promoted primarily by social scientists in the United States, especially Talcott Parsons, who drew on Max Weber, Modernization Theory provided a general schema for analyzing how societies transformed from “primitive” to “modern”.

24 See especially work by Frederick Cooper (1987) and Luise White (1990) for detailed historical analysis of colonial policies directed at Kenya’s two major urban areas of Mombasa and Nairobi, respectively.

52

the imagination of colonial authorities and their attempts assert control over time

in Kenyan society.

At the same time that Mau Mau threatened colonial attempts to order the

temporal experience of their African subjects, there was a separate struggle over

flow of time within Kikuyu society.25 This second arena in which the Mau Mau

challenged temporal structures is related to the gerontocratic authority of Kikuyu

elders and the struggles they waged for control over the life-course of young

men. Chapter 3 focuses more specifically on issues of Mau Mau, generation and

struggles over the authority of elders. Therefore, this chapter will not dwell

extensively on these important issues, other than to point them out as one of the

important arenas of struggle over time in which the Mau Mau are positioned as

threats to existing temporal authority.

The second background section discusses the importance of Mau Mau in

framing political and cultural debates about the Kenyan nation since it achieved

independence from British colonial rule in 1963. As Anderson (1991) famously

pointed out in his book on the rise of the nation as an imagined community, the

sense of a shared temporality is critical to how the idea of nation takes hold in the

imaginations of people who otherwise share very little in common. In post-

colonial Kenya, Mau Mau is an important symbol in these debates over shared

national time and history. Angalia Saa uses Mau Mau to enter into this discourse

about Kenyan national time and is interpreted here as a song that discloses the

25 Kikuyu ethnic history and politics are central to understanding the Mau Mau conflict. Mau Mau soldiers were primarily recruited from the Kikuyu and the overwhelming majority of casualties of the Mau Mau war were Kikuyu.

53

importance of national belonging to Kenyan hip-hoppers. Therefore the second

background section establishes the centrality of Mau Mau to recurring debates

within the Kenyan nation, the linkage between these debates and a shared

national temporality, and the effort of young hip-hop artists to be a voice in the

idea of the Kenyan nation, while asserting their own vision of revolutionary time.

Following the section discussing Mau Mau, Kenyan nationalism, and the

importance of a shared national time, will be a section briefly addressing the

notion of revolution in Kenyan hip-hop. As discussed in the opening to this

chapter, Mau Mau is cast by Kenyan hip-hoppers like Kama as a revolutionary

freedom struggle. Kama and other Dandora rappers, who take the Mau Mau

name, see themselves as revolutionaries who are continuing or reigniting the

revolutionary struggle of their grandfathers. But what do they mean by revolution

and why is revolution the frame they choose to give to their vision of time? In this

section I look at these questions and suggest that Marx’s theory of revolution, as

it was laid out in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1963) gives an

important framework for understanding how Mau Mau is reworked by Kenyan

hip-hop to make their own revolutionary time. It is also pointed out that this

framing of the Mau Mau as revolutionaries is part of on ongoing struggle over

Kenyan history. There is a rich corpus of literature produced by former Mau Mau,

their kin, and other Kenyan writers, which casts the Mau Mau as revolutionary

heroes (cf. Peterson 2004). Therefore, Angalia Saa should not be viewed as

starting a new debate. Rather, the video should be seen as a new method for

54

youth to enter into old discussions that have animated Kenyan discourses about

the nation’s contentious past since independence in 1963.

After completing the three above-mentioned background sections, the

aesthetics of Angalia Saa will be analyzed in order to show how the video

attempts to create a revolutionary time. I indicate several techniques that are

deployed in the film to create a sense of historical time and its arrest. “Angalia

Saa,” when translated as “look at the times,” can be interpreted as a statement of

exasperation at contemporary Kenya, which has moved forward in history, but

forgotten those who made this movement possible. But “Angalia Saa” can also

be translated as “watch the time” (this is the correct translation according the

song’s co-author, Kama). In this interpretation Angalia Saa is a commentary on

waiting, as if one is watching time move along, but not part of its current. I show

how these meanings of Angalia Saa are visualized in the film and discuss what

they disclose about the relationship between African youth and time.

Colonizing Time

The following section reviews colonial efforts to bring African subjects into

a certain temporal framework, one that encouraged regular work rhythms and a

steady historical progression towards modernization. Colonial thinking about time

had a direct bearing on official interpretations of Mau Mau, as well as subsequent

formulations of Mau Mau as representing African subjects that were “outside” of

time’s orderly forward motion. Mau Mau emerged at a moment in Kenyan history

when colonial attitudes and approaches in Africa were undergoing major

changes following the events of Second World War. The war had devastated

Europe and the need for colonies in Africa to be productive and contribute to the

55

rebuilding efforts had never been more important. The question of how to create

a productive and efficient African labor force was paramount, and a great deal of

debate on the topic was undertaken amongst colonial authorities and business

interests throughout the empire. Colonial governments were becoming

increasingly bureaucratic and endeavoring to bring social science research –

steeped in Modernization Theory26 – to bear on these interests. The arguments

about what type of workforce could or should be created became directly tied to

what type of society Africans should have, as well as what sorts of perceived

African cultural attributes would benefit or detract from these goals.27

In Kenya, which was under British control from 1895 until independence in

1963, British colonial authorities had attempted at different moments - with

different schemes and levels of success - to remake sections of African society

by replicating on African soil an experience they were familiar with: namely, the

formation of an attitude towards time, labor, and society, which had emerged

unevenly over centuries as capitalism developed in Europe (Thompson 1967).

E.P. Thompson, in his influential essay on the development of European

attitudes towards work and time, describes how time - vis-à-vis the development

of capitalism - came to be viewed as something that “must be consumed,

marketed, put to use” (91). He contrasted this new “clock-time” with the “task-

oriented” time that had once been the norm for European societies. What

26 See above note (8) regarding Modernization Theory.

27 A comparison between the discourses of colonial policies and research regarding “youth” with those produced by contemporary civil society and governmental apparatuses would be an interesting addition to this discussion. However, due mainly to time constraints, such an analysis has not yet been undertaken. It is likely that I will add this component when converting this dissertation into a book manuscript.

56

Thompson shows is that the capitalist mode of production and the temporal

structure imposed by its work rhythms (time-discipline) had important

ramifications for the structure of society, especially once the work/life separation

was habituated. However, the transition towards this new apprehension of time

was not uniform, swift, or uncontested. Indeed, as Thompson makes sure to

point out, competing ideologies over time and work were “a place of the most far-

reaching conflict” (93).

Colonial authorities in Africa had hopes that they could avoid such

conflicts as they attempted to shape structures of time for their African subjects,

and thereby create social formations they could control, or at least understand.

However, colonial rulers did not enter worlds that were “timeless” or where

debates over time and work discipline were unknown. As Kaletso Atkins (1988)

points out, in South Africa the Zulu had their own notions of time-discipline and

work, which they brought with them into the arena of industrial labor.

Furthermore, Cooper (1992) discusses how struggles over work rhythms in the

plantation economies of the Kenyan coast predated British colonial rule.

Capitalism, and its development in Africa under the care of colonial rule, did not

simply imprint a foreign concept of “time-discipline” on African society. The

relative success colonial authorities had in reshaping African notions of time were

the result of historical processes of struggle, conflict, and negotiations that

happened over the duration of the colonial encounter.

But it was during and after the Second World War that struggles over time

and society became particularly acute. As Lonsdale (1990) points out, “The

57

future of Kenya was more anxiously contested after the second world war than at

any time in its stormy past, behind rival dreams of social order” (395). During the

Second World War, a number of strikes had taken place throughout British

colonies in Africa in “a period of unprecedented labor conflict” (Cooper p.226).

This prompted colonial authorities to question the economic structures governing

urban labor in their African colonies. Anxiety over the prospect of urban disorder

was manifested in colonial assumptions about the undisciplined nature of the

casual laborer and the threat he posed to urban stability. Casualism – i.e. the

lack of steady regular jobs – became the great enemy of progress and order in

the minds of colonial officials at the time. The solution, colonial authorities

thought, was to rid the urban workforce of casual labor and create a permanent

working class in the city that was completely cut-off from what were seen as the

harmful cultural effects of village life. As Cooper argues, this created a dualism in

colonial thought and sociological theory of the time. This dualistic thought

entailed a sharp distinction between the “modern” African and his “un-modern”

cousin, a distinction revealed in titles of colonial social surveys like “Townsmen in

the Making” (Southall and Gutkind 1957).

The significance of this separation between the imagined modern African

and his un-modern relatives was made starkly visible to official eyes in Mau Mau.

For many colonial officials who had undertaken projects to shape African

attitudes towards time and work so they might resemble those of modern

European society, the appearance of Mau Mau in the upcountry areas of central

Kenya, became a foil to their vaunted ideals about progress and modernization.

58

As Smith (2008) points out, Mau Mau represented a dangerous threat to the

grandiose objectives of the colonial state, whose goal was “to centrally manage

the recurring drama of world history” on the Kenyan stage (29). The

preconceived linear direction in which African societies under colonial rule were

supposed to move, within a system of regular and controlled work rhythms on a

path towards modernization found its bogeyman in the dreadlocked peasants,

their grisly violence, and “primitive” oathing rituals. Nevermind these imagined

markers of the “tribal past” were by and large modern creations (Blunt 2013).

However, the complexity that lay under the eruption of violence in central

Kenya and sections of Nairobi was utterly lost on the British rulers who still clung

to the modernist fantasy that African peasants could be shepherded into the

capitalist mode of production and thus into a predetermined vision of progress.

As Cooper points out the official interpretation of the Mau Mau was simple: “the

Kikuyu people of central Kenya unable to take the streams of social change, had

fallen into an atavistic rebellion against progress. They had gone collectively

mad, egging each other on with a ‘primitive’ oath to tribal unity and terrorizing

Europeans and Christian, progressive Kenyans” (238). This official view of the

savagery of Mau Mau was used to justify the brutality with which the colonial

state dealt with its suppression during the years of the State of Emergency,

which the British declared in their colony between 1952-1959. The Mau Mau thus

made visible the conflict within the modernization project of the British colonial

state that wished to assert temporal authority over Africans through capitalist

time-discipline and promotion of their vision of development and modernity.

59

But the contestation of regimes of temporal authority was not only played

out in the relationship between colonial authorities and Africans. There was an

even more significant struggle happening within the boundaries of Kikuyu ethnic

identity, and which made the Mau Mau as much an internal “civil war” as it was

about fighting the British colonial masters. Mau Mau was the product of disputes

over authoritative intergenerational structures governing time. It had to do with

the internal arguments of Kikuyu over how to become a man and under whose

authority. What John Lonsdale (1992) pointed out so forcefully in his seminal

essay on the topic was that the original sin of Mau Mau historiography was a

failure to adequately understand what Mau Mau was and what is wasn’t. “Mau

Mau fought as much for virtue as for freedom,” Lonsdale wrote (317). They took

to the forest to become men as much as to lead a political revolution (White

1990). Therefore, while officials saw Mau Mau as one kind of argument over time

– i.e. the refusal of some “tribal-minded” Kikuyu to accept progress – there was in

fact a very different debate over temporal authority happening within the Kikuyu

community: a fight between the Kikuyu gerontocracy and younger Kikuyu men.

The Mau Mau presented a threat to the colonial efforts to control time

through development. This is not altogether dissimilar from the way

contemporary discourses about Kenyan youth play out in public arenas. In these

discourses youth, especially those who are unemployed or who are seen to be

unable or unwilling to move towards manhood are seen as not contributing to the

progress of the nation. The Mau Mau also represented a thorn in the side of

systems of elder authority, and thus the dominant procedures of generational

60

time. This too, has relevance to the contemporary situation of youth in Kenya,

who are often seen as unruly and in need of discipline from generational

authorities. Both of these valences – youth as a possible roadblock to national

progress and youth as a threat to gerontocratic authority – are relevant linkages

between the Mau Mau and the experience of being young in Kenya. Mau Mau,

like young Kenyans, represented a threat to interrupt temporal continuity,

whether that continuity is conceived as national development, or generational

authority. This makes the Mau Mau a powerful symbol for young Kenyans who

seek to create their own revolutionary temporality by arresting the flow of history

through their art.

Hip-Hop, Nation, Time

While the authors of Angalia Saa assert control over time by casting

themselves as revolutionaries - as authors of a new revolutionary present - the

fact that they draw heavily on the imagery of a shared national past shows that

they are never completely free of other existing temporal frameworks. Indeed, as

Marx wrote in The Eighteenth Brumaire, “men make their own history, but they

do not make it just as they please” (15). This is true of the revolutionary hip-

hoppers who made Angalia Saa, as they rely heavily on symbols of the shared

temporality of the Kenyan nation, even as they subvert its hold over the past. The

images used in the video for Angalia Saa are central to Kenya’s national

historical imagination, and the use of these images underscore the significance

of the nation in shaping debates over time that young Kenyans engage in.

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The centrality of national symbols in Angalia Saa also contradicts some

contemporary accounts of global hip-hop in which the importance of nationality is

downplayed. In studies of East African hip-hop, some authors have seen

membership in a global hip-hop community as evidence of a decline in young

people’s concern with their national identity. For example, Mwenda Ntarangwi’s

(2009) book on hip-hop in East Africa argues, “none of the artistes whose work is

analyzed [in the current volume] have, for instance, any distinct Kenyan,

Ugandan, or Tanzanian identity” (116). My fieldwork experience with hip-hop in

Kenya revealed a different situation than the one Ntarangwi describes. National

identity was important to the hip-hop musicians I knew. It came through in their

daily discussions and in their music. Indeed, the song Angalia Saa is uniquely

Kenyan and demonstrates the effort of its authors to use the trope of revolution to

enter into debates unique to the Kenyan nation and its particular history.

John Lonsdale’s (1992) seminal work on Mau Mau and Kenyan history

makes this point: at the heart of any nation – indeed, any group that imagines

itself a community – are ongoing arguments over essential issues. One of these

debates at the heart of the Kenyan nation is the nature and flow of time. As Smith

(2008) points out in his ethnography of development and witchcraft in southern

Kenya, arguments over the management and flow of time are central features of

Kenyan national discourses. Smith argues that these discourses about

“development” were formalized in the late colonial era, and have served to frame

postcolonial politics right through to the present. Indeed, he identifies such

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struggles over the nature and flow of time as critical aspects to understanding

African social and political life in general:28

Kenyan understandings of development are related to competing understandings of temporal unfolding, [as] different groups of people work to assert their control, or sovereignty, over this unfolding, and in the process try to insinuate themselves in history” (2008: 7)

The authors of Angalia Saa are very much involved in this temporal politics

aimed at insinuating themselves within the history of the Kenyan nation. But in

contrast to the discourse of development identified by Smith, they use

“revolution” as the primary category with which they assert control of time. They

cast the Mau Mau as revolutionary heroes of the Kenyan past, and themselves

as the “new” revolutionary Mau Mau of Kenya’s present. In their use of Mau Mau

as a forum in which to debate the nature and flow of time, the authors of Angalia

Saa are participating in a national discourse. Therefore, it is important to keep in

mind that the arguments about Kenya’s past presented in Angalia Saa are hardly

unique to Kenyan hip-hop, and say more about their authors’ membership to a

broader Kenyan public than the narrowly defined hip-hop community (Mwangi

2010; Githuku 2015).

The link that Angalia Saa makes between time and nation is a

fundamental one. Most contemporary thinking about nationalism and its

relationship to time is influenced by the work of Benedict Anderson who famously

argued that modern nationalism was born when, among other historical forces,

there was a fundamental shift in the way people perceived time (Anderson 1991). 28 “Part of what is unique about African social and political life is the degree to which it is dominated by a tempopolitics and a temporality that has come to shape meaningful action” (Smith 2008: 244-245)

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Nations as imagined communities were able to come into being because of the

development of a new apprehension time, which enabled an otherwise disparate

people to gain the sense of a shared temporal trajectory from past to present to

future. Anderson further pointed out that while the combination of discrete

historical forces allowed for the development of modern nationalism in Europe at

the end of the Eighteenth Century, once modern nations emerged in Europe they

became “modular” and available to be transplanted to other locations across the

world.

This argument for a “modular” nationalism has a distinct resonance for

nations like Kenya, which emerged from the wreckage of colonial empires in the

Twentieth Century. However, scholars have pointed out that decolonization in

Africa, and throughout the world, was never a simple matter of transplanting a

modular nation-state where a colony had formerly existed (Cooper 1996; Kelly

and Kaplan 2001; Mann 2006). African nations that were formerly incorporated

into European empires were born out of a complicated struggle over political

power, competing visions of how that power should be allocated, and the types of

polities that would best suit those goals. Those who won in these struggles were

given the first opportunity to define the terms of debate about what the nation

was, where it came from and where it was going. These political leaders along

with the intellectuals and writers who helped construct nationalist

historiographies, sought to give Africa a “usable past” (cf. Ranger 1976).

But the visions offered by the early nationalists in Africa hardly went

unchallenged at the time, nor since. In the case of Kenya there is hardly a more

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controversial topic with regards to arguments about the nation than Mau Mau.

The conflict, which led the British government to declare a State of Emergency

from 1952 to 1959, was notable for its brutality on all sides. Although historians

dispute the exact numbers, African casualties are minimally estimated to be in

the tens of thousands, including both Mau Mau and loyalist factions, while the

number of Europeans killed was in the hundreds. In both popular and historical

accounts the violent uprising in central Kenya has been variously portrayed as a

peasant revolt, an ethnic civil war, and a heroic nationalist movement.29

Throughout post-independence history Mau Mau has been viewed by some

Kenyans as liberators, and by others as an embarrassment. After independence,

the memory of Mau Mau was viewed as a threat to the postcolonial efforts of

Kenya’s nationalist leaders who wanted to build the nation by forgetting its

divisive past. “Everyone fought for independence,” was the famous proclamation

of Kenya’s first president, Jomo Kenyatta, who himself was falsely accused and

imprisoned by the British for being “leader of the Mau Mau.” Simply put, Mau

Mau was the skeleton that architects of Kenyan nationalism thought best to leave

in the closet (Lonsdale and Odhiambo 2003; Ogot 2005).

Yet, rather than follow this prescription to forget the past, as earlier

Kenyan nationalists had wanted, Angalia Saa raises Mau Mau anew. The first

line of the first verse in Angalia Saa is therefore the most provocative: “Blood,

sweat and tears/Mau Mau won the war/But the spectators took home the

29 There is a very large body of literature that examines the historical and historiographical debates over Mau Mau. It is beyond the scope of this chapter to discuss even a portion of this literature’s contribution to the understanding of Kenyan history. Suggested treatments of the subject include: Kanogo 1987; White 1990; Lonsdale and Berman 1992; Odhiambo and Lonsdale 2003; Anderson 2005.

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trophy.”30 Here, the claim that Mau Mau won the war is taken for granted. It’s true

that the Mau Mau uprising of the 1950s did precede the granting of Kenyan

independence from the British in 1963, and made officials and the British public

reconsider the wisdom of keeping Kenya part of the empire. However, historically

speaking, Mau Mau was not victorious on the battlefield, the uprising having

been definitively crushed by the colonial British government in 1956, several

years before independence was granted.31 But the questions of who “won” and

who “lost,” and who fought for what and to what ends remain core elements of

Kenyan debates about the past. And Mau Mau has long been central to these

discourses. As Cooper wrote in 1988, “Mau Mau has become a politically

charged topic, and discussing it has become a way – in some cases a risky way

– of saying something about the present” (313).

It is precisely this divisiveness surrounding the Mau Mau and its place in

Kenyan history that make it open to such a range of interpretations. Kenyan

historian E.S. Atieno-Odhiambo (1991), writing about the contentious public

debates surrounding the history of Mau Mau in 1980s Kenya, notes the potency

of the Mau Mau narrative in Kenyan society by asking, who needs the Mau Mau?

The audience that needs the Mau Mau message is an audience in search of power. The history of the Mau Mau is the history of power, how it is attained, or lost, manipulated, controlled. It is a confession that society is still engaged in struggle about power and struggle for accountability as well. The narration of the history of Mau Mau is an accounting process with its profits and losses, and yes, scores to be settled (305)

30 “Damu, Jasho, Machozi, Mau Mau walishinda war, mashabik wakaenda na trophy.”

31 For a detailed military history of the Mau Mau war see (Anderson 2005)

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As a narrative about power in Kenyan society it is perhaps not surprising that

poor Kenyan youth would seize on the Mau Mau history in an effort to articulate

their own struggles with structures of domination. The “power” that they seek

access to by drawing on the Mau Mau is the power to interrupt the flow of a

national history that has left them behind. Through Mau Mau youth in Dandora

seek to insinuate themselves into Kenyan history and in a revolutionary moment

that they control, empowering themselves to become authors of history.

Reliance upon the memory and symbols of political and social upheavals

of the Kenyan past is central to the aesthetics deployed in Angalia Saa and of the

revolutionary project of the Mau Mau rappers from Nairobi. Indeed, this is one of

Marx’s defining characteristics of revolutionary movements in The Eighteenth

Brumaire. He writes:

Thus the awakening of the dead in those revolutions served the purpose of glorifying the new struggles, not of parodying the old; of magnifying the given task in imagination, not of fleeing from its solution in reality; of finding once more the spirit of revolution, not of making its ghost walk about again (17)

Similarly, the resurrection of the “ghosts” of Mau Mau by rappers in the video for

Angalia Saa is not merely a parody of the past, but rather a critical gesture of

imagination. They awaken the Mau Mau dead in order to glorify their own

struggles as contemporary youth Nairobi - not to, as Marx put it - make the

ghosts of Mau Mau walk about again. In the following section I continue the

discussion of Mau Mau and revolution, drawing on insights from scholars who

have remarked on the revolutionary nature of The Mau Mau rappers from

Nairobi. I take these works to reveal important insights and seek to build on them

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by giving my own interpretation of the nature of Mau Mau as it is deployed in

contemporary revolutionary hip-hop. Ultimately, I suggest that Walter Benjamin’s

interpretation of Marx (1969) on revolution is critical to understanding the

revolutionary nature of Angalia Saa. Following Benjamin’s insights, I argue that

hip-hop uses the specters of the Mau Mau past to interrupt the flow of time,

which they feel they’ve been left out of. In doing so they create their own

revolutionary temporality.

Mau Mau and Revolution

The birth of revolutionary hip-hop in Nairobi is the subject of Chapter 3

and will be dealt with in detail there. But here it should be mentioned that the

aesthetics of Mau Mau that are featured in Angalia Saa are part of a broader

revamping of Mau Mau in 21st century Kenya (e.g. Mwangi 2010; Koster 2013;

Githuku 2015). In the Nairobi revolutionary hip-hop community Mau Mau has

wider resonance than just the video for Angalia Saa. When Kalamashaka, who

are commonly regarded as pioneers of revolutionary hip-hop in Kenya released

two of their earliest and most well known songs in the late 1990s, their

references to Mau Mau were already at the forefront. For example, in the song

Tafsiri Hii (Translate This), their introduction begins with the proclamation:

“Straight from the Mau Mau camp…” Here, like the famous N.W.A. song “Straight

outta Compton,” the allusion is to the place the artists are representing. In this

case the Mau Mau camp refers to a residential compound where many of the

rappers hung out in the eastern Nairobi estate of Dandora. Imagining themselves

as inheritors of the Mau Mau revolutionary struggle the young Kenyans from

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Dandora and other nearby neighborhoods appropriated the language of “the

camp” associated with the forest war.32

A second example of the way that Kalamashaka designated themselves

as inheritors of the Mau Mau can be found in the beginning of the title track to

their 2001 album Ni Wakati (It’s Time). Before the music begins we hear an audio

clip of Malcom X praising the Mau Mau as revolutionaries who fought for and

won independence for Kenya

There’s been a revolution, a black revolution going on in Africa. In Kenya the Mau Mau were revolutionaries, they were the ones who made the word ‘Uhuru’ [Freedom]. They were the ones who brought it to the fore. The Mau Mau, they were revolutionaries

In using this audio clip from Malcom X, Kalamashaka make a connection

between themselves as the inheritors of the Mau Mau revolution, but also

present themselves as part of a global struggle that harkens back to the pan-

Africanist movement of the 1960s (Osumare 2010). After their success in the late

1990s/early 2000s the members of Kalamashaka mentored several other hip-hop

groups from Dandora, all of whom shared their revolutionary aesthetic. Soon

these Dandora rappers, who called themselves “Mau Mau” linked with a group of

32 The semantic relevance of calling there Dandora hang out a “camp” brings up some interesting ideas, which are not within the scope of this dissertation, but may be followed up at a later date. In particular, I’m interested in the way that a “camp” represents an impermanent settlement and exploring how this impermanence relates to conceptualizations of youth and time in Nairobi. In a material sense the Mau Mau camps set up in the forest during the guerilla insurgency of the 1950s were necessarily mobile and impermanent structures. By contrast, the hip-hop Mau Mau camp set in a residential compound in Dandora in the 1990s is a much more permanent structure. Indeed, it is still there to this day. However, in addition to recalling the guerilla insurgency of the Mau Mau, calling their urban hangout in Dandora a “camp” might convey the impermanence of the social formations that took place there. Indeed, by the time I arrived in Nairobi and asked my friend, MC Kah, if we could visit the “base camp” he told me that he didn’t hang out there anymore. In fact, few original members of the Mau Mau hip-hop crew still spend any time at the camp. The semantic meaning of having a camp in the city may also relate to the transitory nature of the city in general, which has never really been accepted as a “permanent home” for most Kenyans.

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like-minded hip-hop enthusiasts from the coastal city of Mombasa, calling

themselves “Ukoo Flani.” Together these two groups of revolutionary Kenyan

rappers formed a larger collective called “Ukoo Flani Mau Mau.”33 The ranks of

this Kenyan hip-hop collective are ever changing, but its membership is probably

somewhere between 20-40 individual members.

One of the scholars who has examined this group and the notion of

revolution in Nairobi hip-hop is Mickie Mwanzia Koster. She argues that in

drawing on the memory of Mau Mau young rappers from Nairobi are continuing a

struggle that was initiated by “their Mau Mau grandfathers” (Koster 2013). Koster

points out that with hip-hop in Nairobi, the struggle has traded the physical war

for a mental one.34 Writing of the hip-hop associated with the group Ukoo Flani

Mau Mau, Koster writes: “the group is creating a revolution different from their

Mau Mau forefathers that fought a physical war; their war is a spiritual one

designed to fight by educating, uplifting, inspiring, and calling to action listeners

to embrace change” (83).

Mwangi (2010), however, is more skeptical of the claims of revolution that

are made in songs like Angalia Saa. He draws on Stephanie Newell’s notion of

“quoting techniques.” According to this theory contemporary artists “quote” or

mention well-known canonical works in African popular art forms as a strategy to

gain authority (101). This means that if an artist references or “quotes” certain

33 The direct translation of the name, “Ukoo Flani” is “A Certain Clan.” The collective of rappers from Mombasa also point out that their name is also an acronym for the following phrase: Upendo Kote Olewenu Ombeni Funzo La Aliyetuumba Njia Iwepo (Love Everywhere All Who Seek the Creator’s Teachings; There is a Way). See Mwangi (2010) for this translation.

34 Koster cites an interview with Kamau Ngigi (Kama from Kalamashaka) who said, “Our Mau Mau forefathers fought a physical war, but ours is a mental war” (82)

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works, it does not necessarily hold that he or she necessarily endorses the work,

or is even familiar with it. The quoting is merely an act of association to lend

weight to the authority of the artist. Mwangi suggests that the use of Mau Mau in

Angalia Saa is an example of quoting, and not necessarily evidence that the

authors possess a particularly revolutionary outlook or goal. “Although Ukoo Flani

Mau Mau might on the surface appear revolutionary, the embodiment of the ideal

image of the Mau Mau,” Mwangi writes, “it could be quoting Mau Mau just as

another iconographic text to be part of a trend in artistic production” (101). This

notion of “quoting” the past has a similar resonance to Marx’s insights in The

Eighteenth Brumaire about repetitions in history and how revolutionary

movements tend to draw on the symbols and language of the past. However, as I

discuss below, there is a notable difference between Marx’s thoughts on

revolution and Mwangi’s conceptualization of the “revolutionary” nature of

Kenyan hip-hop.

Mwangi goes on to argue that Ukoo Flani Mau Mau contradict the

idealized vision of a contemporary revolution of lower–class youth by “performing

songs that openly support the status quo” (101). He cites the stylistic choice of

using neosoul music in these revolutionary rap songs as evidence that the music

is actually meant to appeal to wealthier section of Nairobi society. This, he

argues, ends up reinforcing contemporary trends in popular music consumption,

which seeks to market a contemporary neosoul sound to upper-class Nairobians.

For Mwangi, this is in contradiction to the “rugged rhymes and consumes” (107)

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used by the group to present an image of radical revolution led by young and

poor Kenyans, and characteristic of what he terms an “incomplete rebellion.”

The scholarship of both Koster and Mwangi offer different interpretations

of the use of revolution in Nairobi hip-hop. Koster sees revolutionary hip-hop as

continuing with a struggle that the Mau Mau began, but with a crucial difference:

the hip-hop artists who have taken the name “Mau Mau” are not involved in a

physical struggle for “flag freedom,” but rather a mental/spiritual struggle for

liberation of the mind. On the other hand, Mwangi interprets the use of Mau Mau

in Nairobi hip-hop aesthetics as having less to do with revolutionary change, and

more to do with “quoting” iconographic images in order to lend authority to the

artists themselves, an act he argues creates the appearance of revolution, but

actually supports the status quo. These diverging interpretations demonstrate

that understanding the various meanings revolution holds or is assumed to hold

for hip-hop artists and youth in Nairobi is multifaceted and not easy to pin down.

As Koselleck (2004) notes in his conceptual history of the term, revolution

has been used to describe such a wide variety of historical and contemporary

situations that it has lost much of its conceptual clarity and essentially become a

slogan. This sloganizing of the term revolution is exemplified in the epigraph to

this chapter, which is spoken at the beginning of the song, Angalia Saa, just as

the instrumental begins. The reference to revolution is such a common slogan in

Kenyan revolutionary hip-hop, that it’s tempting to conclude that it has little

meaning. But as Koselleck points out the ubiquity with which the term revolution

is enlisted to describe myriad situations and outlooks does not empty it of its

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semantic content. Rather the different meanings that revolution can take give the

term powerful semantic potential: “It almost seems that the word ‘revolution’ itself

possesses such revolutionary power that it is constantly extending itself to

include every last element on our globe” (44). According to Koselleck, the

“revolutionary power” of the term revolution is evident in its semantic elasticity

and its durability. The word itself has a fetishistic quality, holding its value as it

circulates through various discourses in different times and places.

Kenyan artists I knew rapped about, spoke about and clothed themselves

in revolutionary imagery as they defined it, identifying with figures from Africa and

the African diaspora: Malcom X, Martin Luther King Jr., Bob Marley, Marcus

Garvey, Haile Selassie, Steve Biko and Dedan Kimathi. The legacies and exact

contributions of these historical figures, like the concept of revolution itself, are

subject to debate and discussion. But all of them share the similarity of being

major figures in the struggles of black subjects to fight the oppression of white

racism. It is in this sense that they fit into the pantheon of revolutionary heroes for

Kenyan hip-hoppers. In the video for Angalia Saa, which discusses the

contributions and trials of a number of Kenyan heroes, it is the deceased Mau

Mau fighter, Dedan Kimathi, who is the central to the films revolutionary

aesthetic. Before turning to the aesthetics of the film and the role of Dedan

Kimathi in the production a brief summary of the preceding background sections

will be made.

The first background section discussed the efforts of colonial authorities to

assert some measure of control of the flow of time in Kenyan society. The

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overarching goal of development that took hold of colonial imaginations following

World War II, sought to move the colony forward in time towards what social

scientists and colonial policy makers conceived of as a modern society. Part of

this vision involved implementing time-discipline in the workplace. It was thought

that by instituting such discipline, colonial officers could create a modern urban

society that they could control, or at least understand. Mau Mau represented the

antithesis of these goals to manage the flow of time in the colony. In colonial

imaginations Mau Mau was a reaction against attempts to move their subjects

into modernity. The uprising represented the immobilization of a linear historical

trajectory that colonial officials had sought to engineer. At the same time that

Mau Mau was baffling colonial officials, Kikuyu debates about generational

authority were made visible in the Mau Mau. For young Kikuyu men sympathetic

to the Mau Mau cause, it was bitter resentment towards wealthier and older

Kikuyu men, which drove them into the forests. Their landless status and inability

to become men were primary factors that led to the rebellion. From the

perspective of wealthier Kikuyu, who were loyal to the colony and enemies of

Mau Mau, the uprising was seen as a threat to their authority over younger men.

Mau Mau therefore became a powerful symbol of temporal disruption in the

imaginations of colonial authorities and elder Kikuyu men.

Similar conceptions framing the Mau Mau as disruptors to the flow of

Kenyan history can be seen in the second background section. In that section,

which takes up the discussion of Kenyan nationalism and its uneasy relationship

to Mau Mau, I point out that for early Kenyan nationalists the Mau Mau past was

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seen as a threat to a productive national unity. Drawing on Benedict Anderson’s

insight that the foundation of nations as imagined communities is the sense of a

shared temporality, I pointed out that Mau Mau threatened that shared national

time. For decades after independence political leaders sought a stance of

collective forgetting with regards Mau Mau.35 The perceived threat that Mau Mau

posed to the establishment and continuation of a shared national time further

marked the rebellion as disruptors to the flow of time.

The chapter up to this point has lingered on these discussions about Mau

Mau in order to give proper context to how they have been historically framed as

problems to dominant ideologies of temporal flow. In the next section I analyze

how through the visual aesthetics of Angalia Saa young revolutionary hip-

hoppers draw on the imagery of Mau Mau in their own attempt to immobilize the

flow of history, and thus create their own revolutionary time.

Analyzing the Visual Aesthetics

From the very beginning of the film for Angalia Saa a sense of the past is

manufactured through the use of both visual and aural cues. As the film begins

listeners hear the familiar rapid clicking sound produced by a reel-to-reel

projector. In reel-to-reel film projection technology this clicking is caused by the

shuttle mechanism rapidly feeding the film through the reel. In Angalia Saa this

sound is a digital rendering of the mechanical noise. Since the video is both

produced and consumed using digital technology the mimicking of film projection

technology is purely an aesthetic choice used to manipulate the viewer’s sense

35 In Angalia Saa this treatment of Mau Mau heroes is described in the line from the chorus, “why has the world thrown you away? You are a hero.”

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of time by imbuing the viewing experience with a feeling of the past. Visually the

screen shows a standard film leader, which is a length of film attached at the

head of a film to assist with threading the projector (see images below). The

leader shown on the screen visually draws the viewer into a sense of even and

structured temporal movement by counting down “8,7,6,5,4,3,2…”

Figure 2-1. Digitally rendered film leader from Angalia Saa.

At the conclusion of the film leader the display momentarily cuts to black

and the mechanical clicking sound of the projector abruptly stops. This lasts less

than a second before both image and sound return. Next a series of six still

images are displayed in even succession. The music begins and a slow melodic

string arrangement introduces the chord progression of the song. The transition

between each image is signaled with a “click and whir” noise similar to the sound

a digital camera produces to mimic the mechanical noise of a shutter slamming

shut on a pre-digital camera. As the photographs flash on the screen, one after

the other, the voice of the Kenyan revolutionary hip-hop artist Kama dedicates

the song to all the Kenyan heroes who have never been recognized: “I’m

dedicating this to all the heroes of Kenya/Everyone who has struggled but never

been repaid /This is the time to get repaid, Revolutionary Comrades!”

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Figure 2-2. Six images used at the beginning of Angalia Saa.

The patterning of these still images introduces the major theme of the

video, which plays on a tension between motion and arrest. In the series of

photographs pictured above this is achieved by showing five images that share

similarities in the way their subjects are posed and dressed. The continuity of the

first five images is interrupted by the sixth, which features the Mau Mau leader,

Dedan Kimathi, lying half naked in handcuffs. At this point in the film a very

discerning viewer will notice that the final picture is not like all the rest, but unless

he or she is very well versed in Kenyan history and politics, and already knows

the song lyrics, it may not be clear what this difference communicates about the

message of the video. Below I flesh out my interpretation of what the use of this

image in this sequence achieves and how it relates to the overall theme of

motion and arrest, which is central to the video’s aesthetic.

In Kenya, photographs of political figures, which resemble the first five

images of the video, are commonly displayed in shops and homes. Even if

someone may not agree with the politics of the President, for example, it is

common to hang a portrait of him in their shop. This is a practice that shows

some reverence for political leadership, even though Kenyans are fond of

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criticizing political leaders of all stripes. These first five portraits are therefore a

familiar genre to most Kenyans. In the video these portraits are used to pay

respect to these men as “heroes” of Kenyan history. All of these first five men are

associated in some way with conflict with the colonial regime while Kenyan was

under British control from 1895-1963. These men had diverging political views

and differed in their personal biographies, but all of them were notable politicians

and prominent African nationalists that challenged colonial rule in Kenya. Thus all

of them are given “hero” status in the eyes of this film. Moreover, all of them lived

well into the era of Kenya’s independent nationhood and were involved in the

post-colonial politics that helped to shape the nation.

These first five men are all wearing jackets on top of dress shirts with

neckties, or in the case of Harry Thuku, a bowtie. Just as important as the

clothing they wear is the way their bodies are positioned within the frame. They

sit upright and their stern expressions look directly in front of themselves. The

theme of “watching” is significant to note. The song’s title, “Watching Time,” is

born out throughout the video as the camera continues to focus on faces with

open eyes. The effect this creates is twofold. Firstly, the faces that the camera

focuses on are constantly “watching” with eyes open. Secondly, the viewer who

looks at their watching faces is invited to watch with them as scenes from the

past are shown on the screen.

In contrast to the first five images, the sixth and final image of Mau Mau

commander Dedan Kimathi, interrupts the aesthetic pattern they establish. The

final of the six images is a newspaper clipping of Dedan Kimathi after he had

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been captured and imprisoned by the British towards the end of the long and

brutal Mau Mau war. Kimathi, who was the leader of a faction of forest fighters in

the Mau Mau conflict, was a menace to British efforts to quell the violence that

disturbed their colonial authority in the 1950s. In this image he is portrayed lying

in a feeble condition after the British captured him in 1956, reduced to a prop for

imperial propaganda. The way Kimathi is posed in this image gives a stark

contrast to the positioning of the men in the five preceding images. He is lying

down on his back, head resting on a pillow. His hands are bound in shackles; he

has no shirt and a blanket covers him from the waist down (swaddled like an

infant or infirmed person); his signature wild and flowing dreadlocks are tied up

above his head. His eyes are not looking forward, but off to the side. His literal

state of arrest is in stark contrast to the photographs which precede his in the

film.

British authorities intentionally posed Kimathi in this way and invited a

group of reporters to capture the images. In the actual newsreel footage of this

moment, which was produced by the British Pathe company in 1956, a narrator

describes the effect colonial authorities expected Kimathi’s capture to have: “his

capture will have a great psychological effect, for the Mau Mau leaders still at

large are only small fries. Without Kimathi, Mau Mau’s days are numbered.”36

Colonial authorities clearly believed that the arrest of Kimathi signaled the

immanent defeat of Mau Mau. This image that they produced of Kimathi was to

36 “Mau Mau Chief Captured (1956)” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q-nx8mr4Re8&list=PLucfM30N6hIsSws7kX0nlc46nZJ9dV4uY&index=13

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be circulated in the media and meant to break the spell of what they saw as an

evil, anti-modern, return to African barbarity. As discussed earlier in this chapter,

the Mau Mau rebellion and their leader Kimathi were, in the minds of the British,

an absolute rejection of the modernity and progress that colonial rule was meant

to bring to the “dark continent”.

But if that’s how colonial authorities saw the Mau Mau, and if the above

image of the half-naked and handcuffed Kimathi was to be used to interrupt the

Mau Mau movement as it threatened to carry the whole of central Kenya back

into the darkness of their pre-modern past, then why in 2007 would the authors of

the Angalia Saa video choose this particular piece of imperial propaganda as the

visual representation of their hero, Kimathi? While part of the choice to use this

Kimathi newspaper clipping might be explained simply by a lack of alternative

representations of the Mau Mau leader, the following images are all widely

circulated and could have easily been used by the filmmakers who produced the

video for Angalia Saa.

Figure 2-3. Three alternate images of Dedan Kimathi.

The fact that they chose the image they did is relevant to the present

discussion because it points to how the visual aesthetics of the video raise

Kimathi up to the status of revolutionary Kenyan hero. His state of arrest is the

symbolic lynchpin of the revolutionary aesthetic, which conceives of revolution as

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a moment in which time is arrested. In order demonstrate how Kimathi is set

apart as the central protagonist of the revolutionary hip-hop video there are a few

additional remarks to be made here. In contrast to the previous portraits featured

in the video, where each man is the central feature of the frame, here we see that

Kimathi is only given half of the frame, while the other half is filled with the text of

the newspaper article. Finally, and perhaps most significantly, Kimathi’s eyes are

looking to the side, and not forward as in the other portraits. In each of the

preceding portraits the men have eyes focused directly ahead of themselves (all

except Bildad Kaggia are staring straight into the camera. Kaggia is posed at an

angle and doesn’t look directly at the camera, but he does look straight ahead of

himself).

As I pointed out above the focus on eyes throughout the video references

the theme of “watching time”. In the case of the first five men, the view they have

is focused and looking “forward.” They are watching time directly, staring straight

at it. The impression of Kimathi’s eyes looking off to the side, by contrast,

communicates something very different. If all the previous photographs showed

men staring straight ahead, as if looking directly at the national history of Kenya,

where is Kimathi looking? Here, I suggest that his state of arrest, is symbolic of

his relationship to national time, which he has been excluded from. Since he is

excluded from Kenya’s national temporal flow (i.e. arrested from time), he looks

upon time from an angle, not directly. It appears that he is “watching time” go by

as if is not a part of it.

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This is indeed the motif of the song, which argues that Kimathi, and by

extension, all his Mau Mau comrades, have been disregarded by Kenyan history.

The idea that these Mau Mau heroes have been forgotten or “thrown out” is

supported by the song’s lyrics. The chorus of Angalia Saa uses the Swahili verb

kutupa to describe the treatment of Mau Mau by history. In Swahili Kutupa

literally means, “to throw.” But, typically it is used by Kenyans to refer to

“throwing something away,” “getting rid of something,” or “discarding something

in the trash.” Therefore, my best translation of this line from the chorus of Angalia

Saa is “Watching Time…Why has the world thrown you away?”37 When the

authors of these lyrics describe Mau Mau in general, but Kimathi in particular, as

having been “thrown away” by the world, I interpret this to mean that their

historical contributions to Kenya’s independence have never been properly

recognized, nor have they received compensation for their losses, or as a reward

for their sacrifice.38 In effect, they have been “thrown away” by history, and are

therefore represented occupying a space of marginality in relation to the nation’s

temporal flow. In short, they are presented as being outside of national time.

Therefore, the way Kimathi is posed in the photograph is useful to the

authors of this video and their revolutionary aesthetic because it communicates

this relationship to history. While the other Kenyan heroes in the portraits have

37 Translated from “Angalia Saa…mbona sasa dunia imekutupa?” The Swahili word takataka (trash) is not included in the original Sheng. Literally, dunia imekutupa, translates as “the world has thrown you away” rather than “the world has thrown you in the trash.” However, I argue that kutupa implies

38 I base my interpretation of this line on several factors. One is the statement Kama makes in the beginning of the song (see epigraph), in which he dedicates the song to all Kenyan heroes who have struggled, but never been repaid. He says, that it is now time to be repaid.

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been recognized and included in the national flow of time, Kimathi has been cast

aside, immobilized, and in the view of the revolutionary hip-hop artists who made

this video, placed outside of Kenya’s national historical consciousness. If Kimathi

and the Mau Mau who fought during the war, are not situated within the national

time of Kenya, but rather outside of it “watching”, then in what temporality are

they located? I suggest that their location outside of national history is precisely

how Mau Mau are imagined by revolutionary hip-hoppers as being within an

alternate revolutionary temporality. As inhabitants of an alternate revolutionary

temporality, Mau Mau, and in this video, Kimathi, are able to pose a threat the

flow of national time.

The effect of Kimathi’s sideways gaze is not only presented in this video,

but is also reproduced in a large mural inside the “Base Camp” in Dandora,

where the hip-hop Mau Mau hung out. In this mural the eyes of Kimathi are not

looking directly in front of himself. Like his eyes in the photograph of his arrest,

the artist who painted this mural chooses to have him staring off to the side.

Figure 2-4. Mural of Dedan Kimathi in Dandora “Base Camp.” Photo taken by

author in 2012.

The fact that the photograph of Kimathi interrupts the aesthetic pattern of

the portraits, which preceded it, is important and relates to the revolutionary

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aesthetic this video cultivates. It situates Kimathi as different. Unlike the other

men who lived to see Kenyan independence from colonial rule, Kimathi died in

captivity in 1957. His death came six years prior to Kenyan independence in

1963, and while the Kenyan colony was still in a declared “State of Emergency.” I

suggest that these are important historical facts that help to raise Kimathi up to a

singular status within the revolutionary hip-hop aesthetic. As I have stated above,

the revolutionary aesthetic in this film is based around a tension between motion

and arrest. Throughout the film images of physical detainment are shown. This

motif begins with the photo of Kimathi in handcuffs, and continues to include film

of British roundups of suspected Mau Mau, and film of the detention camps the

British built to hold the thousands of detainees. The film also draws a connection

to the detainment of young Kenyans by placing them in various states of arrest.

Many of these shots are direct imitations of original footage of Mau Mau in

detention.

Below I continue the discussion of the “arrest” theme in this video, and its

relationship to Kimathi and the revolutionary aesthetic, but here I briefly digress

to emphasize how the lyrics of the song support the notion that Kimathi is

singularly unique amongst all Kenyan heroes. This special place that Kimathi

holds in the Kenyan revolutionary hip-hop aesthetic can be heard in the following

line from Angalia Saa, when Kama poses this rhetorical question:

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Figure 2-5. Images of Kama and Kimathi from Angalia Saa.

The image on the left is captured from the video (I have added the text to

represent the English translation of what Kama raps in Sheng). Here is the

rapper Kama, dressed in a shabby looking suit coat sitting behind barbed wire

with several others of similar appearance (visually referencing film of Mau Mau

detainees also presented in this film). They are clearly meant to resemble those

who were detained by the British in camps during the Mau Mau war. Kama poses

a rhetorical question, which draws on the plot of the hugely popular film, The

Matrix, whose central protagonist is Neo. In this science fiction film set in the not

too distant dystopian future, the protagonist Neo discovers that his reality is part

of an elaborate machine-controlled virtual-reality simulation known as “The

Matrix.” These machines farm human bodies as they are held captive in pods

and their life energy is harvested to power the machines that now dominate

earth. Thus, in the plot of The Matrix, humanity is enslaved, but blissfully

unaware of their enslavement because they’re minds are connected to a

simulation. The story arc of The Matrix’s protagonist, Neo, leads to his eventual

realization that he is “The One” whose coming has been prophesized, and he will

save the world and its human population from enslavement by “The Matrix.”

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Immediately after Kama poses the question of who plays “Neo” in the

modern Kenyan Matrix, the video cuts to a close up image of Dedan Kimathi (the

same image discussed above, but enlarged to focus on the body of Kimathi).

Like Neo who is “The One” in the movie The Matrix, Kama proclaims Kimathi as

the heroic savior of the Kenyan nation, saying that if “Kimathi isn’t the one, then

society is drunk on opium, just like Karl Marx said.”

While his quotation of Marx is apropos, the song even more clearly relates

to Marx’s insight on revolution from The Eighteenth Brumaire: that to talk of

revolution is to talk of ghosts, and of the importance of awakening the dead from

their graves. For Marx the great revolutions of history always implied repetition.

They required a return – in form, if not function – to the past. This return is clearly

evident in the song Angalia Saa, as the ghosts of Kenya’s past, in particular the

Mau Mau, are summoned in order to stoke the fires of the new revolution.

Indeed, Kimathi, more than any other figure in this song, and in Kenyan

revolutionary hip-hop aesthetics, embodies the notion of a revolutionary time that

blasts open the continuum of history. His image is the temporal interruption to the

Kenyan nation’s imagined progress.

This conception of the revolutionary potential of those excluded from

history resonates with insights given by Walter Benjamin on history and

revolution. Earlier in the chapter I referred to Benjamin’s statement about

revolutionary classes and their awareness that their actions “are about to make

the continuum of history explode” (261). What Benjamin refers to in this quote as

the “continuum of history” is a particular conceptualization of history and its

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relationship to time. He is critiquing what, at the time of his essay, was a

predominant philosophical view of history, called historicism. He makes several

remarks about historicism in his essay, but here I’m interested in how he relates

historicism to a notion of historical progress, and how he critiques this idea of

“progress” and its view of history and time. It is in the context of this critique that

Benjamin first describes his well-known concept of “homogeneous, empty time.”

He writes:

The concept of the historical progress of mankind cannot be sundered from the concept of its progression through a homogeneous, empty time. A critique of such a progression must be the basis of any criticism of the concept of progress itself (261).

Here Benjamin argues that in order to offer a critique of the idea of “progress” it is

imperative to critique the particular conception of time from which the idea of

progress cannot be separated (e.g. homogeneous, empty time). Historicism, as a

philosophy of history, is based on a notion of the historical progress of

humankind, which Benjamin here notes, is itself based in a conception that

historical events unfold through “homogeneous, empty time.” Benjamin’s critique

of Historicism, and its notion of progress, is therefore a challenge to this

particular conception of time.

By contrast, Benjamin continues, “History is the subject of a structure

whose site is not homogenous, empty time, but time filled by the presence of the

now” [my emphasis] (261). When Benjamin remarks that the structure of history

cannot be found in a conception of homogeneous, empty time, I interpret him to

be speaking of “history” in terms of his conception of Historical Materialism,

which he poses as a critique of Historicism. Where the latter sees a progressive

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history unfurling through an empty and homogeneous temporality – e.g. a

continuum of history - the former seizes on moments from the past to interrupt

this continuum in the present. Furthermore, Benjamin aligns this Historical

Materialist conception of “time filled by the presence of the now” with

revolutionary class struggle when he writes that revolutionary classes, in the

moment of their action, are “aware that they are about to make the continuum of

history explode.”

In illustrating his point about the linkages between revolutionary class

struggle and his idea of a historical materialism based on a conception of “time

filled by the presence of the now”, Benjamin draws on the work of Marx in The

Eighteenth Brumaire. Although he doesn’t directly cite Marx’s seminal work in the

passage I’m currently discussing, he clearly references insights about historical

revolutionary movements that were first articulated by Marx in The Eighteenth

Brumaire. For example, immediately following his remarks on history being filled

by the presence of the now, Benjamin refers to the French Revolution and the

how it drew on the symbols of ancient Rome: “to Robespierre ancient Rome was

a past charged with the time of the now which he blasted out of the continuum of

history. The French Revolution viewed itself as Rome reincarnate” (261).

This commentary that Benjamin makes was first articulated by Marx in

The Eighteenth Brumaire, when he pondered a seeming paradox of revolutionary

movements:

And just when they seem engaged in revolutionizing themselves and things, in creating something that has never ye existed, precisely in such periods of revolutionary crisis they anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past to their service and borrow from

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them names, battle cries and costumes in order to present the new scene of world history in this time-honoured disguise and this borrowed language (15).

In discussing this tendency of revolutionary movements to revert to the symbols

of the past, Marx references the French revolution of 1792 and their reliance

upon Roman symbols. In addition to mentioning Robespierre, as Benjamin does,

Marx continues to describe the “heroes as well as the parties and the masses of

the old French Revolution, [who] performed the task of their time in Roman

costume and with Roman phrases” (16). The “task” Marx is referring to is the

“unchaining and setting up modern bourgeois society” (16).

From Marx’s insight on the use of the past in revolutionary moments, and

in particular Marx’s comments on the French Revolution’s “parody” of roman

costumes and phrases, Benjamin draws inspiration for his own remarks on the

nature of a revolutionary history – e.g. a history filled with the presence of the

now. Benjamin’s suggestion that revolutionary moments are defined by the

eruption of some past image into the present as an interruption to the continuum

of history seems to be very relevant to this chapter’s discussion of Angalia Saa.

Here I don’t wish to suggest a direct comparison between present day

Kenyan society and the particular historical moment in which Benjamin penned

his famous essay – e.g. 1930s Europe and the rise of Fascism. There are many

political, material, and cultural differences that make such a comparison

impossible. But I do suggest that Benjamin’s remarks, as well as the above

insights from Marx, do offer a valuable frame for analyzing the revolutionary

aesthetic in Angalia Saa. In particular, I am interested in Benjamin’s notion of the

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use of images from the past to break up the historical continuum – e.g. a

progressive linear conception of the unfolding of time - which is how I view the

importance of Mau Mau images to the revolutionary aesthetic in Angalia Saa.

As the current analysis has so far focused on the importance of the

photographic image to the interruption of time, it is also relevant to briefly remark

on the importance of photography and its revolutionary potential, which was

central to Benjamin’s thinking about history. Here, I turn to the work of Eduardo

Cadava (1996) on Benjamin and the importance of photography to his unique

insights on time and history. In his book on Benjamin, photography, and history,

Cadava notes that historical movement is immobilized in the photographic flash

and this concept is utilized in the unique style of writing that Benjamin used: “If

Benjamin suggests that there is no history without the capacity to arrest historical

movement, he also requires a mode of writing that can remain faithful to this

movement of interruption or suspension” (xx). Benjamin’s style of writing

“theses,” which were short fragmentary sections of text, mimic the photograph,

argues Cadava. In particular, I’m interested in Cadava’s thoughts on how

photograph relates to Benjamin’s conception of history and revolution. As

Cadava writes

Photography names a process that, seizing and tearing an image from its context, works to immobilize the flow of history. This is why following the exigency of the fragment or thesis, photography can be said to be another name for the arrest that Benjamin identifies with the moment of revolution. Although Marx identifies revolutions as the ‘locomotives of world history,’ Benjamin suggests that ‘perhaps it is completely otherwise. Perhaps revolutions are, in this train of traveling generations, the reach for the emergency brake” [GS 1:1232] (xx).

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For Kenyan history, and for the revolutionary aesthetic in Angalia Saa, Mau Mau

represents this reach for the emergency break. Mau Mau was and is in this

video, a phenomenon that threatens to immobilize the flow of Kenyan history.

Here it is important to recall some of the connections established earlier in the

chapter regarding Mau Mau and their perceived threat to temporal order. As

discussed above, colonial officials saw Mau Mau as an inexorable threat to their

modernist fantasy of a colony and its people steadily marching forward. Similarly,

the post-colonial state regarded the Mau Mau legacy as something that must be

disregarded for the nation to move forward. Mau Mau was seen only as a threat

to that historical movement forward, and thus prominent Kenyan nationalists

whished to “forget” Mau Mau. Mau Mau also represented a temporal emergency

for generational authority, as seen the struggles over manhood that drove the

internal Kikuyu war within the war.

Mau Mau represented a threat to both colonial and post-colonial

authoritative historical continuums. In the video for Angalia Saa, images from this

past are seized by revolutionary hip-hoppers, to immobilize the contemporary

flow of history that they feel has, like the Mau Mau, thrown them away. I will pick

up this theme again in Chapter 4: Kah’s vision, which explicitly examines a video

that links the experience of poor Kenyan youth from Dandora with the discarded

waste of the Dandora dumpsite. But in the next section, I continue to examine the

tension between movement and arrest. Up until this point I have focused on the

theme of arrest in the video, arguing that the arrest of Dedan Kimathi, other Mau

Mau, and of youth in the video, symbolizes their expulsion from Kenya’s

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progressive national history. In the next section I describe how the film

juxtaposes the theme of arrest with the theme of movement in a character, who

is given no name, but who I will call “Matigari.”

Matigari Doesn’t Even Have a Plot of Land

In Kama’s verse in Angalia Saa, he raps that “Matigari doesn’t even have

a plot of land/the government wants to chase him out of Nairobi.” In this line

Kama references the protagonist, Matigari, from Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s 1986 novel

“Matigari ma Njiruungi.”39 In this novel, Matigari is portrayed by Ngugi as a

national hero who fought for independence in the forest with Mau Mau, but when

the fighting ended and Kenya gained independence he returned to find that all of

his land was taken. But as literary scholar, Simon Gikandi (1991) point out, the

word “Matigari” has a much deeper meaning than simply the name of a fictional

character. Gikandi points out that the original etymology of the word in Kikuyu

signified “leftovers of food or dregs in drinks,” but in the 1960s emerged as a

synonym for the “Mau Mau.” Since talking about the Mau Mau was politically

dangerous at that time, Matigari was a euphemism for those independence

fighters who had not been welcomed or incorporated into the postcolonial

national project. Hence, they were the “dregs of the drinks.”

In Angalia Saa a Kenyan actor named Ndungi Githuku embodies Ngugi’s

archetypal Matigari. In the film he portrays two defining characteristics: he runs

and he watches. In the above image captured from the video he is shown silently

watching. His eyes are wide open while his face bears a look of grave concern.

39 See Thiongo 1989 for the English translation of this novel, originally published in Kikuyu.

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From behind broad banana leaves he gazes upon images from Kenya’s past,

represented in the video through archival film footage. He becomes witness to

the turbulent moment at the end of colonial rule when the British colonial state

(with help from loyalist African subjects) fought to violently suppress the Mau

Mau.

Figure 2-6. Image of actor hiding in video, Angalia Saa.

But his is not the only face we see. The camera consistently juxtaposes

his movement with the staring faces of arrested youth. This series of images

provides an example of the camera’s framing technique. These represent just a

small portion of the faces that are presented in the film, but they are typical to all

others in certain characteristics. Firstly, their eyes are open and staring directly

into the camera. Secondly, their countenance is expressionless, i.e. they don’t

smile or make any attempt to draw focus away from their intensely watchful eyes.

Thirdly, these faces belong to bodies that have been arrested. In two of the

above photos barbed wire is clearly visible, while in the other two photos we see

hands raised above their heads.

Figure 2-7. Images of actors in the video, Angalia Saa

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The scenes of arrest are meant to recall the labor camps into which

thousands of suspected Mau Mau “terrorists” were swept during the Emergency.

In his book on the topic, Anderson estimates at least 150,000 Kikuyu “spent

some time behind the wire of a British detention camp” (5). Accounts of the

camps in Kenya have described how existence there was aimed at the

depersonalization of the imprisoned (Clough 1998; Kariuki 1963). Marshall

Clough’s (1998) book on the Mau Mau memoirs that have been published over

the years argues that personalized accounts of detention were shocking to

European readers who could only imagine an undifferentiated mass of hardcore

criminals in the camps (205). In light of the depersonalization that camps cause,

it is easier to understand the effect created in Angalia Saa by the camera’s

insistent framing of individual faces behind barbed wire. The visual focus on the

faces behind barbed wire works to reaffirm the individuality of those mostly

anonymous 150,000 detainees who lived and suffered in the camps. However,

these staring faces are different than the man’s in a critical way. All of the above

visages are looking at the camera from positions of arrest. Indeed, almost without

exception, every scene in the film that doesn’t include the man portrays subjects

who have been arrested.

By contrast, the man who I refer to as Matigari (The Leftovers), is

distinguished in his state of unarrest, and his constant motion as he tries to

evade capture. Yet his movement is not free or constant. As he moves he

alternates tempo, sometimes running, sometimes crawling, sometimes stopping

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momentarily to hide. But he keeps moving. His constant motion throughout the

film is juxtaposed with the scenes of arrest. In this way the visual artistry of the

video plays on the tension between motion and arrest. This aspect of the film is

critical to understanding the notion of “watching time” and what this production

reveals about the attempt of its authors to visually create a revolutionary time. By

constantly returning the camera to this man’s watchful eyes and then cutting to

footage from Kenya’s past and present political crises – moments of mass arrest

– the film makes him a witness to what are imagined to be revolutionary

moments of the past. By seizing on these images from the past and bringing

them into the present through the vision of this man the film shocks the viewers

sense of time as a linear progression.

Figure 2-8. Actor running through Nairobi streets in Angalia Saa.

Early in the video he is shown dashing through the forest. Later, as shown

in the image above, he is running through the streets of Nairobi. While the

footage before was black and white, it is now in color. He has replaced the

banana tree for a utility pole, the corn stalk for a street sign, the narrow forest

path for rubbish-strewn alley. Time has passed, but his condition has not. He is

still a subject outside of time. Nicholas Githuku (2015), who discusses Angalia

Saa in his recent book on Kenyan national identity, writes that “the music video’s

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performative subtext suggest that although chronological time has moved

forward, the hard and harsh times embodied by the Mau Mau struggle still

remain. That the times have not changed” (417). As mentioned in the

Introduction to this chapter, “Angalia Saa” can be translated and interpreted in

different ways. Githuku translates it as “Look at the times.” In this translation, the

meaning of the phrase draws attention to the present moment, essentially saying,

“look at these times we’re living in, what a sad state of affairs that our heroes

have been forgotten.” Under this interpretation “Angalia Saa” is a statement of

exasperation at contemporary Kenya, which has moved forward in history, but

forgotten those who made this movement possible.

But there is a second way in which the translation of Angalia Saa can be

interpreted which is also consistent with the theme of the visual narrative. The

second translation of Angalia Saa is “watching time.” In this interpretation Angalia

Saa is a commentary on waiting, as if one is watching time move along, but not

part of its current. In the video for the song, Kama, who raps the first verse of

Angalia Saa is dressed to resemble a Mau Mau prisoner during the State of

Emergency (see image below). Visually recalling this moment in Kenyan history

the video shows Kama sitting behind a barbwire fence next to other “Mau Mau

prisoners,” wearing a tattered suit coat. Kama, sensing the dramatic scene he is

at the center of, scowls at the camera through the barbwire and points to his wrist

as if to a watch that isn’t there. In this image the meaning of “Watching Time” in

its second translation is given a visual expression. Time has been arrested along

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with the Mau Mau detainees and cannot move forward until these heroes of the

revolution are released and compensated for their sacrifice.

Figure 2-9. Kama points to his wrist in Angalia Saa.

Angalia Saa, in its lyrical and especially in its visual content, offers a

critique of the temporal unfolding of Kenya since the 1950s State of Emergency.

By making the visual connection between the State of Emergency tactics of the

colonial government and their contemporary lives, the makers of the video for

Angalia Saa argue that for the youth of eastern Nairobi, as the video implies, the

State of Emergency never really stopped. In one of the final scenes from the

video the man I refer to as Matigari has finally been arrested. He lies on his back,

cuffed hands folded across his chest. Now he is imitating the famous image of

Dedan Kimathi discussed earlier in the chapter. When the British finally captured

him in 1956 after years in the forests of central Kenya, the Mau Mau leader – in a

final insult – was reduced to a figure for imperial propaganda. Here was the

terrible leader of the vicious Mau Mau, filmed and photographed lying in

shackles, brought to heel by the colonial government. In the video for Angalia

Saa the camera remains trained on the original footage of Kimathi, whose eyes

are now only barely open. He appears frail and weak. There is a brief blurring of

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the shot and then a ghostly visage appears to sit up from Kimathi’s body. It’s as if

the spirit of the Mau Mau commander had arisen, been unshackled, and walked

away. This represents the moment in the video where the catastrophic past

erupts into the present.

Figure 2-10. Dedan Kimathi (left) and actor superimposed over Kimathi (right).

Conclusion

This chapter argues that revolutionary hip-hop offers young Kenyans in

Nairobi access to an autonomous temporal structure conceptualized in the idiom

of revolutionary change. The revolutionary hip-hop community in Nairobi

represents a group of younger Kenyans engaged in an effort to assert their own

vision of history by participating in an alternative vision to dominant temporalities

offered by authorities in Kenyan society. In particular, this chapter focuses on the

shared national time of the Kenyan imagined community, and the perceived

threat that Mau Mau history presents to it. The goal of this chapter is to show

how the historical Mau Mau uprising resonates with conflicts over temporal flow

that relate to generational authority as well as the Kenyan historical imagination.

Mau Mau therefore provides a powerful symbolic framework for young

Nairobians to animate their own challenges to generational authorities’ attempts

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to assert control over the flow of time. At the same time Mau Mau also

challenges notions of a shared national time based on a progressive view of

development under a capitalist regime. Casting the Mau Mau as revolutionaries,

and themselves has inheritors of that revolutionary struggle, serves to bolster

Nairobi hip-hoppers’ claims to be participants in a revolutionary present.

In making this broader argument I have given an analysis of Angalia Saa

in order to show specifically how young hip-hoppers use images from Kenya’s

colonial and postcolonial past to interrupt the flow of time and create their own

revolutionary time. The central conceit of Angalia Saa is the interplay of time and

its arrest. By drawing on images of arrest in the past and present, the authors

compare the experience of poor Kenyan youth to the arrest of time itself. As

Benjamin argues in his “Theses of the Philosophy of History”, it is in the caesura

of temporal flow that revolution becomes possible. He asserts that the goal of

revolutionary movements is to seize on a moment from the past in order to

immobilize the flow of history; to “make the continuum of history explode.” This, I

argue, is the way that Angalia Saa uses images from Kenya’s past as part of a

revolutionary aesthetic. They are meant to shock the complacent Kenyan nation

by bringing the past into the present. Rather than creating a continuity with the

past, as Mwangi argues, I see this as an attempt grab a single disastrous

moment from history – i.e. the massive arrest and internment of tens of

thousands suspected Mau Mau by British forces – and bring it into the present in

order to immobilize the national temporal flow that has, in their words, “thrown

out” these heroes.

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Moreover, in making this attempt to disrupt the national history, they make

their own revolutionary time. The revolutionary thrust of Angalia Saa is created

by its authors placing youth outside the flow of historical time, i.e. “watching

time,” and therefore in a revolutionary relationship to it. This is symbolized in the

film by placing youth in various states of arrest, while the camera focuses on their

faces “watching”. By doing this, the film shows these youth, many of whom are

revolutionary hip-hop artists, to be “watching time” (i.e. “Angalia Saa”). Similar to

the Mau Mau - and particularly Dedan Kimathi, whose image while under arrest

is displayed multiple times in the film - this state of arrest is seen to be the

condition under which a revolutionary temporality is made. By setting themselves

and their Mau Mau heroes “outside” the flow of time, young revolutionary hip-

hoppers are making the linkage between themselves and Mau Mau as

revolutionary actors, whose revolution must begin by exploding the continuum of

history.

This chapter shows that time and its flow are central themes in

revolutionary hip-hop ethos and aesthetics. Kenyan hip-hop pioneers,

Kalamashaka, who will be discussed in the next chapter, titled their first album,

Ni Wakati (It’s Time). When they released their second album thirteen years

later, which is discussed in Interlude B, they again chose a title with a temporal

theme, Mwisho wa Mwanzo (The End of the Beginning).40 In the archive of

Dandora hip-hop songs, revolution and temporal references are central themes.

In the next chapter, I continue to explore how time is experienced and made

40 See “Interlude B: Mwisho wa Mwanzo” for a description of the release of this album during my fieldwork in 2014.

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through the discourses and music generated by revolutionary hip-hop artists from

Nairobi. In the minds and music of revolutionary hip-hoppers, the theme of

revolution is also linked with generation and the concept of translation. Looking at

how these themes interact in the music and discussions of revolutionary hip-hop,

I show how hip-hoppers narrate the history of the beginning of their movement. I

argue that in doing this they imagine hip-hop to be a critical social institution in

Kenya, in contradistinction to the “idle hobby” most Kenyans see it as.

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CHAPTER 3 TRANSLATE THIS

The ancestors would have translated this poem

(Hii shairi wahenga wangetafsiri) - MC Kah, State of Emergency

In this chapter I build on the themes of temporality, revolution and generation

introduced in Chapter 2, while examining their relationship to the concept of translation.

I show how an act of translation is seen as a generative moment for revolutionary hip-

hop in Kenya. I focus on the Kenyan hip-hop group Kalamashaka, and how the release

of their 1997 single Tafsiri Hii [Translate This] is conceptualized as the genesis of a hip-

hop revolution in Kenya. One of the primary reasons that this song and the metaphor of

translation proved to be such a powerful moment in the history of revolutionary hip-hop

in Kenya is the fact that it spoke to an extant language politics in Nairobi, where class

and youth identity were very much tied to the language one spoke.

I will go into further detail about the class dimensions of language in Nairobi

below, but here it should be noted that in Nairobi, Sheng, which is an ever-changing

urban polyglot based primarily on Kiswahili, is associated with lower-middle class youth,

especially those living in the Eastlands estates.1 By contrast, wealthier, or “uptown”

Kenyans who reside in Westlands and other areas West of downtown, primarily speak

English. Understanding this key dynamic in Nairobi social divisions is central to the

discussion below, which shows how hip-hop became a potent medium for marginalized

youth in Nairobi to contest power structures that pervaded the society they grew up in.

1 Eastlands is a large area East of downtown containing several different housing estates and neighborhoods. It is known as the lower-income and working class area of the city. In contrast, Westlands and several other estates to the west and north of downtown are upper class communities.

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Translation – because of its resonance with these as well as other historical struggles

over language in Kenyan society that I discuss below – became a seminal work in

creating a revolutionary hip-hop community in Nairobi.

This chapter has two primary goals. First, I use the song Tafsiri Hii and the

discourses surrounding it to argue that it has generated a sense of shared time for the

revolutionary hip-hop community in Nairobi. The importance of translation and time to

the formation of revolutionary nationalist movements has been discussed by Benedict

Anderson, whose work provides a framework for this chapter’s discussion of how the

Kenyan “imagined community” of revolutionary hip-hop came into being. I argue that

Tafsiri Hii is a critical text to the imagined community of revolutionary hip-hoppers in

Nairobi because it historicizes their movement, creating a shared temporal trajectory

that members imagine themselves to be a part of. The second goal of this chapter is to

argue that the revolutionary hip-hop community engages in an effort to “institutionalize”

their movement. By casting hip-hop as a critical social institution in Kenyan society,

revolutionary hip-hoppers contradict the prevailing sentiment, especially from older

Kenyans, that hip-hop is an idle hobby, a waste of time, and not a real vocation. In the

course of this chapter, I show that Tafsiri Hii is important both to the creation of an

imagined hip-hop community in Nairobi, and to its claims to be a social institution

capable of providing services to citizens that the neoliberal Kenyan state has neglected.

Revolutionary Hip-Hop and Civic Virtue

In Chapter 2 I discussed the work of John Lonsdale on the Mau Mau. In his

influential essay on the debates that constituted Kikuyu political discourse prior to and

during the Mau Mau insurrection, Lonsdale (1992) remarks that Kikuyu ethnicity faced

the same civic debates that animate most nations. Lonsdale writes, “Tribes, like nations

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– and they are alike in most respects other than in their lack of a state – are changing

moral arenas of political debate” (267). Lonsdale argues that the formation of ethnic

identity is, in principle, the same as the building of national communities. What animates

the sense of membership to a community – whether it be a tribe or a nation - are

struggles over power, arguments about how wealth is distributed in society, and most

importantly, moral debates about civic virtue.

Following Lonsdale’s argument that ethnic groups like the Kikuyu are essentially

small nations within the broader Kenyan nation, I suggest here that the revolutionary

hip-hop community can be described in similar terms. This community represents a

group of young Kenyans who, through hip-hop, engage in moral debates both internal

and external to their group. Hip-hop, for them, provides a platform to voice their opinions

about these issues. But they also feel that joining the revolutionary hip-hop movement is

an act of civic virtue. For them, revolutionary hip-hop is a livelihood that requires honest

and hard work. It is also an institution that provides critical services to their

communities. Their membership in the revolutionary hip-hop community, as they see it,

demonstrates their moral value as honest hard working citizens who provide a critical

service to their community. Since most Kenyans don’t see hip-hop as promoting any of

these virtues, there is significant energy used by hip-hoppers to cast their movement as

a valuable social institution.

The most fundamental activity in this project, in my view, is giving their

movement a history. As Anderson points out in his seminal work on nationalism, a

central theme in the formation of “imagined communities” is the sense of shared time.

By historicizing their revolution, members of Nairobi’s revolutionary hip-hop community

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generate the sense that they share a temporal trajectory. In Chapter 2 I described the

nature of this shared time as a revolutionary time, one that draws on the past in order to

interrupt the flow of history. In this chapter, I argue that discourses about the history of

hip-hop in Kenya, it’s founding and its heroes, are the scaffolding that support this

communal notion of participating in a revolutionary time. These discourses are critical

aspects of imagination, which help create a sense of community based on a shared

revolutionary temporality. Before discussing more theoretical frameworks used to

support this argument, I begin with an example of how the history and institutional value

of revolutionary hip-hop appears in the words and art of an artist from Dandora named,

Zakah.

Zakah, “Native Son”

Towards the end of my fieldwork in Nairobi, I met Zakah, who is one member of

the duo, Wenyeji (Native Sons), in a small cyber café in downtown Nairobi. Although I

had known Zakah for several years and had talked to him several times about hip-hop

in Nairobi, I asked if he would give me a more formal interview about his personal

history and relationship to the genre. His remarks on the history of Kenyan hip-hop

repeat a narrative that locates Dandora and the three-person group, Kalamashaka, as

the origin of Kenyan hip-hop:

[Dandora] is the home of Kenyan hip-hop. Kenyan hip-hop started back in 1995 from the group Kalamashaka. They are the pioneers of Kenyan hip-hop. Their first track was Tafsiri Hii. The song was a big hit. The first time I heard Tafsiri Hii I was really inspired because it was the first Kenyan hip-hop song to be heard on radio…

As discussed below this narrative is an oversimplification of the actual history of hip-hop

in Kenya. Nevertheless, the reliance on this version of Kenyan hip-hop history is

significant to the work that Tafsiri Hii performs as a text. As Barber suggests,

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understanding how texts function within a broader textual field requires looking at “how

genre distinctions are maintained, canons formed, and claims to ownership of texts

exerted; how texts are locally conceptualized, and in what manner they are held to have

meaning” (224). When Zakah repeats the story of Tafsiri Hii being the beginning of hip-

hop in Kenya, he makes a claim to ownership of that text. In this case, it is not personal

ownership he is referring to, but the ownership that Dandora has in relationship to the

origin of Kenyan hip-hop. In his narrative, Zakah continues to insinuate himself in this

history and in this ownership of Kenyan hip-hop that he claims for Dandora. In the quote

below, which I have redacted for clarity, Zakah explains what Dandora was like in the

late 1990s and how Kalamashaka “saved” him from a life of drug abuse and crime:

[Back then] Dandora was known for its immorality [and the] negative things that used to happen there. But the good thing about Dandora is [the] music. And the music [of Kalamashaka] is positive. If it wasn’t for Kalamashaka I’d probably end up in drug abuse. I’d probably end up being a thug. Or I’d probably end up joining these terror gangs, you know? Music saved my life.

Zakah, who is approximately the same age as me, would have been about twelve years

old when Kalamashaka formed in 1995, and about fourteen when they released Tafsiri

Hii in 1997. He describes music, and specifically the hip-hop of Kalamashaka and Ukoo

Flani Mau Mau, as literally life-saving. Here Zakah’s recollection resembles the

Christian testimonials common in Kenyan evangelical churches, and evangelical

churches throughout Africa, in which converts testify to their life-saving conversion to

Christ.2 Only, instead of Christ and his church being an agent of personal change for

Zakah, he gives credit to the revolutionary hip-hop of Kalamashaka. As he continues his

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narrative, he gives credit to Kalamashaka for welcoming him into the Mau Mau hip-hop

community:

So after hearing Kalamashaka I started doing my research to know more about Kalamashaka. Who were these people? So I came to find out that Kalamashaka were my neighbors! I came to find out that these guys just live next door! I was lucky to meet Kamau [Kama of Kalamashaka]. So I told him my passion for music, I told him my interest in music and that I’m very inspired to do music [and] Kamau really mentored me as an artist. [That’s when] I joined Ukoo Flani Mau Mau.

A few years after Zakah first met Kalamashaka and joined the Ukoo Flani Mau Mau

movement, he teamed up with a school friend from Dandora, Swaleh (a.k.a. Roba from

Wenyeji), and they formed the hip-hop duo, Wenyeji (Native Sons). In 2006, Wenyeji

released the song and video for what is their most well-known work, Mizani (Verses). A

brief analysis of this song and video demonstrate how Zakah, who credits revolutionary

hip-hop for saving his own life, represents it as an important social institution capable of

providing services to those in need.

Wenyeji and the Mau Mau Program

In the song MIzani, Wenyeji describe the their brand of revolutionary hip-hop as

kipindi – “a program”. In Mizani, Zakah raps, “Who did you think it was who has come to

change all the ghetto families?” Here he poses a question about who [e.g. which

institution] is the actual guarantor of improvement for the lives of residents who live in

Nairobi’s “ghettoes.” Ghettoes can be understood as urban spaces that the state has

neglected. In posing this question rhetorically, he highlights a pervasive sense of

uncertainty over where services should or will come from. The answer to this question

of where important services will come from is given by himself later in the song: “this is

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the Mau Mau program (kipindi)…Dance with your shoulders and agree you are a

member!”

The Mau Mau hip-hop movement is thus described as a “program” that anyone

can join by moving in sync to the rhythm of the music (i.e. “dance with your shoulders”).

The imagery created in this metaphor hints at the importance of sharing a temporal

rhythm to the sense of communal belonging. Joining the “Mau Mau program” is equated

with bouncing to the beat, or being “in-time” with the rhythm. I draw attention to this

temporal aspect of the song because it recalls Benedict Anderson’s insights about the

formation of national identities and the importance he places on the sense of shared

time to the creation of these “imagined communities.” It was through the advent of

“print-capitalism” that the first national communities came into being, argues Anderson.

The technological advances in the printing industry enabled otherwise scattered groups

of people, who had little to no sense of commonality with each other, to consume the

same news and literature simultaneously. According to Anderson, this sense of

simultaneity – of being on a shared temporal trajectory with others across space – was

the primary catalyst for national communities to come into being.

One of the motifs in the song, Mizani, and the video made for it, is the imagined

creation of their own news publication, visualized in the video as the “Daily Mapupa”

(“Daily Gossip”). The images of the fictional newspaper, Daily Mapupa, are flashed

across the screen several times in the video, featuring headlines about the rap group

Wenyeji and the collective Ukoo Flani Mau Mau.3 At the end of the song, they pose a

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series of scenarios that people might encounter and suggest that “reading” the Dandora

newspapers will provide the answers:

If you are caught by the police in the streets… If you are caught shitting in public… If you are caught sleeping in class… Read what the newspapers of Dandora say… As long as Ukoo Flani are involved you don’t need to worry

In these lines and in the images of an imagined “Daily Mapupa” Wenyeji echo one of

Benedict Anderson’s key points about the creation of “imagined communities.” By

creatively instituting their own newspaper, “Daily Mapupa,” Wenyeji subvert one of the

central institutions of the Kenyan nation as an imagined community, the newsprint

industry. Indeed, one line from Zakah in the song demands the reduction of the media

gossip, which he feels unfairly portrays Dandora, youth, and hip-hop.

Hey! Reduce the media gossip This is the Mau Mau program Where we struggle To pass the dancehall doors It’s the sweat of Dandora4

Here Zakah describes frustration with “the media” for promoting untrue or salacious

depictions of the Mau Mau program, but counters by emphasizing their hip-hop

movement as one of struggle and sweat. As discussed above, hip-hop provides a

platform for young Kenyan hip-hoppers to make the argument that the work they do is,

in fact, work. This is part of a longer standing discourse in Kenya that centers on

debates about moral virtue and civic responsibility. These lines are an example of

4 Perhaps more could be done here to draw out connections between the literature on Christian testimonials and this narrative from Zakah. Especially with regard to work that has focused on Christian conceptions of time, such as Guyer’s remarks on “evangelical time” (Guyer 2007), or China Scherz’ article on the intersection of Christian charities and NGO’s in Uganda (Scherz 2013).

4 Translated from the original Sheng: “hebu, panguza mapupa za media/kipindi ya M.A.U. double/venye si u-struggle/kupita through milango za dancehall/Ni jasho za Dando.”

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Zakah taking the opportunity to challenge what he feels are unfair media portrayals of

his home a Dandora, his identity as a young person, and his vocation as a hip-hop

artist. Contrary to these prevailing depictions, he asserts he and the Mau Mau program

work hard to achieve their goals.

This argument is bolstered by the visual presentation of the imaginary

newspaper, Daily Mapupa, which is displayed several times in the video with different

headlines. These headlines tell a different story from the often-grim descriptions of

Dandora and its young residents. These headlines read: “Wenyeji: ‘It’s a New Day,”

“Underground Hip Hop Rocks,” and “Kilio Cha Haki: Cry for Justice.”

Figure 3-1. Images the fictional “Daily Mapupa” newspaper from the Wenyeji video for “Mizani”.

This section provides a brief discussion of Zakah’s personal narrative regarding

the birth of Kenyan hip-hop and his relationship to it, as well as, examples of how he

uses hip-hop to challenge media portrayals, while he argues that hip-hop itself is a

“program” that a) requires hard work and struggle; and b) provides services to the

community. In neoliberal Kenya, where several institutions of the state have been

drastically reduced or have disappeared completely from neighborhoods like Dandora,

revolutionary hip-hop makes claims to be capable of filling in these gaps. Whether it’s

institutions of state, such as education, policing, and media, or social institutions such

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as gender and generation – revolutionary hip-hop takes a position of institutional

empowerment, giving young Nairobians at least some level access to these services.

As I alluded to in the beginning of the chapter, the primary basis for authority that

hip-hop artists make claims to have, is based on the sense of a shared revolutionary

time. As an imagined community revolutionary hip-hoppers reinforce their identity and

moral authority by historicizing their movement. Thus, when Zakah describes Dandora

as the birthplace of Kenyan hip-hop, he is not only reciting what he regards as a fact.

He is also asserting that Dandora has a historical claim to the entirety of Kenyan hip-

hop. In doing this he is insinuating himself within and institutional history, but also

lending revolutionary hip-hop legitimacy as a social institution by giving it a history.

By imagining a Dandora newspaper that prints stories about Dandora hip-hop,

Wenyeji engage in an activity that Anderson has pointed out as central to the formation

of imagined communities. They subvert one of the institutions that helps define the

Kenyan nation (e.g. the national media) and make their own newspaper as an act of

imagining their own community of revolutionary hip-hoppers.5 By citing the influential

work of Benedict Anderson I do not wish suggest a direct comparison between the

origins of national consciousness in medieval Europe and the origins of a revolutionary

youth hip-hop consciousness in Nairobi at the turn of the present century. However,

what I find useful about Anderson’s work for the present discussion is the general

mechanics that he outlines as key aspects to forming imagined communities. Chief

amongst these is the attention he gives to the formation of a new apprehension of time

5 A similar example can be seen in the video for MC Kah’s “All Over the World”, which is the subject of Chapter 4. In this video several publications are imagined in a parody of well-known international magazines. For example, “National Geographic” is reimagined as “National Ecographic”; “USA Today” becomes “USA Okay”; “TIME” becomes “ITEM”; and the US based hip-hop publication, “The Source” is recast as “The Score.”

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and the role that vernacular language plays in fragmenting and territorializing larger

communities into smaller a smaller national consciousness. The latter issue is

particularly relevant to this chapter and its examination of translation in the process of

forming a revolutionary hip-hop community in Nairobi.

As Anderson points out, the medieval European community was for centuries

defined by the Church, it’s apprehension of time and it’s sacred language, Latin. The fall

of Latin, he remarks, “exemplified a larger process in which the sacred communities

integrated by old sacred languages were gradually fragmented, pluralized, and

territorialized” (19). The combination of technological change and the rise of print-

capitalism enabled the translation and printing of sacred texts in vernacular languages.

The rise of national literatures, which were written in vernacular languages, argues

Anderson, were key to the rise of national consciousness, since it enabled populations

of vernacular language speakers to imagine themselves within a shared temporal

directory with others across space.

The vernacularization of hip-hop in Kenya, through an act of translation, was also

a key moment in the formation of the revolutionary hip-hop community. Like the advent

of the printing press and rise of print-capitalism in Europe, technological changes and

shifts in the socio-economic landscape of Kenya also played an important role in the

formation of a new hip-hop consciousness based on language identity and a shared

apprehension of revolutionary time. As Eisenberg writes:

Along with the liberalization of Kenya’s broadcast media, what set the stage for Kenya’s millennium music boom and the revival of Nairobi’s recording industry was the proliferation of digital music technologies.

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In Nairobi, the liberalization of the Kenyan media and access to (relatively cheap) digital

recording technology that came around the turn of century, were catalysts in the

formation of the revolutionary hip-hop community. Later in the chapter I give more detail

on the intersection of these changes with the language politics that undergirded youth

identities in the lower income areas of Nairobi, especially Eastlands, by showing how

translation and the use of Sheng in hip-hop became a central moment on the rise of

revolutionary hip-hop in Nairobi. But before moving on to the history of hip-hop in

Nairobi, I lay out some theoretical insights on the texts and translation that help frame

my analysis of the importance of the release of Tafsiri Hii. The next three sections,

therefore, focus on outlining theoretical insights into: a) the relationship between texts

and the creation of publics; b) how translation speaks to theories of revolution; b) the

notion of translation in relation to generation and generational debates in Kenya.

Texts, Publics, and Time

Karin Barber’s work on texts and publics provides a starting point for this analysis

of how Tafsiri Hii functions within a broader discursive environment about community

and belonging (Barber 2007). Barber writes:

To understand how texts are produced out of a given textual field is to understand how that field is institutionalized, how operations within it are regulated…This involves asking how [texts] are shaped by – and shape – the disposition of communal power and social differentiation (224).

Understanding the importance of Tafsiri Hii to revolutionary hip-hop in Kenya requires

attention to these questions raised by Barber. Tafsiri Hii was critical to the

institutionalization of revolutionary hip-hop in Kenya, as a genre and as a community.

For fans of revolutionary hip-hop in Kenya Tafsiri Hii is commonly thought of as

canonical; a work that defined a new genre of verbal art in Nairobi. As I discuss below,

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the common narrative about the origins of revolutionary hip-hop in Nairobi presents the

first forays into hip-hop in Kenya as essentially imitating English rap from the United

States. At this stage hip-hop as it was performed and consumed in Nairobi was viewed

to be a foreign element, lacking any Kenyan identity. In the narrative which holds the

release of Tafsiri Hii as the moment when a truly Kenyan revolutionary hip-hop was

instantiated, the act of rapping in Sheng and demanding they be “translated” (i.e.

“translate this”), is regarded as the historical event that gave rise to a new community of

revolutionary hip-hoppers in Nairobi.

Tafsiri Hii and the founding of revolutionary hip-hop in Nairobi should be

understood within the broader discourses – what Barber refers to as a “textual field” -

encompassing the concepts of translation, revolution and generation. In this chapter I

seek to connect these discourses to the theme of temporality, by showing how Tafsiri

Hii was produced in conversation with existing temporal rhythms, and how it also

produced in own temporality. In making this connection, I follow insights from

musicologist Georgina Born (Born 2015). Describing the relationship between music

and time, Born urges scholars to look at “how music produces time through the

contingent articulation of its several temporalities, while in turn the variant temporalities

immanent in social, cultural, political, and technological change mediate the evolution of

music and musical genres” (371).

Translation is linked to notions of revolution and generation in discourses within and

about revolutionary hip-hop in Nairobi. These discourses articulate views on temporal

flow and also produce their own time. I begin by looking at the relationship between

revolution and translation

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Revolution and Translation

As Marx pointed out in The Eighteenth Brumaire revolutionary movements are

paradoxical. Just as they seem to be on the precipice of “creating something that has

never yet existed,” they always seek out the “borrowed language” of other revolutions,

thus undermining the newness of their undertaking. Marx used a linguistic metaphor to

discuss how historical revolutions always seem to begin through parody of a foreign

system: “In like manner a beginner who has learnt a new language always translates it

back into his mother tongue” (15). This insight that revolutionary movements seem to

always draw on the past in the creation of something “new” is important to

understanding the relevance of translation to revolutionary hip-hop in Kenya.

Translation presumes the existence of two languages with discrete structures and ways

of ordering the world. For any translation to occur there must be a transfer of ideas from

one system to the other. Furthermore, the translator is limited as he or she must work

from the given structures of both languages. A perfect translation is impossible and the

translator becomes the author of something that originated in one thought system and

has been morphed in its transference to another. It is no longer quite the original, but it

carries the originals’ residue as it becomes transformed in its new language.

According to Marx, revolutionary actors take a similar position to the translator in

their relationship to the past. They wish to become authors of a new history, but are

limited (as well as enabled) by the historical structures of the past. Chapter 2 quoted

Marx’s insight that “Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please.”

Rather, history is always made “under conditions directly encountered, given, and

transmitted from the past.” Just as the translator must work within the conditions that the

languages dictate, so must the revolutionary authors of history translate the past into

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the present under conditions that the past has set. When the pioneers of revolutionary

hip-hop Kenya take the position of authors of a new historical moment, therefore, it is

not surprising that they should return to the Mau Mau framework. They are taking

positions as translators of a previous revolutionary moment. They are translators of the

past as they work to assimilate political conflicts into their own revolutionary present (i.e.

Mau Mau).

They are also translators of other places, as they are incorporating hip-hop,

which originated in the United States, into their own revolutionary movement. The act of

translation is thus critical to portraying Kenyan revolutionary hip-hop as an authentic

and autonomous movement in both time and space. As I will discuss below, the

common narrative about the origins of revolutionary hip-hop in Nairobi follows the

following pattern: hip-hop came to Kenya as a foreign system, much like the colonial

system that came to Kenya in the late 19th century. Early Kenyan hip-hop suffered

because Kenyan youth tried to merely imitate American hip-hop. But when

Kalamashaka rapped “Translate This” in their own language about their own issues, a

true revolutionary hip-hop in Kenya was born.

Having an origin story and history attached to Kenyan revolutionary hip-hop is

important to the creation and maintenance of younger Nairobians’ sense of temporal

autonomy. In Kenya, and this is true throughout the continent, there is a general

discourse in urban areas regarding young African men and their lack of structured time

(see Introduction to this dissertation). They are perceived to lack temporal structure in

both their daily activities as well as in their life course and transitioning from boyhood to

manhood. In Kenya criticisms are frequently heard about hip-hop being a waste of time.

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Remember the Airtel commercial I mentioned in the Introduction, which features a

young college student telling his parents he wants to pursue hip-hop instead of his

studies. The subtext, which most Kenyans will relate to, is that his parents’ anger was a

justifiable result of interpreting their child’s desire to pursue hip-hop as waste of his

university education and a threat to his future ability to secure a career, towards which

they have likely invested much of their own savings. In other words the commercial

bases its effectiveness on the relatability of this common Kenyan sentiment: hip-hop is

waste of time in the present tantamount to cancelling the future.

Yet for it’s most ardent fans and practitioners in Nairobi (and beyond) hip-hop is

not regarded as an idle hobby. Nor do its Kenyan adherents regard hip-hop as a parody

or imitation of American culture. Rather, hip-hop is seen as a critical social institution

that supports and nurtures Nairobi’s youth, as the discussion of Zakah above points out.

In its ostensible function and value revolutionary hip-hop positions itself as part of

Kenya’s civil society. For example, Revolutionary hip-hop in Nairobi makes claims to

offer at least some level of access to education, news, spiritual/religious teachings,

protection and livelihood.6 Part of what justifies hip-hop as a meaningful use of time is

the sense that it has been rooted in Kenyan soil – that it is essentially a Kenyan activity

and not seen as a foreign activity that misguided Kenyan youth are mimicking.

6 The best example of all of these claims being made in one song, which was also extremely popular is the 2006 song Mizani (Verses) by the Dandora-based group, Wenyeji. Wenyeji is a duo consisting of Zakah and Roba, but they also associate themselves as part of the larger Ukoo Flani Mau Mau group. In Mizani, Zakah raps, “I touch, I bury, I write lines of verse. Who’d you think it was who has come to change all the ghetto families?...Reduce the media gossip, this is the Mau Mau program…Uncle, give me some respect! A hustler must eat before he can pay the rent. It’s better to be lame than to sleep in jail…Dance with your shoulders and agree you are a member!” In these redacted lines from Zakah’s verse he touches on several social institutions: funerary customs [“I bury”], the media [“reduce the media gossip”], the struggles between youth and generational authority [“Uncle, give me some respect”], jail [“It’s better to be lame than to sleep in jail]. He also claims that the Mau Mau is a “program” [sw. kipindi], which you can become a member of through a simple act of agreement [Dude, dance with your shoulders, agree you are a member].

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Translation is an important metaphor for this transfer through which something that

originated in the United States is made authentically Kenyan. Translation represents an

action in which young Nairobians incorporate the history of a foreign art form (hip-hop)

into a localized historical trajectory. The concern that its members have with maintaining

an institutional history of Kenyan hip-hop, therefore, shows their concern with giving it

status as a legitimate social institution to which youth may belong.

Generation and Translation

In his foundational essay, The Problem of Generations, Mannheim described

how the “continuous emergence of new human beings” (294) ensures that each

generation makes “fresh contact” with the accumulated cultural heritage of those

generations that preceded it. This fresh contact, in which new participants engage with

the cultural process already set in motion by their forbearers, entails a reexamination of

the cultural inventory. Thus, while some items of the cultural repertoire are inevitably

examined and discarded, others are kept. This process, through which the past is

engaged by each new generation who come into “fresh contact” with it, decides which

artifacts from their cultural heritage may be assimilated, and which may not.

Cole (2004) uses Mannheim’s insight on “fresh contact” in her analysis of young

women’s engagement with the transactional sex economy in Tamatave, Madagascar.

She shows that while transactional sex practices go back several generations in

Tamatave, the new socio-economic context with which young women at the turn of the

century entered into these relationships has had pronounced effects on these practices.

It is her argument that the examination of generational change and its relationship to

historical circumstances has lacked insight into how some practices remain with a new

generation, but are transformed by the present conditions. She writes that, “generational

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change is not only about the loss of some practices and the adoption of others.

Sometimes youth draw on old practices, but their enactment in new circumstances

changes the effects of those practices, so that even the reproduction of practices with

long histories in a region can entail change” (576).

In Kenya translation, like the practice of transactional sex described by Cole, has

a long regional history that crosses several generations. As I show below translation as

a cultural practice in Kenya has been taken up by previous generations of Kenyans to

debate essential issues related to politics and identity. Translation as a cultural practice

was once again transformed through “fresh contact” with the new generation of youth in

Nairobi during the late 1990s. In particular, it was Kalamashaka who brought the issue

to the fore when they released their hip-hop hit, Tafsiri Hii [Translate This] in 1997. As

Kenyan scholar Jean Kidula (2013) notes while discussing Kalamashaka’s role in the

founding of hip-hop in Kenya, “Kenyan rap became a national phenomenon through the

release [of Tafsiri Hii]” (174). She goes on to call Tafsiri Hii “the most important

watershed for the appropriation of rap as a Kenyan expression” (174). In a slightly more

exuberant tone, Kenyan journalist Oyunga Pala reflected recently that “Kenyan hip-hop

struck oil in 1997.” Referring to the year that Kalamashaka released Tafsiri Hii, Pala’s

article “Tafsiri Hii! The song that fired up Kenya’s music industry,” reflects with

reverence on the moment twenty years earlier when Kenya found its hip-hop voice:

Tafsiri Hii was more than a song, it was a game changer. The socially conscious music captured the frustrations of an entire generation of young people locked away in urban ghetto squalor. It embodied their aspirations of escaping poverty to seek a better life despite being born on the wrong side of town.

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The use of translation as the song’s main theme and the popularity of the song when it

was released in the late 1990s, show how potent a symbol it was when deployed by

Kalamashaka. Part of the reason for its potency is that translation contains several

layers of meaning. In one sense by saying, “translate this,” Kalamashaka were literally

referring to the words of their song, in which they used Nairobi’s urban youth language,

Sheng, to resonate with a particular language politics in Kenya, which viewed English

as the language of wealthier uptown Kenyans and Sheng the language of the poorer

working class youth of eastern Nairobi. In this way the use of Sheng indexed an urban

class politics that had grown out of the working class neighborhoods of eastern Nairobi.

In another sense, “translate this” referred to Kalamashaka’s demand that they be heard,

that they be given a platform to describe their lives as poor Kenyan youth. Thus the line

that starts the chorus of the song: “Translate this! Life in Dandora is difficult, I’m crying

through this microphone!”7 Here, they mean translation as a metaphorical process of

“understanding” their life in the Dandora estate.

Translation and History

Translation had a central impact on shaping political, social, and cultural realities

for Africans under colonial rule. It also helped Europeans to extend their power over

large areas through language (e.g. Fabian 1986). As Jeater (2007) writes, “Translation

represented the critical moment at which African and European worldviews came into

contact, when the whites sought ways to insert their ideas into the local culture” (6). The

primary arenas in which the practice of translation was most prominent were, therefore,

the most common sites of encounter between Africans and Europeans: the church, the

7 Tr. “Tafsiri Hii! Maisha kule D ni mazii, ninalia ninakutumia M.I.C.”

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workplace, and in the legal administration of the colony. As Jeater points out official

language policy in Southern Rhodesia focused on translation as practice through which

to create expertise about the Shona culture, to be put to administrative use. The result

was the creation of an idealized tribal identity, codified in the language of colonial

administration.

But as much as translation was at the center of unequal contests over European

power and hegemony in Africa, it was also a factor in reshaping power dynamics within

African societies. In the previous chapter, I discussed how the historiography of the Mau

Mau conflict demonstrates that it was more complicated than a clash between

Europeans and Africans. It also revolved around fractures within Kikuyu society.

Likewise, in colonial Kenya translation practices were not only part of a power struggle

between Europeans and Africans, but also had an undeniable influence on how

historical and generational change were arbitrated and fought over within Kikuyu

society. Derek Peterson’s (2004) work shows how translation has been used at

moments of profound change in Kenyan (Kikuyu) society to rework the terms and

characters in the drama of history as it unfolds. For example, he points out that

indigenous theories of social change in Kikuyu society were categorized into two

separate models: one (Mbari) that viewed time as a gradual unfolding, under the care

and wisdom of elders, and another (Ituika) in which time was epochal, where “old” and

“new” were brought into conflict, when radical change occurred as an upheaval of the

social order.8

8 Peterson, p.18: “History thereby gave Gikuyu two distinct models of social change and political organization. Mbari thought…was gradualist in its prescriptions for change and local in its model of political community…Ituika, in contrast, was an indigenous theory of radical change...ituika organized time epochally, not linearly, by contrasting the old with the new.”

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It was through the act of translation that early Christian adherents made their

argument to be the vanguard of the latter type of radical change in Kikuyu society.

Acting as translators of the Bible from Swahili to Kikuyu, they were able to set the terms

of debate about the nature of historical change and position themselves as the future

leaders of Kikuyu society. Thus, generational change was tied to the practice of

translation, through which a new generation of mission-educated Christian converts

discarded aspects of their Kikuyu cultural heritage, while keeping still others. This rift

between literate and illiterate Kikuyu remained a powerful animus in the Mau Mau

conflict a generation later.

In post-colonial Kenya, translation was once again brought to the fore of public

discourse as both a practice and as a symbol for a new generational autonomy. The

leader of this resurrection of translation in the Kenyan public was the controversial

Kenyan writer, Ngugi wa Thiong’o. Ngugi (1986) argued that in order for an authentic

African literature to emerge from the ash heap of colonialism, African writers of his

generation must write in African languages. Instead of translating their mother tongues

into colonial languages imported from European powers and thereby enriching the

national literary traditions of their former colonial masters, Ngugi argued that Africans

should develop their own national literatures relying on the linguistic richness of

vernacular languages.

In his verse for Angalia Saa, Kama who was a founder member of Kalamashaka

alludes to this relationship to Ngugi’s work by directly citing and making an explicit

connection between the event of Ngugi’s book and revolutionary hip-hop’s present

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moment twenty years later: “So, synchronizing time 2-0-5 [2005], Decolonizing Minds,

you should never say you were hypnotized by their rhymes.” Thus, in this telling line

from Angalia Saa the language-based revolution that Ngugi initiated in the 1980s is

“synchronized” with their own linguistic hip-hop revolution. In so doing, Kama asserts his

temporal autonomy – i.e. marking the year as 2005 – while at the same time weaving

their revolutionary moment into the contemporaneous revolutionary fabric of Ngugi’s

language-based revolution. Kama’s admonition not to be hypnotized by their rhymes –

i.e. mystified by the language of their former colonial masters – is also a statement

about hip-hop’s cultural authenticity as well as its autonomy as a generational

movement.

But, when Kama and his partners in Kalamashaka made the hit song Tafsiri Hii

(Translate This) in 1997 they didn’t use translation in the same sense that Ngugi had a

decade earlier. They cited his work, and “synchronized the time” between his

revolutionary moment of translation and their own, but their sense and use of translation

had its own resonance. Ngugi wished for his generation of African writers to produce

literature in their own vernacular African languages (Kikuyu, Luo, Kikamba, etc), and to

let the world access their writing through translation. Essentially, he was making an

argument similar to Kalamashaka: we will write and speak our thoughts in our own

language and it is incumbent upon the outside world to “translate this.” The major

difference between the attitude of Ngugi and Kalamasha is that the translation

Kalamashaka advocated was not from a traditional vernacular language associated with

an ethnic heritage. Rather, they rapped in the urban polyglot, Sheng, which in many

ways is the exact opposite of traditional vernacular language. In fact, the discourse

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about Sheng from the vantage point of many older Kenyans, has typically viewed Sheng

as inimical to African culture and values, a discourse I will pick up again below.

In this section I have briefly described translation as a long-standing practice

within the historical experience of the region, drawing attention to two moments in which

translation was used to articulate a new generation’s aspirations for the future. The first

instance occurred within the internal dynamics of Kikuyu society, where a generation of

young Kikuyu Christian converts used their literacy and translation skills to literally re-

write the terms of moral debate in Kikuyu society. The second example is the effort of

Ngugi to generate a movement towards writing literature in African vernacular. In

contrast to Ngugi’s grandfathers whose translation had impacts only within the confines

of tribal identity, the scope of Ngugi’s movement strove to be pan-Africanist, and

marked a major moment is post-colonial scholarship more generally.

I argue that in Kenya translation is a long standing cultural practice which has

been employed in poignant moments of generational change, and that it was once

again used by Kalamashaka in their effort to assert their own revolutionary moment of

“fresh contact” with the cultural heritage of their ancestors. However, translation was not

merely used in the same sense as it had been during previous moments of change. It

had been transformed by the socio-economic reality that governed the experience of

Kalamashaka and their generation. In the following section I sketch the historical

context into which Kalamashaka drew on the practice and metaphor of translation, in

order to delineate how it had been transformed after coming into “fresh contact” with a

new generation of Kenyans.

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Hip-Hop History in Dandora

When hip-hop first arrived in Kenya it was very often associated with upper class

Africans. It was they who had the wealth and privilege to travel to the United States and

Europe, and it was through their social networks that the first cassettes and VHS tapes

of popular hip-hop artists traveled to the African continent (Charry 2012). From there,

hip-hop was dispersed through local social networks. Whether it was listening to the

tapes of wealthier uptown cousins (Ngigi 2014), or scraping up some cash to buy

second hand cassettes from hawkers in the downtown Uhuru Park, a small number of

school age youth from Dandora and other lower-income estates in Nairobi became avid

listeners (and soon imitators) of rap from America. A typical story from Kama, co-

founder of Kalamashaka, illustrates his boyhood infatuation with American hip-hop. One

day while Kama was still in grade school an English teacher asked Kama to recite a

poem for the class. Standing up in front of his fellow students, clad in the standard blue

and white Kenyan public school uniform, Kama cleared his throat and recited lines from

the only poetry he knew: rap from Snoop Dogg. To his teacher’s credit, rather than

reprimand Kama for is youthful insouciance, he congratulated him and encouraged him

to continue to follow his love for poetry, whatever forms it took.9

Early attempts to make the new American rap genre speak to Kenyan concerns

included the 1991 song “Stay Alive,” by Jimmy Gathu, host of “Rap ‘em” and Coca-Cola

Youth Ambassador from 1995-98. “Stay Alive” was made to promote road safety in

Kenya, but it also highlights the significance of matatu as critical sites of social

9 Kama related this story to a classroom full of students at the University of Florida campus in the Spring 2013 semester. He was an invited guest at event on African hip-hop, which was supported by UF’s Center for African Studies.

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interaction for Kenyans. “Yo, you crazy driver! Our lives our in your hands/I say, yo, you

terrified passenger, won’t you get up, get up and make a stand!” The music and the flow

of the rap are evidence of an art form that had not yet taken a distinctly Kenyan identity.

The aspect that marked it as Kenyan was the topic of road safety, particularly its focus

on matatu, the Kenyan minibuses used for public transportation.10

At the time that Kama and his soon to be fellow rappers were still in school the

Kenyan media landscape was shifting drastically. Kenya in the 1990s witnessed the

opening up of the media and programming agendas that sought to create and exploit

youth markets (e.g. Odhiambo 2002, Kidula 2012, Eisenberg 2015). As Eisenberg

(2015) writes: “Kenya’s first privately owned FM radio station, Capital FM, went live in

1996, ending a half century of government control of the airwaves…Kenya’s new

independent radio broadcasters were primarily interested in attracting young, urban,

middle-class audiences” (5).

The Kenyan Television Network (KTN), which was the first privately-owned television

network in Kenya, similarly offered a new alternative to the long standing monopoly held

by the government-owned Kenya Broadcasting Company. KTN aired a number of

shows catering to young urban audiences. This was part of an increasing

corporatization of youth culture, where the Coca-Cola corporation sponsored shows

such as “Rap ‘em” were promoted in an effort to market their product to young Kenyans.

But while the production of youth-oriented programming in the changing media

landscape of 1990s Kenya helped to promote hip-hop generally, it was aimed at the

10 As the comments section on youtube can attest, the video still serves as a piece of nostalgia for some who grew up in 1990s Nairobi.

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more privileged section of Kenyan youth. As Kama notes while recounting

Kalamashaka’s history, rap played by the corporate sponsored television shows was

met with skepticism from people in low-income areas like Dandora (Ngigi 2014). “Early

rap tracks sold dreams of a perfect and beautiful America,” he writes, “A different reality

from what people that I knew were living. Youth in my neighborhood resented it” (30).

Indeed, the most popular music in Dandora was, and still is, Reggae and Jamaican

Dancehall. Therefore, when hip-hop first arrived in their neighborhood, locals from

Dandora and other estates drew on a discourse heavily influenced by Reggae and

Rastafarian symbolism to criticize hip-hop as being a part of “Babylon.” For many in

Dandora, American hip-hop was associated with western materialism and wealthier

uptown Kenyans referred to as Mababi, a Sheng neologism for Babylonian, i.e.

someone who is part of the Babylon system (Samper 2002).11 Those who did embrace

hip-hop style, were mockingly referred to as “Yo-Yo’s,” after the word “yo” commonly

heard in popular hip-hop tracks in the 1990s. So, while Kenyan media programming in

the 1990s helped promote hip-hop to a popular middle-class Kenyan audience, it can’t

be assumed that it was the primary reason that hip-hop gained popularity in Nairobi.12

When recalling these early days, several artists attributed their neighborhood’s

antipathy towards hip-hop to the fact that it was performed in English and thus

associated with foreigners and wealthier Kenyans, who tend to use English as their 11 It is also common to hear or read on social media uptown Kenyans referred to as “Barbies.” I can’t confirm, but it seems likely that this term comes from Mababi, or Babi. The original association with Babylon may have been traded for an association with Barbie Dolls, an equally apt characterization for how posh uptown Kenyans are viewed by their working class cousins. In Kenyan English the words “Barbie” and “Babi” are indecipherable, so it is easy to imagine how such a semantic shift may have occurred.

12 Evidence from my interviews tell that the most important factor for the rise in hip-hop’s popularity in Nairobi was the matatu. Video mixes were made by enterprising young Kenyans and sold to matatu who played them on their in vehicle screens and tricked out stereo systems.

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primary language of communication. Sheng, a polyglot comprised mostly of Swahili

mixed with English, urban slang and loan words from vernacular languages, is spoken

primarily in the lower income Eastlands estates like Dandora. In Nairobi, speaking

Sheng is an important marker of identity, as it is intertwined with an individual’s

neighborhood and class background. Kama of Kalamashaka recently described the

importance of rapping in the language of his everyday speech, and the political

significance it held in 1990s Kenya:

During that political climate people resented those things from America. English was forced in schools. If you were caught speaking Swahili in school, you were punished. Rich kids embraced speaking English as elitist, but poor kids in the ghetto spoke Swahili. When you left school, and went back to the neighborhood, if you were found speaking English you were bullied (258)

Thus Kama describes the linguistic catch-22 that he and his peers faced while growing

up in Dandora. In the classroom English was the only permissible tongue, but in the

neighborhood speaking English could get you beat up. With this picture in mind, it is

easy to see that singing a song in Sheng and provoking the audience to translate their

words was meaningful, precisely because it confronted a perceived truth about power

and privilege in Nairobi at that time.

Origin and Imitation

Most narratives about the origins of hip-hop in Africa locate its genesis in an act

of imitation. For example, Milu (2016) writes, “Across Africa, it is well documented that

the composing and performance practices of the first generation hip-hop artist, in the

1980s, was characterized by imitation, mimicry and appropriation” (32). This echoes

recent comments by Eric Charry as he addressed debates about the origins of hip-hop

in Africa (Charry 2012). Some have argued – wrongly, Charry believes – that ultimately

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hip-hop has its origins in Africa since it emerged from an African American cultural

tradition which itself is part of a longer African tradition of orality. This view holds that

African hip-hop is a continuation of longstanding traditions of oral poetry and

performance, which underwent a gestation period in the New World, before returning to

the African continent – changed, but still essentially African in its character. This

viewpoint is especially prevalent in the tenuous connections many have made between

the West African Griot tradition and modern hip-hop performers. Charry disputes this

view of hip-hop having African origins, noting that while there are some similarities and

shared traditions hip-hop was a distinctly un-African art form when it began to take hold

on the continent:

Rap as the expressive genre of choice for the children of the post-independence generation of Africans did not emerge out of any traditions on African soil, but rather began as a direct imitation and appropriation of imported American rap. African rap did not gain a voice of its own until rappers began to shed some American influences, which entailed rapping in their local tongues about local issues. This portrayal of hip-hop as being an essentially foreign element to Africa until

African rappers began to rap about issues in their own languages is a critical feature of

the narrative of the birth of Kenyan hip-hop. When Kalamashaka rapped their song

Tafsiri Hii in their everyday spoken Sheng, they were making a self-conscious statement

about their authenticity, while rejecting the imitation of other people who rapped in

English, whether they be American rappers, or wealthier Kenyans. In his study of the

hiplife genre in Ghanaian hip-hop Jesse Weaver-Shipley points out that debates over

origins and authenticity, which are manifest in Ghanaian hip-hoppers’ relationship with a

broader global hip-hop community, are productive aspects of the aesthetic development

of hiplife.

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Hiplife is an example of how black youths in the “global shadows” transform value, turning marginality and disconnection into a form of moral public recognition…The music’s malleability and reflexive tendencies also lead to its easy transportability to new contexts as youths can use local sounds to make something new while claiming membership in a global community of successful, outspoken artists. They can sound unique but be part of something bigger, be radical, and be controversial while striving for official recognition (14-15)

To be sure, the revolutionary hip-hop movement in Nairobi draws its revolutionary

language from a mixture of diasporic discourses, personalities, and events that that are

spatially and temporally remote to their experience. The most prominent of which are: 1)

the Mau Mau conflict (see Chapter 2 for a discussion of this contentious issue); 2) the

Rastafarian movement associated with the political leader Marcus Garvey and roots

reggae musicians like Bob Marley; 3) The Black Panther movement in the United

States, and the influence of prominent black leaders like Malcom X and Louis Farakan;

4) the hip-hop movement that arose in New York during the late 1970s.

But despite the fact that Revolutionary hip-hop in Kenya sees itself as part of

these other revolutionary movements, its members do not think of themselves as

“copying” something foreign. Rather, revolutionary hip-hop in Kenya regards itself as an

autonomous movement, which has its own history, heroes, as well as its own origin

narrative. Establishing an origin moment is critical to linking time and place in the

historical narrative of hip-hop in Kenya. The narrative that hip-hoppers from Dandora tell

about themselves and their revolutionary movement are, in turn, part of another origin

story that centers on Hip-hop’s original founding in the United States. This particular

origin story of hip-hop as a global art form and as a cultural phenomenon has been told

many times: hip-hop was born in the multi-cultural boroughs of New York in the 1970s

through a mixing of musical forms – soul, funk and disco – primarily by skilled DJ’s for

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urban block parties. Later poetic vocalizations known as rap or emceeing were added

on top of the music. Thus hip-hop was born, resting atop the four pillars of hip-hop

culture: emceeing, deejaying, b-boy dancing and graffiti writing (e.g. Chang 2005; Rose

1994).

While the historical veracity of this account of hip-hop’s beginnings is not in

dispute, scholars have recognized that its constant retelling in both academic and

popular accounts has helped create a reified trope that is limiting to a complete

understanding of the complex histories that give rise to hip-hop communities in diverse

locales. Appert (2016) writes: “hip-hop’s origin myth at times idealizes and codifies the

musical culture, centering as it does on a canon of figures and practices that represent

a specific and limited historical moment of creative innovation coupled with radical

social consciousness” (240). The problem with the often repeated “origin myth” of hip-

hop isn’t that it is false. As stated above the veracity of this account is not disputed. The

problem with the narrative that hip-hop was born in the United States and then

transported to places like Kenya is that it obviates the ways in which young people in

other parts of the world brought their own historical consciousness to the genre. In

Kenya, for example, there was a much longer historical engagement with American

musical traditions, as well as traditions from diasporic cultures (i.e. Jamaican reggae)

and other African traditions (i.e. Congolose Lingala music). In addition to the variety of

extant musical and poetical forms that young Kenyans were already engaged with, they

had their own historical engagements with concepts like translation that shaped the way

hip-hop was born in Nairobi.

Recognizing the limitations of locating a singular place and time as the center of

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a linear hip-hop history, Pennycook and Mitchell (2009) have called for an approach that

views hip-hop as having multiple origins:

Global Hip Hops do not have one point of origin…but rather multiple, copresent, global origins. Similarly, global Englishes are not what they are because English has spread and been adapted but because language users refashion themselves, their languages, their histories, and their cultures (40).

This argument for multiple origins for hip-hop across the globe is useful because it helps

to move beyond the linear narrative of the “spread” of hip-hop to ways in which it

emerged in different locales to express unique historical conditions. These insights from

Appert (2016) and Pennycook and Mitchell (2009) provide an important corrective to the

often repeated narrative that hip-hop originated at a specific moment in the United

States and was later brought to other parts of the globe. This narrative tends to

subsume hip-hop’s birth and spread under a single temporal movement. Rather, as I

argue here, hip-hop in Nairobi was born out of a plurality of temporal rhythms, including

those defined by the concepts of revolution and generation.

The tendency to view hip-hop as having a singular origin time and space is also

true of the narratives which get repeated about the birth of Kenyan hip-hop. But as

Eisenberg points out, the view that the Kenyan hip-hop was born in Dandora with

Kalamashaka is overly simplistic (Eisenberg 2007). In fact, hip-hop emerged

simultaneously in different urban centers in Kenya. Additionally, important contributions

by Kenyan rappers Hardstone and Poxi Presha clearly preceded Kalamashaka, the

latter’s album Total Balaa, was released three years before Kalamashaka’s

breakthrough single Tafsiri Hii (Ferrari 2007). Nevertheless, members of the group

themselves as well as scholars of hip-hop in Kenya have helped perpetuate the

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narrative that Dandora is the birthplace of Kenyan hip-hop, with the beginning of

vernacular hip-hop in Kenya being traced to the 1997 release of the song Tafsiri Hii.

Fans of Kenyan hip-hop who were part of the nascent scene in the 1990s, do

concede that Kalamashaka were not the first Kenyan rappers, nor even the first to rap in

vernacular. Yet it is common to hear the narrative perpetuated by fans, the musicians

themselves (see above discussion of Zakah), and some scholars as well.13 Here it is

important to distinguish between the narrative origins of revolutionary hip-hop in Kenya

and the actual origins of hip-hop in Kenya. Using this model we can discuss how hip-

hop emerged in Dandora, Kenya, both as part of a larger international hip-hop

movement, but also possessing its own autonomous origin moment.

Translation and Difference

Through their autobiographical lyrics, interviews, published writings, as well as

the supporting narratives of scholars, journalists, and fans, Kalamashaka have been

made central protagonists in the story of revolutionary hip-hop in Kenya, with their

status as pioneers of Kenyan hip-hop being tied to an extant language politics in

Nairobi. With Tafsiri Hii translation coalesces the time and place of hip-hop’s emergence

in subsequent narratives about the history and importance of Eastlands, and more

specifically the Eastlands estate of Dandora where Kalamashaka are from, to Kenyan

hip-hop. For example, in an interview for the recent documentary about his community

arts project “MAONO”, MC Kah, brother to Kama of Kalamashaka, mentioned Tafsiri Hii

when recounting where hip-hop in Dandora came from. In telling of the beginning of hip-

13 For example, Koster (2013) refers to Dandora as the “birthplace of Kenyan hip-hop” (Figure 1.0, page 85). Yet, as discussed in this chapter, there was not a singular birthplace for Kenyan hip-hop. Multiple hip-hop groups formed in multiple locations in Kenya in the 1990s.

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hop in Dandora MC Kah notes that there was a sort of proto hip-hop culture that

developed in the streets and the Florida 2000 nightclub, a popular venue in downtown

Nairobi. But, while those early rap battles and performances at Florida 2000 were

important activities, the real significance of Kalamashaka was when they took up the

microphone and began rapping in Sheng. This, according to Kah, enabled

Kalamashaka to represent Dandora lyrically:

It was interesting listening to Kalamashaka because they had a message and they rapped in Sheng and Swahili. Kalamashaka represented hip-hop and Dandora lyrically. Translating life in Dandora, they made Dandora famous

In making Dandora famous through their own celebrity, Kalamashaka also drew other

rappers to the estate. Nazizi, Kenya’s (self-proclaimed) “First Lady of Rap,” wasn’t from

Dandora, for example, but she came to hang out there with Kalamashaka and other

rappers in the late 1990s. In 1999, she drew on Kalamashaka’s fame in her own song,

“Nataka Kuwa Famous” (I Want to be Famous). In the chorus she enacts an imaginary,

but humorous conversation with her unsympathetic parents about her desire to become

“famous like Kalamashaka”

Mama, Mama, I want to be a rapper! Child, I don’t know what to do with you! I want to be famous like Kalamashaka What! Have you lost your mind! Please, I’ll give you anything you want I want to represent hip-hop culture Don’t be foolish! Mama, It’s okay Next, you’ll say want to sing! Even that would be okay

The song “Nataka Kuwa Famous” highlights the struggle young Kenyan hip-hoppers

face when telling parents that they want to pursue hip-hop as a livelihood. Her parents

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criticize Nazizi for being foolish, to which Nazizi reponds by invoking Kalamashaka’s

success as proof that hip-hop artists can make it. Nazizi gives a narrative in which

Kalamashaka have become famous and Nazizi wants “to represent hip-hop culture” that

they helped bring to Kenya. In her second verse, invokes translation as central to this

struggle with her parents

Listen to these words We’re hot like spicy peppers Even until now, I’m still translating But you still don’t understand!1

A couple lines later Nazizi marks the present year with the following statement: “it’s

1999 and I’ve arrived.” It’s therefore two years after Kalamashaka released Tafsiri Hii

and Nazizi is still translating, but her parents still don’t understand.2 Here, translation

acts as the metaphor around which the narrative origin of Kalamashaka’s fame - and

the hip-hop revolution - is moored. Nazizi casts her own rope around that post,

anchoring herself to the revolution as she confronts societal expectations of

generational authority. In other words, by drawing on the metaphor of translation in this

song Nazizi poetically inserts herself into the revolutionary space-time that

Kalamashaka had helped establish in Dandora through their own use of translation.

What the examples from MC Kah and Nazizi demonstrate is how Tafsiri Hii,

conceptualized as an historical event, has produced its own temporality, which interacts

with other temporal rhythms, including those associated with revolution, generation, and

history. MC Kah describes the moment of translation as a moment that made Dandora

famous. Nazizi, two years later and seeking her own fame, similarly refers to

1 Listen to these words/We hot like pili pili/Na mpaka leo, ninatafsiri/Hujaelewa! 2 The chorus of “Tafsiri Hii” demands “Skiza kwa makini” (listen carefully).

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Kalamashaka and their act of translation as a foundational moment for the revolutionary

hip-hop community in Nairobi. The archive of revolutionary hip-hop songs from Dandora

is flush with references to the history of Kenyan hip-hop in Dandora. This form of

marking time poetically is done both by the members of Kalamashaka and others. For

example, in the song Muda Umewadia (The Time has Come) featuring Kitu Sewer and

Kama, who had collaborated on song Angalia Saa, Kitu Sewer introduces the track in

this way: “Don’t you remember Kalamashaka telling you it’s time [referring to the title of

their debut album, Ni Wakati, which translates to “It’s Time”]. Then we returned with

Kama to tell you to look at the time [Angalia Saa]. Just in case you can’t remember,

we’ve come with a third one. I don’t know if you’ve realized yet because some time has

passed. This is a new one called ‘The Time has Come’ [Muda Umewadia].”

Just as Nazizi does in her song “Nataka kuwa famous” (I want to be famous),

anytime that the present year is mentioned and connected with the hip-hop revolution

that began with Kalamashaka, it strengthens the foundations on which the institution of

revolutionary hip-hop rests in Nairobi. By reiterating the origin point, and claiming to be

part of a historical movement, artists lend weight to the legitimacy of their endeavor. The

authenticity these references provide is critical to the maintenance of Kalamashaka’s

autobiographical narrative, which tells how through translation they established a new

revolutionary hip-hop movement that was authentically African, and which resonated

with certain class and cultural identities that significant to young Nairobians. This is

exactly the narrative that gives meaning to Kalamashaka’s Tafsiri Hii as a moment when

Kenyan hip-hop came into its own, both as an authentically local art form, but also as a

generational movement distinguished from previous generational moments through

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“fresh contact” with the cultural process of translation. When Kalamashaka made the

demand to “translate this” they were engaging in a discourse about power and privilege

through the linguistic idiom of translation.3

Conclusion

Returning to the concerns Barber posed with regards to texts and publics will

help to clarify some of the arguments this chapter makes about the importance of Tafsiri

Hii to revolutionary hip-hop in Nairobi and the major themes of this dissertation. In

particular, I focus on her insistence that understanding how texts are produced within a

textual field requires looking at how that field is institutionalized. The textual field I have

outlined above is formed by the broader discourse about the beginning of revolutionary

hip-hop in Nairobi and the position Kalamashaka and their song, Tafsiri Hii, are given as

pioneers of a new genre and indeed a new revolutionary movement. It is my contention

that the references to time discussed above (e.g. the historical event of Kalamashaka’s

translation), which locate Tafsiri Hii as the origin moment for revolutionary hip-hop in

Nairobi, are central activities aimed at institutionalizing Kenyan hip-hop. They are part of

a discourse that attempts to make hip-hop into a social institution, indispensible to the

youth of Nairobi, rather than an idle hobby that distracts Kenyan youth from pursuing

socially sanctioned uses of their time.

3 However, as Eisenberg points out, this view of Kenya’s hip-hop history is over simplified, giving too much credit to Kalamashaka (Eisenberg 2007). In fact, hip-hop emerged simultaneously in different urban centers in Kenya.3 Additionally, important contributions by Kenyan rappers Hardstone and Poxi Presha clearly preceded Kalamashaka, the latter’s album Total Balaa, was released three years before Kalamashaka’s breakthrough single Tafsiri Hii (Ferrari 2007). Nevertheless, members of the group themselves as well as scholars of hip-hop in Kenya have helped perpetuate the narrative that Dandora is the birthplace of Kenyan hip-hop,3 with the beginning of vernacular hip-hop in Kenya being traced to the 1997 release of the song “Tafsiri Hii.”

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At the beginning of this chapter I illustrated this point by showing how a

prominent 2006 song by the Dandora-based revolutionary hip-hop group, Wenyeji

(Native Sons) presents revolutionary hip-hop as an institution, or “program”, in Nairobi.

One that is capable of providing much needed services to citizens in lower income

areas like Dandora. I also used the personal narrative of Zakah to show how he

conceives of the birth of Kenyan hip-hop in Dandora to be the beginning of a movement

that saved his life. By becoming a member of the Mau Mau movement, Zakah was

drawn into a revolutionary time in which his passion for music was useful to him and his

community. In the song Mizani he offers this same salvation to others, who he argues

can become “members” by “dancing with your shoulders” to the rhythm of their

revolutionary movement. Making revolutionary hip-hop into a critical social institution

allows its members to demonstrate their civic virtue as young Kenyans. Contrasting

their activities in hip-hop with the life of drugs and crime that many youth in Dandora fall

into, young rappers like Zakah, argue that hip-hop provides a productive use of time that

is beneficial to Kenyan society.

Tafsiri Hii is a critical text in defining revolutionary hip-hop as both an imagined

community and as a benevolent social institution in Nairobi. By offering an origin

moment in time and place that members of the community acknowledge as “the

beginning” of their community, Tafsiri Hii acts as a text that generates its own sense of

time. As Anderson points out, this sense of a shared time is critical to the formation of

imagined communities. There were other non-English hip-hop songs written that

preceded Tafsiri Hii, but Tafsiri Hii became a potent symbol for the revolutionary hip-hop

community, because of the depth in which translation intersected with important

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discourses youth were engaging in at the time. In order to highlight the intellectual force

of translation in the context of the birth of revolutionary hip-hop in Dandora, I discussed

how it relates to the concept of revolution, extant language politics in Nairobi, and also

to generational debates.

In the case of the latter, I showed that translation has been brought to the fore of

social debates over several generations. When Kalamashaka chose translation as the

central metaphor for their 1997 song, they made “fresh contact” with an older cultural

process, one that had been at the center of debates that their grandparents and great-

grandparents had engaged in about community in times of change. In this sense, Tafsiri

Hii was also a defining moment for their generation of young Kenyans, one which gave

a vocabulary to young Kenyans like Nazizi seeking to challenge their parents’ authority

by proclaiming, “I want to be famous like Kalamashaka”. Her line, “even until now I’m

still translating/but you still don’t understand” shows how the vocabulary of translation is

deployed by a new generation of Kenyan youth, drawing inspiration from

Kalamashaka’s success to argue that their own hip-hop dreams are legitimate, even if

their parents think they are being “foolish.”

The next chapter continues to examine the concept of translation as it is

represented in MC Kah’s video, “All Over the World,” and in his vision of a world united

by revolutionary hip-hop. Kah, who is a friend and steadfast collaborator with my

research project in Nairobi, ultimately envisions hip-hop as a global movement capable

of commensurating diverse worlds. Translation and its relationship to the hope of

commensuration continues to be an important concept in this vision that Kah holds with

his international hip-hop interlocutors. Take for example, one project named

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“Translating Worlds,” which was funded by several German cultural institutions and

brought an international collection of hip-hop artists, including Kah, to Berlin with the

goal of uniting different hip-hop movements under the aegis of translation. In this

chapter I explore the limits of the commensuration that such projects envision, drawing

on theories of translation and incommensurability, as well as recent anthropological

work on universalist discourses, which are used as part of the framework for promoting

collaborations between international NGO’s and local activist organizations.

However, before turning to MC Kah and his vision of a world united through hip-

hop, I present an interlude titled, “The End of the Beginning.” This interlude is meant to

be a postscript to the present chapter. While this chapter has focused on the origins of

revolutionary hip-hop in Dandora and the role that Kalamashaka occupy as pioneers of

that movement, this interlude provides an ethnographic narrative of their “comeback”

concert some seventeen years after the release of Tafsiri Hii. I attended this concert

and closely followed the promotional media campaign that led up to the event in

December 2014. By including this narrative I hope to present the readers with a

description of the fortunes of Kalamashaka after nearly two decades as heroes of

Kenyan hip-hop. In particular, I hope to show how the theme of time continues to be

central to their revolutionary hip-hop aesthetic. The title of their comeback album is titled

“Mwisho wa Mwanzo” (The End of the Beginning). Here, the “beginning” alludes to the

revolutionary temporality that, as I have argued in this chapter, was generated around

the text, Tafsiri Hii.

The release of Tafsiri Hii in 1997, and their first album in 2001, called “Ni Wakati”

(It’s Time) represent central events in the formation of revolutionary hip-hop community

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in Nairobi – i.e. “the beginning” of a hip-hop revolution. The awareness that they are

regarded as the beginning of a new revolutionary temporality, is referenced in the title of

their comeback album, where Kalamashaka declare that they have come to the end of

the beginning (of their hip-hop revolution).

Postscript: The End of the Beginning

On Jamhuri Day 2014, a contingent of hip-hop fans, a few members of the Kenyan

blogosphere, and at least one reporter from The Standard newspaper, gathered at the

Tree House club in Westlands, Nairobi to witness the long awaited comeback of Kenyan

hip-hop pioneers, Kalamashaka. For most in attendance it was unclear where exactly

Kalamashaka had been in the intervening years since putting Kenyan hip-hop on the

map in the late 1990s - an uncertainty that helped stir up rumors and speculation during

their long hiatus. But the reasons for Kalamashaka’s extended sojourn in the wilderness

didn’t matter to the revelers who had come to celebrate the return of Kenya’s erstwhile

hip-hop heroes. Coinciding with the release of their new mixtape, Mwisho wa Mwanzo

(The End of the Beginning), the concert was as much a celebration of the group’s past

as it was their future. As one fan tweet proclaimed just days before their comeback

show, “then GOD said, let there be Kalamashaka and Kenyan hip-hop was born.”

Given the vaunted place Kalamashaka holds in the history of Kenyan hip-hop,

however, I was surprised how few people showed up for the “Mwisho wa Mwanzo”

release party at the Tree House. When I arrived at the trendy, thatch-roofed nightclub

minutes before the concert was to begin, a meager crowd milled around - many were

friends of the band. Where were the masses of fans? I had expected the event to be

much, much bigger for what I considered a momentous occasion. And so did the band,

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judging by the stacks of “Mwisho wa Mwanzo” CD’s on the merchandise table (of which

most remained unsold at the end of the night).

Across the club a Swedish producer named Ken Ring held court at a table littered

with empty Tusker bottles. Mr. Ring is a hip-hop celebrity in Sweden and an important

producer who has worked with some of the biggest names in international hip-hop. A

Swedish national, Mr. Ring is a relative to former Kenyan President Daniel Arap Moi

and owns property - and a soccer team - at the Kenyan coast. He had recently returned

to Kenya from Europe and was rumored to be working on a future project with the

group. Ring had been involved with Kalamashaka since the 1990s, when they made a

trip to Sweden and he helped them shoot the video for their hit song Fanya Mambo (Do

Something). His long-standing support for and friendship with Kalamashaka seemed to

invigorate the flagging group and kindle hopes of a true return to form.

In fact, the “Mwisho wa Mwanzo” mixtape, which Mr. Ring helped to produce, had

been in the works for years. A 2009 article in The Daily Nation had featured an interview

with him and group member Kamau Ngigi (Kama) anticipating its release later that year

(Muchiri and Wahome 2009). It was now nearly five years later and the project was

finally ready to be released to the awaiting public. Part of the reason for the delay was

the fact that this was a long distance collaboration. Mr. Ring had recorded some of the

songs during earlier visits to Kenya. But recent additions to the project had been

completed through email. Ring would make beats in Sweden and email them to Kenya

where the audio files would be extracted and rendered onto the software of a dusty

studio computer in Nairobi. Vocals would be laid down using a borrowed microphone

before the files were compressed and sent back digitally to Sweden for final mastering.

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That was the plan, anyway. Upon closer listen to the mixtape, it was clear that a

couple of the tracks never did go through the final mastering. And one of the tracks, Moi

Avenue, only featured two of the three members of K-Shaka. A space had been left on

the track for Johnny Vigeti to record his vocals, but he never did, and that void remained

on the final version of the song as a strangely prolonged instrumental. To anyone

familiar with Johnny and his ongoing battle with drug addiction, this absence wasn’t

surprising.

But despite these relatively minor issues, the mixtape has a lot to offer fans of

Kenyan hip-hop. The revolutionary ethos is still there in songs like Moi Avenue, but

quite a bit of the album is reflective, looking back on their personal and collective

histories. It was evident that they had grown and changed. The group, which nearly

fifteen years earlier had marked their entry onto the scene with the album, “It’s Time!”

had followed up with a more muted temporal title, “The End of the Beginning.” Many

things had changed in the music industry and in their lives since the 1990s. The release

of their mixtape represented a moment of transition in their constantly evolving

narrative. They had come far, but they still had far to go.

* * *

The rather small crowd for the Kalamashaka comeback show was disappointing,

but not entirely surprising. The truth is that enthusiasm for the group had waned and

although Kalamashaka was still a household name for many Nairobians under the age

of 40, most knew very little about the three members of the group. There were newer,

fresher acts on the scene, and the younger generation of hip-hop fans no longer looked

at Kalamashaka the same way. Through the course of my fieldwork I entered countless

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conversations about Kenyan hip-hop with many different people. Whenever

Kalamashaka came up, unless they were friends of the group, the response would

invariably be, “oh yeah, whatever happened to those guys?”

The struggle to regain relevance in Kenya’s public eye was plain to see in the

group’s press junket preceding the release of “Mwisho wa Mwanzo.” In promotion of the

upcoming show, members of the group had been busy over the previous weeks giving

interviews on Kenyan radio, television as well as the various blogs and youtube

channels that cater to Kenyan hip-hop fandom. A week before the concert they

appeared on “#The Trend,” a popular arts and culture show on NTV. But their

appearance on #The Trend got off to an inauspicious beginning when the show opened

with an in-studio performance hampered by severe audio difficulties, causing the

production to appear amateurish. Although this wasn’t the fault of the performers, the

low quality of the production still portrayed them in a negative light. It was impossible

not to see in this moment a group that appeared to have fallen behind the times, looking

rusty and out of step, appearing as relics of a bygone era. One young Kenyan on

Twitter even quipped, “no offence but some Kalamashaka guy looks like he escaped

from the museum.”

In addition to the poor in-studio performance, the re-emergence of Kalamashaka

to the Kenyan public was further undermined by the fact that only two of the three

members were still in Kenya. Kamau Ngigi had moved to the United States a few years

earlier where he had garnered several invitations to college campuses and hip-hop

festivals, giving talks and performances on hip-hop panels. Another member, Johnny

Vigeti, was just missing on the night of Kalamashaka’s appearance on #The Trend. In

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fact, Rawbar was the only member of the group actually at the studio and he had to

recruit two other hip-hop artists to take the place of his two absent band mates.

As the show pushed on through audio problems and awkward guest-host

interactions, I watched the tweets come in. They ranged from genuine enthusiasm to

harsh criticism. The latter tweets, which were the minority, frequently took the form of

admonishments against drug use and glib declarations about how far the once proud

Kalamashaka had fallen.

Such was the variegated discourse surrounding Kalamashaka after they stepped

gingerly back into the public spotlight so many years after they had come to be the most

prominent of Kenya’s early hip-hop acts. For fans of Kenyan hip-hop this moment had

been a long time coming. Kalamashaka’s relative fame in late 1990s had propelled

them forward into lives as figureheads for subsequent hip-hop groups and artists. And

while fortune never accompanied the fame, and while the group hadn’t officially

released an album in more than a decade, the three individual members of the group

had gone on with new and important projects - sometime together, sometimes apart –

and they remained close friends, always proud of where they came from and what they

had done to popularize hip-hop in Kenya.

* * *

Back at the Treehouse club, the reclusive Johnny Vigeti was barely visible as he

sat at a dark table in a corner of the club wearing camouflage fatigues, a woman on

each arm, smoking cigarettes, drinking beer and calmly soaking in the atmosphere.

When the shy, soft-spoken Johnny reluctantly took the stage after much cajoling from

the couple dozen adoring fans in the venue, he flipped a switch and came to life. He

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joked, he worked the crowd, he recited lines from all of his classics, and he carried the

entire performance as Rawbar, apparently drunk, flubbed his lines and forgot entire

verses. For Johnny, it was one of his first public appearances in years. Regarded by my

many to be the most talented lyricist of the group, the ultra talented and enigmatic

Johnny had finally resurfaced after spending several years battling drug addiction,

including a stint in prison for stealing to support his habit.

In the weeks leading up to the comeback show I had spent time with Johnny in a

studio/artist space on Kijabe Street in downtown Nairobi. He was quiet and inquisitive.

When I told him that I had already recorded songs with some of his friends he was keen

to listen to them with me. He asked if I would be interested in doing a song with him. Of

course I would. Playing an idea on my guitar in the studio everyone began nodding their

heads and taking turns free styling. I knew we could do something really good together.

But in the comedown from the musical excitement I noticed one of the guys who was

always hanging around Johnny take a dirty handkerchief out of his pocket. I saw him

take the heroin out and I began to squirm. I said I needed to get going. Before I left

Johnny pulled me aside and asked if I could give him “a loan.” That he could pay me

back when we got together to record the song. I said no. He asked when I was coming

back to the studio to record the song and I said I’d be back in three days. But I never

went back to the studio and we never recorded the song. Instead, I recorded a different

version of the song in another studio with lyrics I wrote that night – lyrics about seeing a

talented artist be dragged down by drugs.

* * *

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Unlike Johnny, Rawbar had avoided falling into the trap of drug addiction and

crime. He had remained involved in different projects of community activism and

recording collaborations with other artists. But in the intervening years he had also

struggled with public perception and stories that swirled around his (mis)fortunes. In

2013, when Ghetto Radio published an article on their website claiming that Rawbar

was seen selling peanuts at the Caltex matatu stage in Umoja, there was a small

firestorm of criticism from the hip-hop community. “Why the big diss of kalamashaka?”

tweeted prominent producer Tedd Josiah, who worked with the group in the late 90s,

producing their hit, “Tafsiri Hii”; “shameful mockery of historical youth who transformed

Kenyan music & media! Ghetto radio need to do right!” For his part, Rawbar responded

to the story on his public facebook page writing, “So I hear I’m selling peanuts in Umoja

these days. Umoja is my ‘hood. I was gonna say oh that isnt me, but then let them

amuse themselves.” Commenters on his post reassured him by quoting from a classic

Kalamashaka song “Wanabonga Tu” (They’re Just Chattering).

Whatever his personal ups and downs and trials his public image endured as he

made is way in the world after Kalamashaka, Rawbar had always been an ambassador

for his Eastlands home and a positive voice for young people in his community as well

as a personable and open host to me as we’d meet in the studios and streets of

Eastlands. Therefore it was difficult to watch him struggle to remember lyrics during the

“Mwisho wa Mwanzo” release party. I cringed internally each time he lost his way two

lines into his sixteen-line verse. I felt a visceral pain when he’d laugh sheepishly, drop

the microphone down to his side and just awkwardly bounce to the empty beat, waiting

for the chorus to come back and fill the void. He should have practiced more, rehearsed

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more, I remember thinking. The crowd was kind though. They cheered and clapped just

the same. But when I found him after the show to congratulate him and say goodbye, he

looked tired and deflated. He seemed disoriented. The comeback show had not gone as

he wanted it to go.

That Jamhuri Day weekend following the concert I listened to the Mwisho wa

Mwanzo mix tape several times, considering the legacy of Kalamashaka, what they

meant to hip-hop in Kenya and what their future held. I was coming to the end of my

fieldwork and preparing for a transition of my own. “Mwisho wa Mwanzo” seemed

poignant, a signpost inviting rumination on transition, on emergence and on time. The

End of the Beginning, they had proclaimed. But the end of the beginning of what?

In Chapter’s Two and Three of this dissertation I have tried to give some answers

to the question of what began with the birth of revolutionary hip-hop in Nairobi. I hope

that the work of the dissertation up to this point has shown that what arose with

revolutionary hip-hop in Nairobi was an aesthetic and an ethos concerned with giving

young Kenyans some sense of control over time. In Chapter Two I argued that Angalia

Saa (Watching Time) represents an attempt to draw on images from Kenya’s contested

past to interrupt, or immobilize the flow of time, which has forgotten Kenya’s Mau Mau

heroes. This song argues that youth of Kenya today are in a similar predicament to the

Mau Mau – they are marginalized (e.g. in a state of arrest) from the dominant flow of

history. But, it is precisely this relationship to time that they turn towards their

revolutionary cause. Their state of arrest, and the threat that these revolutionary minded

youth pose to temporal order (like the Mau Mau before them), is turned into a powerful

symbol in their revolutionary aesthetic.

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In Chapter 3 I showed that ten years before the 2007 video of Angalia Saa, the

release of Tafsiri Hii in 1997 was a key text in the formation of the revolutionary hip-hop

community in Nairobi. Tafsiri Hii, powerfully symbolic because of the resonance

translation had with language politics that went back for generations, marked a

beginning point critical to the sense of a shared revolutionary time for this imagined

community.

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CHAPTER 4 KAH’S VISION

The whole world united

Many days I’ve been waiting Travel widely and you will see

Amsterdam…New York

MC Kah, Roba, Raw Goddess All Over the World

Introduction

Chapter’s 2 and 3 examined how revolutionary hip-hop in Kenya generates a

sense of shared revolutionary time in relation to debates that are internal to Kenya and

Nairobi. Chapter 2 argued that revolutionary hip-hop artists in Nairobi enter into national

debates surrounding Mau Mau in order to criticize, and ultimately interrupt, the flow of

national history, which they argue has cast aside the Mau Mau (just as, in their view,

poor youth are presently discarded by Kenyan society). It is important to note that the

chorus of the song uses the Swahili verb –tupa (to throw something away), when

describing how the Mau Mau veterans have been treated. As will become clear in this

chapter the metaphor of being discarded or thrown in the trash, is a central theme in the

revolutionary hip-hop aesthetic. In the case of Angalia Saa, I argued that Mau Mau are

represented as being thrown out of a national history, and thus the temporal flow central

to Kenya as an imagined community. This engagement with the shared temporality of

the Kenyan nation discloses the importance that national identity – itself produced by a

sense of shared time (Anderson 1991) – holds on the imaginations of young Kenyan

hip-hop artists, as well as how they present themselves as being “thrown out” of

Kenya’s national time.

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Chapter 3 shows how the intellectual potency of translation, as deployed by

Kalamashaka in Tafsiri Hii, draws its force from its resonance with historical debates

within Kenya, as well as contemporary language politics related to class in Nairobi. I

argued that Tafsiri Hii represents a critical text in the historicization of revolutionary hip-

hop in Nairobi, and helps create a sense of shared time for members of that community.

The broader goal of these two chapters has been to demonstrate the importance of time

to the aesthetics and goals of revolutionary hip-hop. The evidence presented from hip-

hop songs and interviews with artists in these chapters shows that revolutionary hip-hop

gives a platform for youth to speak to and influence the flow of time, thereby creating an

imagined community based on a sense of shared revolutionary time.

In this chapter, I turn to the international imagined hip-hop community, how it is

envisioned by artists in Dandora, and what limitations it has. In pursuing these lines of

inquiry I present two forms of evidence to support my views on the limitations of a

shared global revolutionary hip-hop movement. The first is an analysis of a video and a

song called, All Over the World. Similar to Tafsiri Hii, this video draws on the theme of

linguistic difference and translation. It presents hip-hop as a powerful movement that

overcomes language-based divisions on a worldwide scale. In All Over the World hip-

hop is imagined as a kind of translation between diverse worlds, capable of achieving

commensuration between them. But, is such an ideal achievable in the actual

interactions between international members of the hip-hop community? If so, under

what circumstances and in what ways does translation become possible? And how do

the related notions of translation and commensurability relate to the revolutionary ethos

of Dandora hip-hop?

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These are central question in this chapter, but they also carry over into Chapters

5 and 6, which continue to look at the limits of achieving the revolutionary hip-hop ideals

that I described in the two preceding chapters. If the first two chapters and the first part

of the present one describe the work of building an imagined community based on a

shared revolutionary time, the final two and a half chapters demonstrate the limits of

such a project.

The second form of evidence I present in this chapter turns to ethnographic

description of my interactions with MC Kah. Kah, whose vision of a universal hip-hop

revolution is described in my analysis of his video, All Over the World, was a key

collaborator for me while conducting fieldwork. Our friendship spanned all of my trips to

Nairobi, and many days were spent with him in Dandora. By presenting details of Kah’s

life through the prism of my interactions with him, I hope to bring into focus his goals,

motivations, and ultimately his vision regarding the powerful revolutionary potential of

hip-hop. I also hope that by describing setbacks he faced and challenges to his vision,

will highlight the limitations of his revolutionary ideal.

Universalism and Global Hip-Hop

Revolutionary hip-hop, as seen from the vantage point of Dandora, is a global

movement, one that transcends national boundaries. Indeed, hip-hop in Dandora is in

many ways underwritten by collaborative projects bringing together people and

resources from around the world. These relationships are largely sustained through

practices of exchange and gift giving. Over the years a host of benefactors, primarily

from Europe, have come to Nairobi to participate in hip-hop workshops and various

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projects.1 These connections have directly impacted hip-hop in Dandora by promoting

local concerts, giving Dandaora hip-hop local and international press, and in some

cases publishing their music.2 The circulation and exchange of people, ideas and things

are critical to understanding the practice of hip-hop in Dandora, as well as the way hip-

hoppers come to see themselves as part of a larger global hip-hop community.

In his ethnography of Ghanaian hip-hop Shipley (2013) demonstrates that the

movement of people and ideas, which are part of hiplife’s sphere of cultural production,

transforms value in moral, linguistic, aesthetic and economic arenas (18). In Ghanaian

hiplife circulation is a central aspect for positioning artists “as agentive self-fashioning

subject[s] striving for individual success and mobility” (11). The epigraph to this chapter,

taken from the Dandora hip-hop song, All Over the World, references a similar

perceived value in mobility, e.g. “travel widely and you will see.” But the epigraph’s

allusion to Amsterdam and New York isn’t just an act of it’s authors’ imagination; it is a

direct reference to the home cities of the American and European collaborators who

helped make that song and video possible.3 The mobility of these visitors, e.g. the ability

to travel to Dandora from Amsterdam and New York to collaborate with local artists, is

part of the productive circulations that have helped make Dandora known as the “hip-

1 One example of a non-hip-hop related project is the “GHETTO Olympics,” which was held just after I left the country in 2012. For this project, MC Kah and his organization, MAONO, collaborated with about a dozen volunteers from Italy who had come to stay in Dandora. The goal was to hold a sporting event in Dandora, encouraging local youth to participate in any number of athletic events. Part of the festivities involved a hip-hop concert.

2 Aside from Kalamashaka’s album, “Ni Wakati,” the most prominent Dandora hip-hop albums – “Dandora Burning” and “Kilio Cha Haki” – were supported by resources garnered by the Dutch music impresario Nynke Nauta.

3 Rah Goddess is a hip-hop activist from New York City. She visited Dandora and was a collaborating artist on the track “All Over the World.” Nynke Nauta is from Amsterdam. She makes a cameo in the video.

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hop city”.4 International visitors such as these have variously donated time, money and

resources to promote Dandora hip-hop. In turn these international collaborations have

opened opportunities for hip-hoppers from Dandora to travel abroad under the aegis of

cultural institutions promoting the arts.

Translation is an apt metaphor in these international exchanges, which are

predicated on the hope of bringing together diverse people and cultural backgrounds

under the broad hip-hop umbrella.5 The ideal these hip-hop linkages promote is a global

hip-hop ecumene – a transnational affiliation sometimes referred to as a “hip-hop

nation” (cf. Comaroff and Comaroff 2000, pp.305). Similar to the world music festivals

described by Kapchan (2008), which create “transnational communities of affect”

through the promise of the ultimate translatability of sound, hip-hop is quite frequently

thought to be a community that transcends cultural and linguistic difference, while

offering hope of a united movement. The importance of the song Tafsiri Hii described in

Chapter Three was that it framed the birth of an imagined revolutionary hip-hop

community as an act of translation. Translation became a key metaphor in which the

Nairobi revolutionary hip-hop community imagines itself.

The work that translation did for the revolutionary hip-hop community in Nairobi

was to literally bring it into being in the imagination of its members. This idea of

translation as an act that unifies resonates with a concept that is often tied to 4 As far as I know, MC Kah and Zakah coined this phrase first in their song, Dandora L.O.V.E., where the chorus is: “Dandora L.O.V.E. inside the hip-hop city.” Translated from: “Dandora L.O.V.E. ndani ya hip-hop city.” It has since been used by many artists to describe Dandora. In 2015, former Dandora resident and member of the Mau Mau hip-hop fraternity, Juliani, also started an NGO in Dandora called “Dandora Hip-Hop City.” see: http://dandorahiphopcity.com/. Last accessed: 11/3/2017 at 2:20pm.

5 One example of translation being used as a central theme in these encounters is “Translating Hip-Hop” project sponsored by Goethe Institut and Haus Der Kulturen Der Welt in Berlin in 2014. This project included artist from Beirut, Bogota, Manila, Berlin and Nairobi. The artists from Nairobi were MC Kah and Nazizi.

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translation: reconciliation, or the commensuration of difference. Following insights from

Benjamin’s essay on translation, Derrida remarks, “translation promises a kingdom to

the reconciliation of languages” (200). Yet, as I demonstrate below, global hip-hop

projects conceived of as commensurating diverse worlds, highlight the difficulty in in

achieving this reconciliation. Therefore, international hip-hop collaborations highlight the

limits of translation, where difference is never completely overcome.

The Dandora hip-hop song, All Over the World, is an exemplary model of this

promise of reconciliation through hip-hop. In this song the New York based hip-hop

activist, Rah Goddess, who visited Dandora to collaborate on this project, makes the

following statements: “representing any nation/standing for our liberation…hip-hop’s

universal and we’re taking it all over the world.” What these lines promote is the idea of

a global hip-hop community that is universal. As Tsing (2005) argues, the deployment of

universalist discourse in the service of bringing together a diverse group of actors can

be a productive force, and not only a reductive one as anthropologists often assume of

universals. She points out that anthropologists and their cultural-relativist values tend to

hold deep skepticism towards universalist claims, but asserts that this is not helpful for

understanding the interconnections of global movements. Rather than dismissing

universalist claims she implores anthropologists to seek to understand them as a type of

knowledge that acts as a causeway connecting diverging interests

To turn to universals is to identify knowledge that moves – mobile and mobilizing – across localities and cultures. Whether it is seen as underlying or transcending cultural difference, the mission of the universal is to form bridges, roads, and channels of circulation. Knowledge gained from particular experience percolates into these channels, widening rather than interrupting them (7).

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Similar to discourses that Anna Tsing has identified as central to understanding

the global interconnectedness that entangle forces of capitalist expansion and resource

preservation in Indonesian rainforests, hip-hop is an intercultural phenomenon that

aspires to certain universals –freedom, knowledge, power, consciousness – to name a

few. By entering into a discourse centered on such universal ideals, hip-hoppers from

across a broad spectrum of difference share a certain terminology, and with it the

prospects of belonging to a community and a movement where barriers of difference

are transcended. But, as Tsing explains, there is often a “deep irony” in the use of such

universalist claims:

Universalism inspires expansion – for both the powerful and the powerless. Indeed, when those excluded from universal rights protest their exclusion, this protest itself has a twofold effect: It extends the reach of the forms of power they protest, even as it gives voice to their anger and hope (9).

Similarly, universalizing tropes common to global hip-hop communities often partake of

the same language and ethos of international development and human rights

campaigns. But at the same time, these schemes appear to perpetuate unbalanced

power relationships, seemingly undermining the very project that revolutionary hip-hop

aspires to.

“That Ghetto is Just a Hellhole”

One of the clearest examples of this is illustrated by the experience of the Dutch

manager Nynke Nauta who helped to make the album “Kilio Cha Haki” (A Cry for

Justice), and also made a cameo appearance in the video, All Over the World. With the

help of money from friends in Holland Nauta helped members of Kalamashaka and

Ukoo Flani Mau Mau produce their acclaimed album. “Kilio Cha Haki,” along with

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“Dandora Burning” are high quality hip-hop productions that stand out as the best

compilations that Dandora hip-hop has to offer. In that sense they represent a

successful international hip-hop collaboration. They are productions aimed at giving a

voice to youth from Dandora, so they might “Cry for Justice.”

But in an interview that Nauta gave for a 2014 newspaper article titled, “Troubles

that Caused Kalamashaka’s Downfall,” she laments the inability or unwillingness of the

artists she helped to transform their talent and passion into sustainable success. In a

portrayal that sounds familiar to many international aid or NGO workers who have come

to Africa to work on development projects, Nauta lays the blame on shoulders of the

artists themselves. In part, she blames substance abuse and the lack of practical skills

to implement their vision, for their downfall. But ultimately, she says she can sympathize

with their shortcomings because of the “hellhole” they grew up in:

The fall of K-Shaka is simple. Roba couldn’t stay off alcohol. He had lost it then and I hear he still hasn’t got it together…they did not have the ability to reflect. Roba was a visionary but totally impractical. He had great ideas but would not act on them. That ghetto is just a hellhole. It is very hard to be a sane person growing up in that place. So at the end of the day I understand them.”6

One day I was visiting with Roba in MC Kah’s community studio in Dandora and I

noticed that this article had been posted to the wall of the studio. Finding it strange that

an article that portrayed Kalamashaka and Roba so badly would be put on the wall

(instead of in the garbage), I asked Roba what he thought of the article. He was silent

as he appeared to search for a response before finally saying, “you know, people have

there own opinions, but not everyone knows the full story.”

6 http://www.sde.co.ke/thenairobian/article/2000114761/troubles-that-caused-kalamashakas-downfall?pageNo=2 (Accessed 3:35pm, 10-14-16)

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In this instance the ideal of the collaboration between a Dutch music impresario

and young rappers from Dandora was this: through resources she brought to Dandora,

Nauta enabled young and poor rappers to have a platform in which to represent their

neighborhood and their experience through their music. However, the reality is that this

ideal was undermined through the very power structures that enabled the collaboration

in the first place. Nauta, because of her access to money and media channels in Kenya

and in Holland, helped Dandora youth produce and circulate their poetic representations

of life in Dandora. The relative commercial success and critical acclaim of their

collaborative projects helped to cement Dandora as Kenya’s “hip-hop city” to an

international audience. However, this same access she had to the news media in

Kenya, also afforded Nauta the opportunity - years after she had a falling out with her

Dandora hip-hop collaborators - to (mis)represent Dandora as a “hellhole” in the

national press. Roba, lacking the same access to the newspaper that Nauta was given,

had no voice in this portrayal of himself and his neighborhood. He could only read the

comments by Nauta and reply, “not everyone knows the full story.”

These encounters happen frequently in the types of international collaborations

that the global hip-hop engenders, and they highlight the ultimate difficulty in the project

of commensurating social worlds. In his ethnography of contemporary popular music in

Dar es Salaam, Alex Perullo (2011) points out that the actual experience of musical

collaboration at a global level often belies the rhetoric of a singular unified global hip-

hop nation. Perullo describes a moment in 2001 when rappers from Holland and South

Africa visited Tanzania to work on a joint project of sharing and exchanging ideas (239-

240). Significant misunderstandings and frustrations arose during the encounter,

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leading to a somewhat tense meeting between the visitors and the Tanzanians. One of

the Dutch rappers, in a moment of candor, admitted that he found the lack of punctuality

and the general “slowness” of Tanzanian culture to be particularly irritating and believed

that it showed a lack of discipline, which ultimately destroyed the Tanzanian rappers’

chance to find success.

The conclusions that foreign visitors to Africa draw about the frustration and

ultimate failure of collaborative projects tend to follow a formula: it is the fault of either

individual Africans or the society that made them. There is very little room for self-

reflection or admitting that part of the blame may lie with the visitors who failed to adjust

their expectations to the African context. As Perullo’s example shows, the Dutch visitor

to Tanzania brought with him certain ideas about time and discipline that are cultural

products (e.g. Thompson 1965), but likely do not carry the same meaning in the

Tanzanian context. With regards to the example of the Dutch promoter, Nauta, and her

reflections on “the downfall of Kalamashaka,” it was simple to blame the “hellhole” they

grew up in, which she asserts prevents people from staying sane. There are certainly

many Dandora rappers who would say similar things about growing up where they did –

I heard these lamentations about “life in the ghetto” many times. But they were also just

as quick to stand up for Dandora and promote pride in their home.

Indeed, this is one of the key messages of MC Kah’s video, All Over the World.

The video clearly inverts the formula that sees the Dandora dumpsite as a “hellhole,”

and instead imagines it as a source of great value. The main theme of the video, which

will be described in further detail below, follows several young Dandorans as they

collect materials from the dump and build a large tower that eventually reaches into

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space. In building this tower from trash in the dump, Kah points out, they show how “the

stone that the builder refused will become the cornerstone.”7

The fact that this video, which characterizes Dandora as a place of great wealth

and not some kind of modern Gehenna, is at odds with Nauta’s 2014 reflections and her

description of Dandora as a “hellhole”. There is a similar disconnect in the way the video

imagines the youth of Dandora and the way Nauta describes them. In the video,

Dandora youth are shown to be ingenuitive, hard-working visionaries, capable of

transforming a mountain of trash into a great tower by the sweat of their labor. In

contrast, Nauta describes the people she worked with in Dandora in a rather

disparaging tone: “they did not have the ability to reflect,” “[were] totally impractical,” and

“had great ideas but would not act on them.” There is a very large irony, then, that not

only did Nauta help produce the song/video, “All Over the World,” but she actually

appears in the video as an international observer inspired by the work of youth in

Dandora, who have transformed trash into a worldwide symbol of unification.

Figure 4-1. Image from “All Over the World.” Pictured on the left is Dutch manager,

Nynke Nauta, gazing at the tower of trash erected in the Dandora dumpsite.

By discussing these experiences, in which international collaborators have

shared frustration with the results of the projects they have undertaken with African

7 This quotation is from the documentary Maono Ya Kah. Here Kah references the bible passage in Psalm 118:22.

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artists, I do not mean to be critical of either party. I know firsthand the sorts of

arguments these encounters almost inevitably produce. I relate these stories because

they speak to the issue of the complicated and often problematic nature of international

collaboration that Tsing writes about. In her term, the “friction” that is produced has a

“two-fold effect” (see quote above). Universalist discourse, when mobilized in

transnational activists organizations, both challenges power differentials and

perpetuates them. This dynamic is especially visible in the example of Nauta and her

work with Dandora rappers. She used the power she had to help give voice to these

artists, helping them produce an album and the song, All Over the World - a work, which

I show below, has the commensuration of different people around the globe at the

center of it. But the power differential between herself and her collaborators later

undermined this project of commensuration. She was afforded a “voice” in the national

news to speak about Dandora, and to define it as an inescapable “hellhole”, while the

same opportunity to speak for themselves was not given to the artists and residents of

Dandora.

At the end of the Nauta’s quotation on her experience working with Dandora

rappers, she claims, “at the end of the day I understand them.” This understanding is

based on her conclusion that Dandora is a “hellhole” and that it’s nearly impossible for

anyone to stay sane in such a place. Based on the aforementioned view of Dandora

portrayed in All Over the World, which imagines Dandora as place of great wealth and a

place where youth can come together to do great works, it is doubtful how much Nauta

really understands about her one-time collaborators from Dandora. There is clearly a

disconnect between how she understands Dandora and how revolutionary hip-hoppers

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like MC Kah and Roba portray their home. In this disconnect the reality of

incommensurabilty becomes visible. In this experience the promise of translation to

unite diverse worlds under the universalist notion of global hip-hop came to a sour

conclusion, marked more by misunderstanding than by mutual understanding.

Members of the hip-hop community engage in universalistic language as part of

participating in a global hip-hop community, but the meanings attached to these ideas

don’t “flow” evenly or unencumbered across social difference. This is an important

aspect in understanding the so-called “global” nature of hip-hop culture. Theorists of

globalization have long critiqued oversimplified discourses that see the spread of culture

as a homogenizing force. Instead, they have suggested that we look to understand the

“global flows” of people, things and ideas, whose movement across national boundaries

and diverse social “-scapes” – as Appadurai theorized – seem to be the hallmark of our

globalizing world. In scholarly discussions of globalization and its attendant language of

“global flows” many have posed important questions about the nature of cultural

circulation: “Does culture flow or is it moved along?” asks Povinelli (2001:ix). Larkin

(2013), in his essay of circulation and commensuration notes, “circulation is not an

automatic reflex but something that must be made to happen” (246). Boundary crossing

is an active, even forceful event. Images, ideas, people and objects do not flow across

boundaries unencumbered, but are pushed, pulled, even dragged across thresholds by

an active force. From this perspective, a more critical understanding of circulation may

pose the question as Povinelli does: “What forms are imposed on cultural texts as the

condition of their circulation across various types of social space?”

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Tsing’s argument for studying global interconnections prescribes an ethnographic

approach to answering this question. She promotes an ethnographic treatment that

focuses on the “sticky materiality of practical encounters” within the larger universalizing

rhetoric that attempts to transcend cultural distance and difference. By this she means

that ethnographers interested in understanding universalist notions that bring together

transnational groups are best served by focusing on the “friction” that occurs at the

ground level of such encounters. In this way, we may better view the limits of these

partnerships alongside their productive force, including the capacity for universalist

ideals to “form bridges, roads, and channels of circulation” between different groups.8

The brief descriptions of the conflict arising out of international hip-hop collaboration in

both Kenya and Tanzania, are beginnings to Tsing’s imperative that ethnographers

focus on the sticking points within these exchanges. Below I give ethnographic

narratives of my interactions with MC Kah, in order to describe the difficulties he

experienced while I was with him. Through such an approach, I hope to frame MC Kah’s

vision and experience as a window through which to view the potential and limits of

transnational hip-hop collaboration. These descriptions in combination with analysis of

the video he made in collaboration with Roba and Rah Goddess, lay out what I see as

“Kah’s Vision,” how it connects to the revolutionary potential of global hip-hop, and what

the “sticky materiality of practical encounters,” reveal about the limits of this project.9

8 See also Marisol De La Cadena’s work on the fraught encounters between cosmopolitan activists in Latin America and their interactions with Indigenous politics (Cadena 2010).

9 “Kah’s Vision” is also the title of a biographical film about MC Kah that was shot in Dandora during my fieldwork. The film’s title is itself a reference to Kah’s community organization, Maono, which translated into English means “vision.” This chapter discusses both the film’s portrayal of Kah’s life and work, as well

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All Over the World

MC Kah’s “All Over the World,” highlights what I argue is a central theme in

“Kah’s Vision” as well as the universalism within the discourse of global hip-hop. The

visual imagery of the video draws explicitly on the imagery of the biblical Tower of

Babel. The authors of the video show a “new tower of babel”10 being built by Dandora

rappers out of the trash that abuts their homes next to Nairobi’s municipal dumpsite in

Dandora. In this portrayal, the tower being constructed in Dandora is a metaphor for the

power of hip-hop to unite humankind. If the Tower of Babel represents humankind

divided by linguistic difference, then translation represents the promise of transcending

that difference and of commensurating different worlds.

Figure 4-2. Image from “All Over the World.” This image offers a parody of “National

Geographic” in the form of “National Ecographic,” which proclaims the construction of a “New Tower of Babel” on its cover.

Viewing the international exchanges that are at the center of hip-hop in Dandora

as acts of global translation – i.e. commensuration – opens up the question of power. If,

as his organization in Dandora. But in a broader sense this chapter seeks to discuss Kah’s vision in terms of his philosophy on art and activism, and the centrality of hip-hop to his life.

10 This phrase, “New Tower of Babel,” is explicitly written in the video. There is a short montage of fictional newspaper and magazine covers which feature “news” of the Dandora hip-hop movement and their tower. In one magazine, which is meant to look like National Geographic, but is in fact titled “National Ecographic” the cover features a photo of the tower of trash with the caption, “New Tower of Babel.”

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as it is often portrayed to be, hip-hop represents a global language in a world of many

languages, then who decides the vocabulary and who controls it’s meaning? Certainly,

hip-hop gives an opportunity for young Dandora artists to contest and redefine the

vocabulary that is often used in discussions about them. For example, as I discussed in

the Introduction to this dissertation, demographic concerns surrounding the large

population of unemployed Kenyan youth, especially in Nairobi, have made them a focus

of contemporary policy initiatives - whether state-sponsored or under the large umbrella

of international organizations. This is especially true with regards to young Kenyans

who are poor. A variety of representatives from these organizations commonly visit

Dandora, because of its reputation for youth unemployment, drugs and crime, combined

with the spectacular photo opportunity that the dumpsite affords. Some of these

organizations are more committed than others, but often locals perceive these visits as

little more than publicity stunts, which benefit the local community very little. Many

photographs have been taken of governmental representatives or international visitors,

standing atop a pile of trash in the dumpsite, surrounded by children in rags who live

and work in the dump.

For Dandora residents like MC Kah, these sorts of visits do nothing to help

Dandora. While Kah is genuinely happy to welcome visitors, he is well aware of the sort

of “poverty tourism” that exists when wealthier outsiders come to tour Dandora. In his

2012 song, Hip-Hop for Life, he alludes to this relationship in the line: “There are

NGO’s/ [they are] Poverty Joy-Riders/Outsiders milking profits from beggars/Hope for

the youth is in the arts…”11 This line from MC Kah speaks to the experience of young

11 Translated from the original Sheng: “Kule NGOs…Ma-joy rider wa poverty…ma-outsider wananyonya begger faidha. Hope ya vijana ni sanaa…

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hip-hoppers from Dandora, who having put their own hope in the arts, make use of

connections with NGOs and “outsiders,” who wish to lend support for arts-based

projects in Dandora. At the same time, they also realize that the circulations of ideas

and resources also highlight an imbalance in these relationships, which occur under the

aegis of a “global hip-hop” community.

All Over the World, which features MC Kah, Roba from Kalamashaka, and the

American hip-hop activist, Rah Goddess, intends to transcend the unequal reciprocal

relationships that frequently occur between the residents of Dandora and NGO workers

from outside. As opposed to the “poverty joy riders,” whose ostensibly charitable

engagements in Dandora are essentially exploitative, Rah Goddess represents the

potential of an equitable exchange under the aegis of a unified global hip-hop

movement. Her presence in the song and the video for “All Over the World” is part of the

vision of commensuration through travel. However, her words and the visual symbolism

used in the video reveal the power dynamic that cannot be escaped when she as an

American chooses to visit Dandora as part of a global hip-hop exchange.

When she is introduced in the film, she begins to rap in front of a small plane.

The plane symbolizes her mobility and the access she has to air travel, an unthinkable

mode of transportation for the majority of Dandora residents. As an American citizen,

Rah Goddess was able to travel to Kenya by jet to work with her hip-hop counterparts in

Dandora. Procuring a visa to Kenya was no obstacle to her because she holds an

American passport. Tourist visas may be bought when landing at the airport for $50. In

the song, she alludes to the ease with which she is able to move through the world in

pursuit of global hip-hop connections: “from NYC to Dandora, I be soaring with the

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eagle fully legal with my eye on the sparrow.” Here she reinforces her privilege to travel

“fully legal” and positions herself as an eagle, which could be interpreted as a sign of

her nationality, but is also clearly linked by her mention of the sparrow to the old gospel

hymn, “His Eye is On the Sparrow.”12 Later in the song she raps, “got laptop, will

travel/international peoples delegation/representing any nation.” Here she alludes once

again to her power to travel. She has a laptop and a willingness to go anywhere, and

that’s all she needs. It would be hard to imagine this statement coming from the mouth

of a rapper from Dandora. He or she would likely not own a laptop, and would have to

go to considerable effort and cost to travel to, say, New York. And even after expending

that effort and straining financial resources, a visa could be denied at the whim of an

officer at the embassy.13

The possibility of this international collaboration hinges on Rah Goddess’s ability

to get on a plane and fly to Nairobi (legally). But the movement is only in one direction;

rappers from Dandora, for the most part, can only dream of hopping on a plane to New

York City. The limitations of their mobility, due to lack of funds and tougher visa

requirements for visiting the United States, highlight the fact global hip-hop circulations

do not happen equally, but are part of systems of power and access that more wealthy

and privileged hip-hop artists enjoy. The image of Rah Goddess in front of a plane in the

video All Over the World is an apt symbol for this disparity, and contrasts sharply with

the images of the dumpsite, which make up most of the video.

12 Written by lyricist Civilla D. Martin and composer Charles H. Gabriel in 1905. The song has been covered many times, including by Whitney Houston and Lauryn Hill.

13 Jesse Weaver-Shipley recounts an experience in his book “Living the Hip Life” where well-known Ghanaian musician, Reggie Rockstone, was surprisingly denied entry into the USA at the last minute, despite being a headline act for an American concert.

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Figure 4-3. Rah Goddess in front of plane in All Over the World.

“The Nairobi Sewer”

Like Rah Goddess, I was able to use my citizenship and access to financial

resources to travel to Kenya, and eventually Dandora, to participate in the hip-hop

community there. I learned of Dandora and the hip-hop community from seeing their

music videos on the Internet, and reading press and academic articles on their work.

MC Kah was my first contact from the Dandora Mau Mau collective and the first person

to take me to Dandora. I had received Kah’s number from an Italian filmmaker in Nairobi

who had worked with Kah and insisted that if I wanted to visit Dandora or learn about

the rap group Ukoo Flani Mau Mau, I should contact Kah because he was “very

dependable.” By this the Italian meant that Kah would answer his phone, keep his

appointments, and not try to take advantage of me because I’m a foreigner. The

filmmaker correctly assumed that these would be appealing traits to me as I pursued

fieldwork relationships to support my nascent research project.

Indeed, these characteristics, along with his visibility as a popular hip-hop artist

and CEO of the Maono have led many other foreign visitors to seek out Kah when they

wanted to come to Dandora.14 In this role, MC Kah has been somewhat of an

ambassador for Dandora hip-hop and a critical linkage between youth in his community

14 Several scholars have relied on Kah as a spokesperson for hip-hop in Dandora, e.g. Mwenda Ntarangwi (2009), Mbugua wa Mungai (2008), not to mention journalists, activists and community organizers that have reached out to Kah when coming to Dandora.

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and visitors from other parts of the city and, very frequently, from all over the world.

When I met MC Kah in person, I had already seen several of his hip-hop videos, and

therefore, formed an impression of him from these videographic representations. The

first thing I remember noticing about Kah was his height. Like many Kikuyu men he has

a small, compact stature, and stands a half-foot shorter than me. Because of the

framing of artists in most Kenyan hip-hop videos, which tend to make them the

centerpiece of most shots, I was nearly always surprised to find that “in real life” rappers

were smaller than I expected.

When we first met, Kah was waiting for me at a matatu stage called “mosque”

just a short walk from my home in the Eastlands estate of Umoja. A green and white

minaret rising over the dirt yard of a local madrassa marked the place where we were to

meet. It was a bright and dusty June morning in Umoja, as I made my way to meet Kah.

Other than being smaller than I expected Kah was easily recognizable standing under

the minaret. He wore his thick dreadlocks tied at the back of his head, the longest locks

falling almost to his waist. The dark t-shirt he wore showed a slight belly, not fat, but not

the slender young man I remembered from his videos. Unlike some Kikuyu who are

known to have a light, almost caramel skin tone, Kah’s complexion is several shades

darker. His round face, distinctively arched eyebrows, and wide set eyes above a small

nose were also familiar to me from his videos.

We stood there at the Mosque waiting for our matatu. The dust kicked up by

passing vehicles crunched in my teeth and the late-morning sun caused me to squint as

I tried to make my introduction in faltering Swahili. Soon a yellow and green Number 17

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from Kayole came rumbling down the pitted street, music blasting.15 After looking at the

vehicle to make sure it wasn’t overly crowded, Kah ushered me on and directed me to

two open seats in the back. As we bumped our way through the crowded, dusty

Eastlands traffic, clouds of black exhaust and acrid smoke from roadside garbage fires

wafted into the vehicle as we sat scrunched together in the vehicle’s small seats. The

earsplittingly loud sound system played Jamaican dancehall music several decibels

above blaring. I strained my voice while leaning in uncomfortably close to be heard,

hoping to make a good first impression and explain who I was and why I wanted to visit

Dandora. Just a short ride later and we had reached the edge of Dandora.

The Nairobi River marks the western border of the Dandora estate. The bridge

that spans the diminutive waterway is therefore at the threshold of the large Eastlands

estate. I passed over that bridge many times coming and going from Dandora and still

remember the scene vividly. The vantage point from the bridge offers a break in the

dense urban scenery. The river crossing momentarily opens a new line of sight.

Emerging from one bank and disappearing into the other, a bare sewer pipe sits

precariously above the water. The exposed pipe is covered in debris: branches, rushes,

and plastic bags, which flowed down the swollen river during the rainy season, were

deposited around the rusting pipe when the water receded.

The combination of excitement and nervousness I felt going over the bridge and

entering Dandora caused me to ask what may have seemed like an ignorant question to

Kah. As we passed over the bridge I asked Kah what river we were presently crossing.

“That’s the Nairobi River,” he said, pausing momentarily before adding, “but it’s also

15 The fleet used for the Number 17 route from Kayole is owned by a cooperative called “Forward Travellers,” and all their vehicles are painted a combination of green and yellow.

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called the ‘Nairobi sewer’.” A foul odor came up from the trench below as if to

emphasize his point. Indeed, the smells of Dandora are potent and do not escape the

notice of rappers who frequently allude to them. I remember a conversation with Kah

about the lyrics of the Dandora artist Kitu Sewer (Sewer Thing), a lyricist we both

admired. Kah recalled a memorable line that Sewer has in one of his songs describing

Dandora as soaked in urine. Kah, in the song All Over the World, which is set in the

Dandora dumpsite also alludes to the bad smell of the dump, but turns it into a positive

when he raps, “You all know the war of revolution must have a stench/But I’m watching

the youth and they will smell the aroma of peace.”16 Here, Kah alludes to the smell of

the dump, but describes it as a necessary “stench” that comes with the “war of

revolution.” He then adds that he is watching the youth and their works, represented in

the video by the building of the tower of trash, and he knows that the stench of the

dump will become an “aroma of peace” because of their endeavors.

Poetic descriptions of bodily fluids, excrement, or waste are drawn on by poets

like Kitu Sewer in portraying their city and their home of Dandora. Saying, “I come from

the sewer,” as several Dandora hip-hop artists have introduced themselves in their

songs, is part of a moral commentary similar to the one identified in Ghanaian hiplife by

Shipley (2009), where “the authenticity of bodily presentation is aligned with public

morality” (636). In the Chapter 3, I quoted part of Zakah’s song, Mizani, in which he

poses the question: “what will you do if you are caught shitting in public?” The answer

provided in the song was that if Ukoo Flani Mau Mau is involved, there’s no need to

worry. Statements like these, which resemble the aesthetic of the grotesque famously

16 Translated from the Sheng: “Mnajua vita ya revolution inanuka/Natazama vijana wanakazana kunusa aroma ya peace.”

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described by Bakhtin (1984) in his work on the Rabelaisian novel, are most times met

by Kenyan hip-hop listeners with a chuckle.17

Figure 4-4. (Left) MC Kah rapping in “All Over the World.” (Right) an image of the tower

of trash being built in the Dandora dump. These images are portrayed here as they are in the video (the image on the left immediately precedes the image on the right). The text is provided to show the words Kah is rapping in sync with the images that are being displayed in the video.

When I asked Zakah about his description of the perils of being caught “shitting

in public,” for example, he just laughed without giving me the deeper analytical insight I

was hoping for. Similarly, Kah’s description of the Nairobi River as the “Nairobi Sewer”

was a joke, meant to find humor in one of the more vulgar experiences of life in

Dandora: the open sewer.

In their own work on the aesthetics of the sewer in Victorian literature, Stallybrass

and White (1986) demonstrate how Victorian social reformers, politicians, poets and

writers, all helped to produce an urban “other” which was critical to “the construction of

the urban geography of the bourgeois Imaginary” (126). In this literature, write

Stallybrass and White, “the slum, the laboring poor, the prostitute, the sewer, were

17 The work of Bakhtin clearly identifies images of the grotesque in the Rabelaisian novel as humorous, linking them to the “laughter of the masses.” In this chapter, I do not provide a deeper analysis of the relationship between humor and the grotesque, other than mentioning it in the context of my broader argument about the symbolism of the dumpsite as a critical aspect of the Kah’s video, “All Over the World.” However, the relationship between the aesthetics of the grotesque in Kenyan hip-hop and larger societal debates is an interesting topic to which I hope to return at a later date. This topic has been discussed by Shipley (2009), who also centers it within a larger body of literature: “Links between humor, vulgarity, eating, and excess in postcolonial African politics have been well demonstrated (Mbembe 2001, Geschiere 1997, Bayart 1993, Elias 1978, Bakhtin 1986)” (638).

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recreated for the bourgeois study and the drawing room as much as for the urban

council chamber” (125).18 For Stallybrass and White, the sewer and the slum were key

aesthetic features in which the Victorian Bourgeois class (re)imagined social divisions

and the transgression of social boundaries in the 19th century city. Drawing on Marx’s

Eighteenth Brumaire, which portrays the lumpenproletariat as those who are marginal to

production, Stallybrass and White, point out that in the Victorian literature on the 19th

century city, while “marginal in terms of production, the lumpenproletariat are yet central

to the [Victorian Bourgeois] ‘Imaginary’, the object of disgust and fascination” (129).

The work of Stallybrass and White, and the connection they establish with Marx’s

theory of the lumpen, are useful to the analysis of All Over the World that I give here.

However, my analysis differs substantially from theirs. Stallybrass and White

demonstrate how the Bourgeois class created an “other” in their writings on the city, the

slum, the sewer, etc. By contrast, I am concerned with how Dandora hip-hop artists

themselves identify with the slum and the sewer, and in the case of All Over the World,

the dumpsite, in order to position themselves as revolutionary actors. I have already

mentioned that Kah describes the theme of the video by invoking the biblical parable of

the stone that the builder refused. In this metaphor, and in the video for All Over the

World, Kah draws a powerful lesson about the revolutionary power of the

marginalized.19

18 For work on how the Bourgeois colonial imagination, and ideas about order, morality, and cleanliness, impacted the structuring of Nairobi throughout the colonial period, see Luise White (1990). Although he doesn’t engage the work of Stallybrass and White directly, Shipley (2009) has a similar interest in looking at how contemporary signs of the grotesque are used to imagine a moral urban topography.

19 The notion of Dandora and the dumpsite as a place where the discarded of society produce value was also described in a 2015 Facebook post by a Dandora rapper named MC Farakan. He posted an image of the mountains of trash located in Dandora with the words, “the place you’ve discarded this trash is the

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In Chapter 2’s analysis of Angalia Saa I argued that youth from Dandora

represented themselves, like their Mau Mau heroes, as left out of the national flow of

time. Their position as subjects outside of that dominant temporal framework – i.e. in a

state of temporal arrest with relation to the Kenyan nation – is the very symbolism they

draw on to set themselves apart as revolutionaries. In my interpretation of Angalia Saa

the revolutionary aspect of the song draws on the possibility that these youth could

threaten, or immobilize, the flow of national time through their hip-hop and use of

images from Kenya’s contested past. The main character of the film closely resembles

Ngugi wa Thiongo’s fictional character, Matigari. As the Kenyan literary scholar, Simon

Gikandi (1991), points out, Matigari is a Kikuyu word that refers to “leftovers of food or

dregs in drinks” (161), but in Kenyan political discourse Matigari came to be a name for

Mau Mau who had survived the war. In postcolonial Kenya these Mau Mau were

conceived of as the “leftovers” of the revolution – a conceptualization that strongly

resonates with Marx’s idea of the lumpen. Remembering this context from Chapter 2 is

critical to this analysis of All Over the World, which sees revolutionary potential in the

“leftovers” of the dumpsite.

Kathleen Millar (2012), who has conducted extensive ethnographic research in

the Jardim Gramacho dump site outside of Rio de Janeiro, argues that the dump is a

location where global connections are visible, even if not always acknowledged from

outside perspectives of the waste site: “It is not only the case that Jardim Gramacho is

connected to the world beyond its borders, but its connections were often forged

through the medium of waste” (182) Critiquing the notion of marginality as it is used in

same place I’ve picked up this talent.” The original post in Sheng read: “Place mlitupa hii takataka ndio niliokota hii talent.”

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present and past studies of urban poverty, Millar seeks to challenge the “tacit

associations of garbage and marginality,” in the literature. She argues that this

scholarship “suggests that today’s urban poor are excluded economically, politically and

socially” and are therefore “superfluous to the global capitalist economy (168). On the

contrary, she demonstrates in her research that workers of the dumpsite are very much

a part of the global economy. This became clear as news of the 2008 economic crisis in

the United States reached Brazil and her informants immediately realized the impact the

crisis would have on their local economy. Going even further, Millar suggests that

scholars should seek to disrupt the common negative association with garbage and

marginalization with a more positive one:

Waste became productive of social relations, both relations of inequality [and] relations of belonging and solidarity. These ties ultimately point us toward a reconceptualization of waste as not only decay, death and loss, but also as raw material, potential and possibility (182)

Indeed, Millar’s argument that the dumpsite be recast as a site of belonging, as

opposed to exclusion, as a place of potential rather than decay, resonates deeply with

the theme of All Over the World, which takes the dump to be a place of community and

global connection.20

Here, it should be pointed out that unlike the dumpsite workers that Millar

interviews, hip-hoppers from Dandora are not part of the dumpsite economy. They do

not make a living from the dump, but rather draw on it as a metaphor for global

connection between Dandora youth and the rest of the world, as well as for their own

revolutionary potential. The use of the dumpsite as a metaphor for the power of the

unassimilated or marginalized can be drawn out in two different senses. In one sense,

20 Also see Derek Pardue’s (2008) book on hip-hop and marginalization in Brazil.

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the trash that fills the dump resonates with theories of order, dirt, and pollution identified

by Mary Douglass (1966). Dandora is the collecting place for discarded objects or

pieces of objects that have circulated across different thresholds and been left as waste.

The huge municipal dumpsite in Dandora represents for most people an undifferentiated

mass of dirt. The refuse that has been brought to the landfill has reached its final state,

apparently without identity or value (Douglass 1966; Kopytoff 1986). Yet, for

revolutionary artists like Kah, the dumpsite is a metaphor for the power inherent in

discarded and marginalized. The video for All Over the World makes this connection

explicit. The mountainous stench-ridden material that has been banished to the

Dandora dump, becomes in All Over the World, the literal building materials for a tower

that unites all people and all languages of the world.

In another sense the dumpsite and its connection to hip-hop youth from Dandora

resonates with Marx’s theory of the lumpen. The video links the power of trash to the

power of youth and hip-hop. When Kah describes the stench that accompanies the war

of revolution, but then notes that the work of the youth will lead to a sweet aroma of

peace, he is referencing this potential for the marginalized youth of Dandora to cause

revolutionary change. As the building of the tower of trash continues throughout the

whole video, the structure reaches higher and higher into the sky. Eventually it becomes

so tall that people from all over the world see and comment upon this extraordinary

pillar. The video emphasizes that wonder over this tower cuts across linguistic divisions,

showing newscasts and newspapers featuring Chinese, Spanish, Arabic, and Russian

text. In Chapter 3 I showed how Wenyeji used a fictional newspaper called “Daily

Mapupa” as part of the work of imagining a Kenyan revolutionary hip-hop program. In

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All Over the World this theme is repeated, only on a global scale. Imagining newsprint in

multiple languages, all describing the work of youth in the Dandora dumpsite and their

tower, broadens the imagined community to the whole world. As many people in many

locations, using many languages, read the news and see the tower, they are drawn into

the temporality that revolutionary hip-hop imagines.

Figure 4-5. Newscasts in video “All Over the World.”

Figure 4-6. Newspapers in video “All Over the World.”

Translation and the Remainder

The song Tafsiri Hii used translation to comment upon connection and difference.

In effect, when Kalamasha rapped “Translate This,” they were calling upon others to

“understand” them and their experience. By rapping in Sheng they were acknowledging

their difference from the rest of the rap world, e.g. everything outside of Sheng speaking

Eastlands, but they were also putting the onus on those who don’t understand them to

do the work of translation, rather than the other way around. In doing this, they drew on

an existing sentiment regarding language politics in Nairobi, and the fact that poor youth

from Eastlands strongly identified with Sheng, as opposed to English, or “proper

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Swahili.” Translation, therefore, was used as a metaphor which brought a community of

revolutionary hip-hoppers into being, and at the same time, drew a boundary around

that community, distinguishing it from other hip-hops, whether English rap associated

with uptown Nairobi, or English rap from the United States.

As shown above, All Over the World extends the metaphorical power of

translation. While the song doesn’t explicitly speak of translation, the video imagines far

corners of the world uniting around the tower of trash – the “new tower of Babel.” In this

tower of trash, therefore, commensuration is acted out on a global scale through the

work of revolutionary youth in Dandora. However, although translation seems to enable

commensuration, offering the promise of reconciliation that Derrida describes, there are

limits to what meaning can pass from system to another.21 Another way of putting it is to

say that whenever translation happens from one language to another, there is always a

remainder; some aspects of the original content that don’t quite fit the new language

and are left unincorporated in the new language. This happens because translation

requires breaking down the system of meaning as it existed in one language and then

imposing a new order on it in the form of a second language.

Anytime such a breakdown and reassembly of an ordered system occurs there is

a production of waste. As Mary Douglas wrote about the creation of dirt, “Dirt was

created by the differentiating activity of mind, it was a by-product of the creation of

order” (161). Similarly, argued Marx, when a given political order breaks down and is

reconstituted during a revolutionary period there are unassimilated pieces. This concept

21 In making this point in his essay on Translation, Benjamin describes the relationship between language and content in the original language as “like a fruit and its skin,” while “the language of translation envelops its content like a royal robe with ample folds” (75).

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informed Marx’s theory of the lumpen, which were the byproducts of the revolutionary

reordering of society. For Marx the lumpen were those elements of society that could

not be incorporated into the new political order after the revolution. The video for All

Over the World imagines a world where the unincorporated or marginalized youth, like

the refuse they build their tower with, become agents of a global commensuration. By

extending their movement to a global scale they transcend linguistic difference (as seen

in the multiple news images images above). Hip-hop has helped youth in Dandora build

a structure that unites the world. This is the central theme of the video, and also central

to MC Kah’s vision of the transformative power of hip-hop.

Kah’s Vision

Bridges, in their most fundamental definition, make circulation possible across

thresholds. Crossing the Dandora bridge, as I did with MC Kah on our first ride together,

marked the moment that we crossed into his home of Dandora. But it also gave me the

sense that we were crossing an interpersonal boundary. As we entered into Kah’s

Dandora world, the first thing I did was ask him to clarify a topographical feature of his

landscape - a casual ethnographic inquiry into my new informant’s sense of place (cf.

Basso 1996; Feld and Basso 1996). Kah could have simply named the river as I

requested, but by adding the grimly humorous appellation, “Nairobi Sewer,” he invited

me to learn something deeper about his place. He opened up to me a locally produced

discourse about waste and filth in his neighborhood. It was a moment in which we

began to make commensuration happen.

Just past the edge of the bridge there’s a small junkyard on the side of the road.

Stripped out shells of cars are heaped on the sloping bank, partially taken over by tall

green grasses. Dandora, location of Nairobi’s municipal dumpsite, is the final resting

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place for much of capital city’s refuse. The dump has called Dandora home since 1975

and despite having reached capacity in 2001 and mounting concerns over its

environmental impact and calls to move it, there is yet to be any plan to move it. Kah

and I skirt the southeastern edge of the dumpsite. Peering out the window of the matatu

I catch my first glimpse of the dump: young boys in soiled clothing with bulging sacks on

their backs pick through the trash. It is their lot to toil in the sun day after day, gleaning

from the mountains of trash enough scraps to live. A man holding a thin stick watches

over several goats picking through the rubbish. Nearby, several pigs have their heads

buried in a heap of rotting produce. Blackish smoke from a fire billows into the sky and

fumes waft a startling odor momentarily into our vehicle. I try to describe my research

interests and what specifically drew me to Dandora. Kah listens attentively, but his

responses are barely audible.

Kah is soft-spoken and deliberate when he speaks. I’m not sure if I ever heard

him laugh, yet he has a sharp sense of humor, and always enjoys wry observations or

joking word play. Once, while we were eating lunch together in a small local restaurant,

Kah ordered the typical Kenyan fare of collared greens, beef stew, and Ugali (corn

meal). After ordering the Ugali, Kah turned to me and muttered, “Erik, we’ve got to

Ugalize it.” Another time while eating lunch I ravenously finished my chapatti and beans

before anyone else at the table was even halfway through. Looking up from my plate

and feeling sheepish about how anti-social my eating had been, I attempted to make a

joke while acknowledging my hasty eating. I shouted to everyone at the table, “I win! I

finished first!” During the next meal we ate together, Kah made sure to finish his meal

quickly so he could turn to me with a grin, and say, “I win this time.”

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Kah’s sense of humor, his easygoing personality and pragmatic approach were

not what I had expected. Mostly this was because of the two dimensional idea I formed

of Kah through videos I had seen or even some scholarly portrayals I had read.22 But

Kah’s more gentle qualities are part of what makes him an effective intermediary

between outside visitors and the world of Dandora hip-hop. If hip-hop in Dandora is

produced through the circulations of people and resources through the community, it is

people like Kah who enable these flows to happen. Yet, as I learned more about the

varied collaborative hip-hop projects undertaken between local residents and outside

visitors to Dandora it became clear how often the friction of these encounters heats up

causing projects to collapse in misunderstanding and hurt feelings on all sides.

Conclusion

My first visit to Dandora with Kah was just one of many rides we shared through

Nairobi and beyond. It was during these moments of mobility, whether we were walking,

in a matatu, private taxi, or personal vehicle, that I got to know Kah and his vision. In

one of the most memorable instances of our shared time together, he invited me to

make the six-hour matatu ride from Nairobi to Arusha, Tanzania. During this overnight

trip we visited a large compound outside of Arusha owned by two expatriate United

States citizens, Pete and Charlotte O’Neal. Mzee Pete and Mama Charlotte, as they

were known locally, were members of the Black Panther Party in the 1960s. When Pete

22 For example, in recounting his 2005 meeting with MC Kah in Dandora, Kenyan scholar Mbugua wa Mungai refers to Kah as “the most passionately militant among the performers at Mau Mau camp” (2008). I had also misunderstood of the use of militaristic symbolism in the hip-hop videos of revolutionary artists from Mau Mau camp in Dandora (see Chapter 1), assuming violence was a central premise in their ideas of revolution. I’m not the only visitor who failed to go beyond surface symbolism and look more deeply into the content. Kah once told me of an international reporter who came to one of his shows and afterwards asked why he and other members of Ukoo Flani Mau Mau advocated violence. In telling me this, Kah, in a somewhat exasperated voice said, “it’s like, did you even just hear anything we said!”

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was arrested in 1969 under a two-week old law against carrying a firearm across state

borders, he fled to Algeria and then to Tanzania, where he has lived with Charlotte in

exile ever since. Their compound is the home to the United African Alliance Community

Center, which is an arts-based community project focused on healing in their

community. It is also a place where several revolutionary hip-hoppers from Nairobi

mentioned in this dissertation, including Kah, Kama, and Blak, have lived or visited for

various amounts of time. For Kah, Kama, and Blak, their relationship to Mzee Pete and

Mama Charlotte, are yet another international connection they have made through

revolutionary hip-hop, and a long-lasting friendship/collaboration that reinforces the

vision they share of the potential of revolutionary hip-hop to commensurate diverse

worlds.

Born of such experiences and alliances, Kah’s MAONO (Vision) project in

Dandora worked to establish a similar connection between the arts, international

collaboration, and community assistance for Dandora’s youth. Believing in giving young

people the same chances for creative outlets that he had through hip-hop and his other

passion, acrobatics, Kah started MAONO in 1999. The organization offered

neighborhood youth training in acrobatics, soccer, drama, and music. Over the years,

some of these activities have proved more stable than others, their viability depending

on funding and the dedication of individual community members’ willingness to show up

and take a leadership role in the activity. Overall, the work Kah did with MAONO was

important to him and to many young Dandorans. The soccer team, managed by a

committed young man named Odipo, found success in national competitions and also

found sponsorship to travel to Europe and play in some international tournaments there.

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The acrobatic troupe formed at MAONO similarly led to performances in Kenya and

abroad, which generated some income for the participants and, in some cases, led to

opportunities for youth to make connections that helped fund their education. These are

all noteworthy successes that MAONO and MC Kah can be proud of.

However, towards the end of my fieldwork I paid a final visit to Kah at his

Swedish girlfriend’s uptown apartment, and he seemed somewhat discouraged about

MAONO. He described MAONO as an organization that he wished to start, but not stay

in charge of long term:

When I started MAONO I wanted to run it for six months and then I pass it off to somebody else. But it was always something, always something that comes, every time it comes! So it’s been like that. It’s like, I do music 10% of my life and yet I call myself a musician, ya know? (Laughter) It doesn’t make sense! It should be the opposite – 90% music, 10% other things!

At the time of our meeting in December 2014, Kah had been the CEO of MAONO for

fifteen years. The fact that he had to stay in charge for fifteen years so MAONO could

keep its doors open, was obviously frustrating to Kah, as his vision was ultimately to

have the youth he worked with take ownership of the project. This never really

happened and in 2014, Kah made the decision to leave Dandora to live in Sweden with

his girlfriend. He knew that without him there to oversee the daily operations, MAONO

would close its doors. Indeed, the hip-hop studio at MAONO, where I had spent so

many days during my fieldwork, had already closed its doors. This, I believe, was the

bitterest disappointment to Kah, because of the way it was closed. In the Chapter 5, I

describe in detail my relationship with the producer employed by Kah to run the

MAONO studio, but here I bring him up to show how his betrayal effectively ended the

MAONO studio in Dandora.

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He called himself General Chizee, and was a local rapper and producer who had

grown up in Dandora. Kah had enlisted him to be the producer and manager of the

studio. He was with me when three machete-wielding thieves robbed me on our way to

a hip-hop concert. After the robbery, I was furious with him for running away and not

coming back to help as I dealt with the thieves on my own. My resentment and fear of

going back to Dandora lest I get robbed again, led me to stay away from the studio for

several weeks. Then one day I ran into some Dandora rappers from the studio at a

concert in Kariobangi South. I asked how everything was going at the MAONO studio.

They told me, first off, that they had heard about the robbery and told me that what

Chizee had done in running away “was a very bad thing.” Then they told me that a

couple days after the robbery, Chizee had disappeared from the studio and from

Dandora, taking with him several hundred dollars worth of recording equipment. Without

this necessary hardware, and without a producer in the studio, the MAONO studio was

forced to close its doors.

The equipment that Chizee stole from the studio was purchased with a

combination of money and donations Kah had earned while participating in an

international collaborative hip-hop project called, “Translating Hip-Hop”. This project

was funded by German cultural institutions, the House of World Cultures and the

Goethe-Institut, and brought hip-hop artists from around the world to Berlin to discuss

global hip-hop and the work of translation. This project was conceived from similar ideas

to those discussed in this chapter. It draws on the universalist idea of a global hip-hop

community and movement, which is articulated in the video, All Over the World. And it

also frames the commensuration of different world hip-hops as an act of translation.

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Indeed, for Kah, “Translating Hip-Hop” was a productive trip, where his travel to Europe

opened new connections and provided much needed resources for realizing his vision

of starting a community hip-hop studio at MAONO in Dandora. As he told me on the day

we met in his girlfriend’s uptown apartment:

Now the studio, I went to Berlin and I got some money and I came and bought some equipment. We bought a sound system and we bought the studio equipment and then we built the place. So that’s how it came to be, during the first time I went to Berlin with the Translating Hip Hop project.

Here the “Translating Hip-Hop Project” was an important event in Kah’s life, because it

enabled him to raise money to open the studio at MAONO. This represents the promise

of translation that I discussed at the beginning of this chapter. It was through hip-hop

and the opportunity to travel abroad under the aegis of “translation” that Kah made a

most important step in realizing his vision.

However, as Tsing points out, ethnographers must pay attention to the “sticky

materiality of practical encounters,” that reveal the friction produced in these

international collaborations. In briefly describing Chizee’s theft of the studio equipment, I

demonstrate one example of this principle at work. Earlier in the chapter, I provided

another description of the limits of commensuration by relating the story of the Dutch

manager, Nynke Nauta, and her falling out with Kalamashaka. What these examples

demonstrate is the material realities that belie the lofty rhetoric of a global unified hip-

hop revolution. They point out where this universal project discovers the limitations of

mutual understanding, of translation, and of commensuration.

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CHAPTER 5 NAIROBBERY

“This goes out to all the hustlers in Nairobi

And every ghetto in the world.” – General Chizee

Interlude: Night Session

We were standing on the roof looking out over the dark savannah where just

days before several Maasai had hunted down and killed three lions for eating one of

their cows. A newer bedroom community to Nairobi, Kitengela borders both the bustling

urban life of Nairobi and nearby rural areas, where Maasai continue to practice

pastoralism and kill lions when their herds are threatened. In the distance we could see

the orange glow of nocturnal Nairobi, as we watched planes descend over the Nairobi

National Park into the busy Jomo Kenyatta Airport. In Kitengela we were far enough

from the city and its light pollution to have a full view of the brilliant starry sky. It was

June, the cool season in Kenya, and I was in a T-shirt enjoying the refreshingly crisp

night air and the chance to get out of the studio, which had become cramped and

smelled of sweaty men. Standing next to me, Blak was dressed in a camouflage combat

jacket, smoking a loose cigarette he had purchased for a few shillings on the street

below. “Do you think we should go look for them?” asked Blak. A pause followed before

I replied, “mmm, I don’t know. What do you think?” Another long pause as our resolve

melted in the air and we continued peering out into the dark Kitengela night.

We were in the middle of recording a song called Night Session, which featured

myself, Blak, MC Mutant and Kitu Sewer. But we hadn’t seen or heard from Kitu Sewer

in hours. Almost immediately after he arrived, Sewer had disappeared from the studio.

Sewer is one of the most celebrated lyricists to come out of Dandora. He and Johnny

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Vigeti of Kalamashaka are regarded as the top two, with no other rivals. He is also one

of the most enigmatic performers I met (much like Johnny). He doesn’t own a phone, he

lives with his parents in Kitengela, and he is notorious for blowing off shows, interviews,

and recording sessions. However, if you are lucky to have him waltz into your studio

unannounced and say he wants to record, you have to put other projects on hold and

give him the microphone – he’s that good.

Kitu Sewer is shy, but in the right situation is one of the funniest rappers I knew –

he could have the whole studio in stitches when he wanted to. He is very thin, and

about medium height by Kenyan standards. He is several inches shorter than I am. He

has a distinctive harelip, which often gives the impression that he’s smirking. Long

before I met him I had heard from several people that he had disappeared from hip-hop

and become a drug addict. Others said that drugs had caused him to lose his mind. One

story I heard was that he was last seen walking alone up and down the train tracks from

Dandora to town. By the time I finally crossed paths with Sewer in Kitengela I found him

to be a really charming and affable man, although he did imbibe alcohol and the leafy

stimulant miraa. There were times when we were recording that I thought he was

completely wasted and couldn’t make sense of what he was telling me. It seemed the

recording session was going to fall apart. Then he’d disappear for several hours and

come back with lines scribbled out on a tattered notebook that were so incisive and

spoke so elegantly to the theme of the song that I and others in the studio were all in

awe.

One of those times was when we recorded Night Session in Kitengela with Blak

and Mutant. After several hours of waiting at the studio for him to show, passing the

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time listening to music and watching videos of Reggae concerts, Kitu Sewer suddenly

materialized in the doorway of the studio. After exchanging warm greetings, I explained

my idea for the song and played him the track I had recorded earlier. Taking a moment

to gather his thoughts, Sewer turned to me: “Ok, I’ve got it. Don’t worry. I know what I’m

going to do,” he said in with a breathy slurred confidence. He walked out of the studio

as suddenly as he had appeared. That had been several hours ago. Now, it was time to

record his verse. It was also getting close to the time at which it is no longer safe to be

out, and I was getting impatient to finish so I could walk back to my nearby hotel in

relative safety.

I had come up with the idea for the song a couple days before. I came to prefer

night sessions when the studio was quieter and we had the night to lend creative energy

to our songwriting. During the day, the studio was more of a social hall, people

constantly passing by to chat, meet with friends, find out what was going on. But night

sessions were truly where work could be done. I had texted my idea and lyrics MC

Mutant and asked if he’d be interested in recording a song called Night Session and if

he would track down the elusive Kitu Sewer to participate as well. He quickly responded

that they were both into the idea and we agreed that I would come to the studio in

Kitengela in two days. The following day I ran into Blak in downtown Nairobi and asked

if he was interested in coming to Kitengela to work on the song (I had to organize the

affair with Blak surreptitiously so that the rapper he was with at the time wouldn’t get

any ideas about being part of the project).

I was the first to arrive at the studio on the day we recorded Night Session. In

fact, the door was locked and I had to call Sam, the owner of the Higher Linxxs studio,

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who in turn called one of his friends to come let me in. Since no one was there and the

power was out anyway, I decided to lie down and wait for the others to arrive. The

studio is located in Sam’s bedsitter apartment on the sixth floor of an apartment building

on the edge of Kitengela. The studio itself takes up half of the living space, the rest

occupied by a small twin bed, and a couple of plastic chairs. After about an hour or so I

was awoken by a knock at the door and looked up to see Blak enter. He immediately

launched into a story about what a difficult time he had finding the studio – a situation

made infinitely worse by the fact that he didn’t have a cell phone. It had been several

years since he had been to Kitengela and when he last came there was only one studio,

which is understandably where he went when he arrived. The studio he knew was no

longer there, and even worse there were now several studios in Kitengela. All of that

meant that Blak had been wondering around the streets of Kitengela (thankfully, a small

town), for the last several hours trying to find which studio I might be at. Having finally

arrived, I had to inform him that we wouldn’t be able to begin doing any work until power

was restored. So we waited.

Figure 5-1. Photo taken during recording of “Night Session.” From Left to Right: MC Mutant, Erik Timmons, Adel, Kitu Sewer (MC Blak not in photo).

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System of Thugs

Dandora is a place like any other in Nairobi. It has its churches, its schools, and

its businesses. And like many estates in and around Kenya’s capital, Dandora brims

with the youthful energy one might expect of a city in a country whose population is so

exceedingly young.1 It is a place that is teeming, sensuous and alive. But it is also a

place I was time and again warned to be wary of. Whether it was other Kenyans looking

at me sideways when I announced my plan to visit rappers in Dandora, or listening to

the lyrics of the rappers themselves, I was always aware of the reputation this place

had. In the minds of most Nairobians Dandora is known for three things: as a dangerous

and unruly place infested with gangs and violence, as the site of Nairobi’s enormous,

pulsating municipal dump, and as the home of the famous rap groups, Kalamashaka

and Ukoo Flani Mau Mau.

Like so many other corners of the global south, there is violence in Dandora, and

it takes myriad forms. Rappers from Dandora lament the crime that happens around

them everyday, but they are also keen to point out that it exists as part of a larger

system, one that reaches right through the whole of Kenyan society. Mashifta, a duo

including Kitu Sewer and the late G-Wiji, was one of the most well known groups to

emerge from Dandora. Perhaps their most famous song, Majambazi (Thugs) describes

Kenyan society as a “system of thugs”. 2

This is a system of majambazi

1 Approximately 80 percent of Kenya’s population is under the age of 35 and Kenyans aged 18-34 years old represent more than a third of the national population. While the national unemployment rate is 12.7 percent, in urban areas such as Nairobi youth unemployment is estimated to be between 35-60 percent (UNDP 2013).

2 Mashifta is itself the Swahili word for Bandits. The group is comprised of Kitu Sewer and the now deceased G-Wiji. The song I’m quoting here is “Majambazi”

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Pastors – majambazi! Ministers – majambazi! Lawyers – majambazi! Even us youth in the ghetto – majambazi! Police and Parents – majambazi!

In this scathing critique no one is spared – thuggery pervades all levels of Kenyan

society – “even us youth in the ghetto!” The explicit identification of Dandora youth with

the thugs that comprise the rest of society shows a refusal on the part of the song’s

authors to set themselves apart as victims or morally above reproach. Mashifta, and the

other “youth in the ghetto” are complicit in this system of thugs as much as the pastors,

ministers, lawyers, police and parents.

This outlook demonstrates the ambiguity that surrounds criminality in Nairobi.

Understanding the connection between the actual lived worlds of hip-hoppers in

Eastlands, Nairobi and the poetics of crime and insecurity, which arise from these

worlds, begins with acknowledgement that at the heart of the attitude many Nairobians

have towards crime and insecurity in their city is ambivalence. Similar to what Daniel

Smith points out about Nigerian feelings towards corruption in their country, Nairobians

both confront and participate in illicit economies and shadowy businesses (Smith 2007).

Moreover, this ambivalence is a critical engine of cultural production in Nairobi,

which seems to simultaneously find both horror and humor in the experience of life

where crime and chronic insecurity are normalized modes of existence. These two

aspects of Nairobian attitudes towards crime are not contradictory – but rather two sides

of the same coin, linked as transgressive acts. It was constantly striking to me to see

Nairobians react to specters of violence and crime in their city with tones of relish as

much as revulsion; laughter as much as lamentation.

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What follows is an extended ethnographic narrative that relates how this

ambivalence is not only part of the poetic and discursive speech genres of everyday

Eastlands, Nairobi, but also very much entangled in the social fabric of the community

of hip-hop artists with whom I spent a good deal of my fieldwork. In accomplishing this I

primarily focus on my relationship with an artist/producer who went by the name

General Chizee during my time in Kenya. I embed the narrative of my interactions with

Chizee in and around the Maono studio in Dandora with the lyrics of a song he wrote

and recorded while I was there. By casting my narrative interpretation of actual events

as they unfolded during fieldwork with reference to the stylized poetics of the Chizee’s

song about life in Dandora, I demonstrate how crime can be a productive force in

Nairobi, both culturally and socially.

* * *

Crime and insecurity in Nairobi have long and complicated histories going back

to colonial rule (White 1990; Ocobock 2006). But there was a marked increase in

criminal incidents in Nairobi beginning in the 1980s. This sharp rise in crime coincided

with neoliberal reforms in Kenya, which began at that time, but increased with intensity

in the 1990s (Smith 2008). Historian David Anderson describes this moment as “a

period of rapid growth in the urban population, combined with acute housing shortages,

declining economic prosperity, rising urban unemployment and the collapse of many

institutions of municipal government” (Anderson 2002). It should be noted that the

seeming connection between increasing levels of crime and neoliberal reforms was

hardly unique to Kenya. Indeed, as Comaroff and Comaroff (2006) point out, surging

criminality and lawlessness have been the rule for postcolonies in the neoliberal era – a

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condition they diagnose as part of a dialectic of law and disorder. As this dialectic

played out on the terrain of Eastands, Nairobi – creating what Comaroff and Comaroff

describe as a “palimpsest of contested sovereignties, codes and jurisdictions” (5) – hip-

hop poets responded to their changing world in kind, offering creative lyrical depictions

of their lived experience in “Nairobbery.”3

In her ethnography of crime in Sao Paolo Caldeira (2000) argues that narratives

about violence and criminality in Sao Paolo should be viewed as productive forces in

urban Brazil. She writes:

The fear and talk of crime not only produce certain types of interpretations and explanations (usually simplistic and stereotypical); they also organize the urban landscape and public space, shaping the scenario for social interactions, which acquire new meanings in a city becoming progressively walled (19).

In Nairobi, which has similarly become progressively walled over the last thirty years,

narratives about crime are commonplace and serve similar functions to the ones

described by Caldeira. Talking, joking, and rapping about insecurity in Nairobi are

discourses that generate knowledge and sociality. In their work on what they define as

the genre of “matatu narratives” Mungai and Samper (2006) point out that telling stories

about harrowing experiences in Nairobi’s public service vehicles (matatus) functions to

“provide information about cultural and social rules for riding in matatu and for living in

Nairobi” (62).

The hip-hop poetics of crime and insecurity also help organize urban space,

reinforce social rules and give instructions for living in Dandora. These poetics have

3 I can’t say for certain where and when the term “Nairobbery” entered the lexicon of Nairobians, but to my knowledge, it’s first appearance in hip-hop poetics was as the title of the 2002 album by Eastlands rap group, K-South.

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been forged in the day-to-day lived experience of danger and solidarity, and erected on

a scaffolding of imagined worlds. The young poets who grew up in 1990s Dandora built

these worlds from lyrics scribbled on tattered grade school exercise books inside

cramped studio sanctuaries, with little more than a microphone and computer. The

archive of this hip-hop poetry speaks to the life-worlds out of which it arose.

As an ethnographer I have made a prolonged attempt to witness and participate

in the day-to-day lives of these poets in order to better understand the lived experiences

that give rise to the poetic texts they create. To this end I have been a periodic visitor to

Dandora over the course of several trips to Kenya. During my most recent and longest

visit to Kenya I had been regularly attending the Maono community arts project in

Dandora’s “Phase Four” neighborhood, conducting ethnographic fieldwork in their hip-

hop studio.4 MC Kah, a friend and long time member of Ukoo Flani Mau Mau, founded

Maono in 1998 (see Chapter 4). But it wasn’t until 2013 that he was able to finally

realize his dream of opening a community-recording studio at Maono, using money he

had saved from a recent trip to Germany.5

Kah had graciously invited me to come and visit the studio anytime I wanted. So

when I learned that one of the artists I knew from Maono was to perform at Club

Ebony’s hip-hop night across town in Westlands, it seemed like an important opportunity

to support my friends and also bolster my own research. Having never been to Club

Ebony, however, I hoped to first meet with someone at the studio so that we could go to

4 As mentioned in Interlude B: Introducting Dandora, the modern Dandora Estate was planned and built as part of a World Bank “Sites and Services” project. Through this plan, Dandora was built in Five Phases. Phase Four is where MAONO is located. But Phase Two is where the “Base Camp” is located.

5 The trip to Germany that preceded the founding of the studio was made under the auspices of the Spoken Worlds project.

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the show together. But, an appointment had held me up and it was already nearly dark

when I arrived at Maono. As the sun began to fade in the Eastlands evening – as it does

at the same time everyday in this equatorial country – I noticed some of the distinct

markers that the city was transitioning from day to night. The smells of evening cooking

fires began to fill the air. The streets became crowded with matatus and the flow of

people returning from their jobs downtown. This transition from day to night always

produced an anxiety in me, especially if I was in Dandora, where the security situation

becomes much more perilous after nightfall.

* * *

From the courtyard out back I banged loudly on the metal door hoping to find

someone still inside the studio. Unfortunately, I was too late. The producer, General

Chizee, would by now likely be three or four stiff drinks into his evening, imbibing the

cheap but strong local liquor nicknamed “Tears of the Lion.”6 I called Chizee’s cell. No

answer. Alikuwa mteja, as they say.7 I began to wonder if it would be best to leave

Dandora with the last rays of daylight. As a rule I tried not to be in Dandora after dark,

especially if I was alone. If I was unable to reach Chizee, and if I waited much longer, I

would need to navigate the dark streets of Dandora alone, passing some very

dangerous spots in order to get back to the matatu stage.

6 Sw. Machozi ya Simba

7 In Nairobi to say somebody is “mteja” means they are not answering their phone. It comes from the message you get in Swahili when you call someone on Safaricom, but their phone is off or disconnected for some reason. A woman’s voice tells you “mteja wa nambari uliopiga hapatikani kwa sasa” (the customer’s number you have dialed is not available at the moment). This is so well known that the first word “mteja” or “customer” is synonymous in Nairobi for being busy. In fact the message is so iconic that the Daily Nation ran a story about the woman whose voice is on the message. http://www.nation.co.ke/lifestyle/lifestyle/mobile-subscriber-has-been-found/-/1214/2928444/-/frhptvz/-/index.html. Also, see the song “Mteja” which uses the notion to criticize politicians who never answer the call of their constituents. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TSWSrNl3mXk

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Even in the company of local guides during the daylight moving around on foot in

Dandora comes with risks. For example, I had once walked with Chizee from the studio

in Dandora to nearby Komarock estate. Even though it was still daylight and Chizee was

born and raised in Dandora – a fact that I naively assumed protected him from the kind

of danger I was scared of – he insisted that we find someone to walk with us. Thus we

sought out a reputedly tough local teenager named Buju sitting in the shade of a nearby

building and offered to buy him a drink if he walked with us.

The reason for this precaution, Chizee told me, was that we needed to pass

through a “bad place” where “some very rude boys” were known to hangout. Such “bad

places,” as Chizee called them, exist throughout Nairobi. They are dangerous locations

where opportunistic thieves waylay pedestrians who are too brash, too stupid, or too

drunk to take proper precaution. They are spaces where the flickering orange glow of

the street lamp doesn’t reach: dark alleyways, footpaths, bridges and overpasses.

These “bad places” in Nairobi are characteristic of the “new cartographies of dis/order”

described by Comaroff and Comaroff (2006), where zones of safety and danger are

linked by tenuous passages and must be navigated with care. Because there is no such

thing as a map that designates the “bad places” from “good ones” - or one that charts

the best routes for transecting the surface of the shifting and uncertain urban terrain -

moving with relative safety around the city requires a certain cultural competence: a

combination of intuition, knowledge and experience. For Nairobians, especially those

from Eastlands, having such awareness is a valuable, even necessary part of life.

Accumulating knowledge of these dangerous spaces and how and when to avoid

them is not merely a practical matter of safety, however. It is also part of the cultural

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practice of place making in which non-specific locales become dangerous places

through the transmission of stories, rumors, or gossip (cf. Shaw 2002). It was through a

second-hand account from my Kenyan brother-in-law, for example, that I learned never

to use the convenient shortcut that passes below Outer Ring Road where it crosses

over the railway line. He told me of a friend who used the narrow footpath below the

bridge one night coming home from a bar and was mugged. Being drunk, the man had

foolishly tried to fight the machete-wielding thieves and lost several fingers. He was

indeed lucky not to lose his life. I only needed to hear this story once to avoid the

footpath below the Outer Ring Road bridge, no matter how convenient of a shortcut it

was.

Stories like this circulate through all spheres of communication in Nairobi,8 giving

rise to a poesis of Nairobbery. Although every Nairobian has stories, I found that

Eastlandoz, a nickname for residents of the Eastlands estates, had a particular

penchant for talking about crime, for laughing about it, and for cultivating a sense of

identity, based on a shared understanding of the dangers of life in Eastlands and

knowledge about how to navigate their often perilous surroundings. In Eastlands Sheng,

the word “Rada” (from the English word, “radar”) is a common expression used to

indicate this awareness of ones surroundings. In the following section I discuss this

concept in relation to my own knowledge and experience of dangerous situations while

in Nairobi.

8 By spheres of communication I refer to Bakhtin’s formulation that all areas of human activity give rise to relatively stable types utterances, which he refers to as Speech Genres.

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Rada

The Sheng expression “kaa rada” (stay ready or be aware) was first described to

me by a friend who laughed as he added, “Eriko, now you know the deep ghetto sheng!”

Rada has similar meaning to the Swahili word “chonjo” and can be used in both the

senses of being ready and being aware. In the first sense, one might use rada to ask

someone if he’s ready to go to the club. In the second sense, rada might be used to

describe someone who is aware of his surrounding, i.e. alert to the situation. It is in this

sense that I see the most obvious link to the word and concept of “radar.” In this

chapter, therefore, any use of rada should be read with this connotation, unless

otherwise indicated.

My own rada for danger in the city had, I believed, become increasingly

sophisticated over the years. From the first moment I considered a trip to Kenya as an

undergraduate at Iowa State University I had been engaged in a process of thought

about safety. This began with reading accounts online, speaking with friends who had

travelled to Africa, and reading brochures and pamphlets put out by the United States

Embassy in Nairobi. As I eventually visited Kenya and got to know Kenyans, my

repertoire of knowledge - and my rada - expanded. I could recite many stories – some

true, others not – about cunning and daring thieves, or about unthinkable criminal acts.

The more time I spent in Nairobi, the more experience I added to my bank of knowledge

and my sense of awareness about my surroundings. “Eriko, uko rada!” Kenyan friends

would joke with me, “umekuwa mwenyeji! (You’re aware! You’ve become a native!).”

They were humoring me – compared to them, I could hardly have been less rada, or

less of a local. But at the same time I understood they were making a social gesture,

drawing me for a moment into a community they claimed as theirs, whatever the

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motivation might be. It seemed that the more experiences I had the more like a

Nairobian I felt. This feeling was reinforced as I shared stories of crime with friends.

There was the time a pickpocket had got the better of me on the number 32

matatu from Dandora to town, making off with my Moleskine book of research notes. It

had come on the very first day I visited Dandora with MC Kah (described in Chapter 4). I

distinctly remember sitting with Kah and several MAONO staff and laughing with them

as they told me about a local boy they called “golden finger” because of his adept

abilities as a pickpocket. In the laughter we shared about this daring and successful

young thief, I felt included in a localized discourse about crime in Dandora. This curbed

my sense of fear regarding crime, making it seem like a banal occurrence, an

annoyance that every Nairobian deals with in their day-to-day lives. This led to my

growing sense that I had reached a level of awareness, that my radar had been tuned to

a new frequency. But this led to complacency and the loss of my field notebook.

When I left MAONO, Kah escorted me to the stage and flagged down a matatu

that would take me to town. I was the only passenger until a man with a bushy beard

and soiled clothing boarded the vehicle. It was strange that he sat next to me, rather

than any of the other empty seats, so I decided to pay attention to him. As we bumped

our way through the potholes of Dandora, the man and I collided several times. He

reeked of urine and feces, so I leaned away from him, keeping my face turned towards

the open window to my right. I learned later from friends in Dandora that the man’s

stench was no coincidence. It was in fact a tactic of distraction. By wearing a coat

doused in excrement, this man ensured that his victims would lean away from him and

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turn their heads away from his revolting odor. Distracted and leaning away, victims then

become susceptible, as I did, to his probing fingers.

He had worked on gently moving my notebook towards the edge of my pocket.

With each bump, each sharp turn, and each sudden stop, he would bump shoulders

with me, I would lean away, and he would delicately flip his fingers to inch my notebook

closer to the pocket’s mouth. When we reached town and were coming to the terminus,

he made his move. He reached across my body to “close the window.” In doing this he

shoved his puffy and soiled coat sleeve directly in my face. Not only did this temporarily

take away my peripheral vision, but the acrid smell of his sleeve completely bewildered

me, causing me to turn away in disgust. That was the moment he grabbed my notebook

and slid out of the matatu and into the dark mass of bodies crowding around the matatu.

Even though I noticed my notebook was gone almost immediately, when I jumped out of

the matatu after him, he had disappeared.

Losing the notebook meant the loss of several weeks’ field notes and contact

numbers (many of which I had already transferred into my computer). But what I had

gained in this experience seemed much more valuable. For one thing, it represented for

me a sort of initiation into the experience of crime in the city. As the newest initiate to

“Nairobbery” I shared the story with several Nairobian friends, and we laughed together

about the incident. No one was hurt, nothing of much value was lost; I had to appreciate

the carefully choreographed maneuver the experienced thief had pulled off. The dance

he did with his body, while his vulgar stench cast a spell on me.

Although the thief had stolen from me, I felt that I had gained some things too.

Firstly, the sense of smug satisfaction as I imagined his reaction opening the hard-

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cased notebook, which he must have thought was either a wallet or a phone, to

discover random notes about hip-hop. Secondly, I gained a sense that the experience

had made me more aware. My rada was now more sophisticated, and I would surely

know what to look out for the next time a stinky man tried sitting next to me in a matatu.

Thirdly, I gained a story with which to relate to other Nairobians. Being able to share my

own “Nairobbery” story allowed me to participate in the discourses about crime in the

city that I wouldn’t otherwise be able to. It shrunk the distance between my Kenyan

collaborators and myself, creating a new sense of shared time in the shared experience

of crime and insecurity. It felt as if I had joined them as a citizen of “Nairobbery” rather

than a visitor to Nairobi.

The accumulation of experiences such as the one mentioned above (of which

there were several) had a dual effect on my movement in the city – simultaneously

emboldening me and making me more nervous. On the one hand, I felt my experiences

and growing knowledge of the terrain of my fieldwork enabled me to move more freely

around places that were typically off limits to outsiders. On the other hand, I felt an

increasing sense of danger; a sense that I had passed by too many dangerous areas

too many times and that I was due. Several relatively innocuous brushes with crime had

simultaneously caused me to be less weary of becoming a victim, while also increasing

my sense that a more dangerous experience was immanent.

This is How We Livin’

Despite the insecurity of Dandora and my personal feeling of vulnerability, I felt

safe arriving at Maono on the night of the concert in Westlands. One reason that I felt

comfortable arriving at Dandora, even when I was alone and it was late in the day, was

due to the presence of a local police post, which shared the courtyard with the studio.

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Although police are categorically disliked, even loathed by youth in Dandora, having

them near the studio was ironically welcome because their presence kept away drug

users, ne’er-do-wells and thieves who would pilfer the studio’s equipment, or otherwise

be a nuisance to artists who came there to focus on their music. I too felt a sense of

gratitude for the nearby policemen, as I stood outside the studio’s door watching

shadows fall over the courtyard, realizing night was coming unsettlingly fast. I began to

consider how long I would wait in Dandora before leaving.

I decided to sit and wait a little longer, hoping Chizee would eventually pick up

his phone. Pulling out my headphones I began listening to a song Chizee had recently

made called, This is How We Living. The song is about life in Dandora, although as

Chizee makes clear in his dedication, it goes out to “All the hustlers in Nairobi” and

“every ghetto in the world.” Chizee opens the first verse of the song with a seemingly

paradoxical juxtaposition of imagery:

Welcome to Nairobi, we keep surviving cause we’re soldiers You can find me in Dandora hanging out with my homies If you aren’t paying attention, you’ll be strangled If you bring any cause to my homies we will finish you

There is grim irony in a message that welcomes you in the same breath that it warns

you. Furthermore, the juxtaposition of the imagery of war with the imagery of hanging

out with the homies describes what seem like very different social experiences. Yet, the

two seemingly disparate worlds – the world of the soldier struggling to survive and the

world of leisurely hanging out with homies – are brought together here by Chizee. In

these lyrics, Chizee suggests that two apparently different experiences – that of a

soldier at war and that of a casual day with friends – actually coexist in Dandora.

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This juxtaposition creates an effect, at least in my reading of these lines, which

raises certain questions I wish to explore in this chapter. Is there a difference between

being a soldier and being a homie, in regards to the rules that govern social interaction?

Do soldiers from Dandora, as Chizee conceives of them, have different duties,

requirements, obligations, or codes to each other, which differ from the rules for friends?

If there are differences between how a soldier should act in war and how friends should

act towards each other, then how does one know when to act as a soldier and when to

act as friend? Where is the line and when does it get blurred?

These questions did not occur to me on my first listen to Chizee’s song, This Is

How We Livin’. Nor did I think to ask them after several dozen more listens to the song.

It was only after the experience of the robbery that I began to reflect on the lyrics of

Chizee’s song, as I tried to understand what had happened and why I felt so betrayed.

After all, I remember thinking, had not Chizee’s song baldly stated that if you come to

Dandora you can practically expect to get robbed? In describing “how we livin’” in

Dandora hadn’t his song warned that no one was safe from the daily crime that occurs

there? Was it my expectations that were skewed? Had I simply failed to hear what

Chizee’s song communicates about life and crime in Dandora? Listening to the song in

the aftermath of the robbery caused many of these questions to swirl in my mind,

disturbing me as I reflected on the experience.

In relating the impact that the song had on me after the event of the robbery, I

draw attention to a point, which I hope becomes clearer in the narrative approaches of

this chapter and Chapter 6, where I describe my relationship with Blak. This point is

about the nature of ethnographic fieldwork and the impact that unplanned experiences

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may have of the research project as a whole. In Chapter 6 I will discuss the notion of

ethnography as an improvisational endeavor (cf. Cerwonka and Malkki 2007), and how

my own adjustments to the circumstances presented during my fieldwork changed my

outlook on it. However, as I continue the narrative of this chapter, I will focus on the

robbery itself and analyzing lyrics from Chizee’s song, in order to seek answers to the

question of how crime in Dandora affects social interactions as well as cultural

production.

Returning to the opening lines of Chizee’s This is How We Livin, I wish to

underscore the theme of sociality, and how this speaks to notions of social obligations

and the moral ambiguity surrounding relationships in Dandora. In the first line he alludes

to surviving together as soldiers do; in the second, to hanging out together in his hood

with his homies; and in the fourth line he warns that if anyone messes with him or his

homies they will collectively finish you. But, in the midst of these statements of sociality

and togetherness, he plants a firm warning in the third line: if you aren’t paying attention

you will be strangled.

The picture that General Chizee is building with his words reflects a moral

universe in which reciprocal obligations to one’s homies create a network of survival,

sociality, and protection in the dangerous and unpredictable “battlefield” of Dandora. But

at the same time, he implies that one has an individual responsibility to be aware of his

or her surroundings because, “if you’re not paying attention, you will be strangled.” This

speaks to an overarching moral ambiguity towards crime that is present throughout This

is How We Livin’. I suggest here that imagining himself as a “soldier”, which Chizee

does both in the lyrics cited above and in giving himself the title of General, Chizee

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inhabits a role that holds a very ambiguous relationship to crime. Indeed, soldiers,

represent a class of citizens that are given extraordinary power to commit “crimes” that

are not called crimes or recognized as such. As Chizee speaks of life in Dandora with

tones that both decry the plight of ordinary Kenyans who are often helpless in the face

of crime, and at the same time takes pride in the hardened edges and shrewd

awareness one must possess to survive in his neighborhood, he reinforces the

ambiguity that defines his relationship to crime.

Stroll around the areas and you’ll see criminals [Stealing]9 everything – even clothes from the clothesline We locals can recognize each other by what we wear But fools out here in the streets get played daily

In the opening line the pervasiveness of crime in Dandora is reinforced with the image

that criminals steal everything, including clothes from the clothesline. Then the

statement is made that separates the “locals” who have knowledge (i.e. recognize each

other by how they dress) from those “fools” who get taken advantage of, or victimized.

Here Chizee uses the Swahili words “Wenyeji” (Locals) and “Mafala” (Fools) to

differentiate these two classes of people in Dandora. In this framing, it is clear that while

crime is pervasive, it is really the “fools” who are susceptible to fall victim to it because

they don’t recognize people for who or what they really are.

The symbolism of clothing that Chizee draws on here has a resonance with

soldiering as well. Soldiers where uniforms that make them recognizable to each other

and distinguish them from the rest of society. In the lines cited above, Chizee notes that

civilians, i.e. those who hang their clothes on the line, are susceptible to having their

clothes stolen. On the other hand, he alludes to the fact that “locals” have some sort of

9 Wanapitana kila kitu, literally translates as “They are passing with everything”

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dress code that distinguishes them from others. Here he is not speaking of a literal

uniform, but a way of dressing and carrying oneself in public that communicates a

privileged membership to a group outside of everyday people. This fits the soldier

theme established in the opening lines. By wearing a uniform, he says, he recognizes

and is recognized by others wearing the same uniform, and their membership protects

them from being taken advantage of as “fools” are.

This boast is part of the concept of rada that I discussed above. Chizee is rada

because he is aware of what’s going on in his neighborhood, and most importantly, who

his fellow locals are and who are the fools. To be able to do this - to be rada - is

something that my informants and friends would brag about, even as I was mystified.

They would pull me aside in a club and point to someone with rings on his fingers and a

gold chain and say, “you see, now, this one is a real thug!” Or they would say after we

got off the matatu, “did you notice those thieves?” before they described, in detail, the

operation that had been carried out against an unsuspecting victim, all while I

obliviously gazed out the window. Even though they saw the crime taking place they

wouldn’t alert the victim if they didn’t know him or her personally because it was never

clear how many thieves might be present. There could be several on the matatu,

including the driver and the conductor. It is dangerous to speak up when witnessing a

crime. As Chizee notes:

If you witness a crime, watch your mouth You’d be surprised, even the walls have ears at night

Other times I would notice the way some of my normally affable friends would turn cold

and aloof in the presence of certain people we encountered. While the people seemed

perfectly legitimate to me, my friends would later tell me the guy was up to no good.

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Sometimes they knew the guy specifically, but other times they arrived at their

conclusion by reading certain signifiers, of which I remained perpetually ignorant.

Despite my ignorance I took some satisfaction in small victories of being rada. In

fact, just the day before the hip-hop night at Club Ebony I had practically burst through

the doorway of the studio, barely able to contain my exuberance at having caught a thief

“in my pocket” on the matatu. With great aplomb and a bit of a puffed out chest I

narrated the story to my friends in the studio (who didn’t seem nearly as excited by the

event as I was). I told them how three young men, dressed to look like university

students had boarded the matatu as it stopped at the GPO stage on Kenyatta Avenue;

how they had strategically placed themselves on opposite sides of me; how they had

carried on a loud and rather obnoxious debate about English Premier League football

as a distraction; how the man to my right had set his bag on his lap, but extended it over

onto my knees to hide from my view his nimble, searching fingers; and how in my keen

knowledge of “what was really going on” I had confidently let his nimble fingers search

and search because I knew my money was secure in the hidden zipper pocket of my

pants and my phone was in the breast pocket of my Dashiki, where I could feel it

pressed against my chest and where I could view it from the corner of my eye.

I had admitted to my friends in the studio that even despite being rada of the ruse

playing out in front of me on the matatu, the thieves had nearly found success anyway.

When the matatu had come to a stop we stood up and were pressed together in the

typical and uncomfortable way that bodies are always pushed together inside those

cramped steel confines, and the thief with the nimble fingers had not so nimbly reached

into my pocket causing me to turn and bat his hand away. At this juncture he of course

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pretended he had just accidently brushed me and apologized. Feeling confident in my

awareness I began to make my way down the steps of the matatu. As I stepped onto

the busy street in front of the Ambassadeur Hotel, downtown Nairobi, I realized the

music I was listening to had stopped. I instinctively reached into my breast pocket and

found that the phone was gone, and the chord of my headphones dangled disconnected

at my side. I immediately wheeled around and shoved my hand into the chest of the

nimble fingered student, barring his exit from the matatu. “Where’s my phone!” I

demanded. Feigning ignorance the man looked down and pointed to the bottom step of

the bus, saying, “it’s there, I think it fell out of your pocket.” I only realized later that

when he clumsily reached into my pocket, it was a purposeful distraction. While I was

batting away his hand (and thinking I had kept the thief in check) his friend removed the

phone from my breast pocket. If the music hadn’t been disrupted he surely would have

succeeded in stealing my phone. But my quick realization and reaction had caused him

to surreptitiously drop the phone and pretend that it had merely fallen out of my pocket

by accident.

* * *

Perhaps it was this encounter from the day before and the pyrrhic victory of not

losing my phone to the clever pickpockets that made me feel emboldened to continue

waiting for Chizee in Dandora, even as the sun went down and darkness enveloped the

courtyard behind MAONO. Chizee had finally answered his phone and assured me he

was on his way. But “on the way” could mean just about anything, and with Chizee, it

often meant “much longer than expected.”

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Just then, an officer who had noticed me waiting outside the studio came over to

chat. He was friendly. He wanted to know about where I came from and what brought

me to Dandora. Our conversation was pleasant and chatty. But as we talked I couldn’t

help wondering if he was one of the officers I heard beating a teenage boy a couple

days earlier. Although this is not an infrequent occurrence, it was difficult to listen to the

boy’s howling cries as they mingled with the whaps, snaps and thuds of the canes

against his body.

Not sure how to react to this unexpected intrusion of violence, I had looked

around at the others in the studio. Chizee and the others were laughing nervously. One

of the studio regulars, Ala Ola, walked over and pushed the door shut, saying, “oh it’s

just some rude boy who usually causes trouble.” The beatings lasted for a while and he

screamed a lot. One of the guys in the studio explained that he had run over a little kid

on his motorcycle and left the scene and that’s why the police were punishing him. But,

as Ala Ola put it, “these cops just really enjoy beating people.”

Despite the apparent nonchalance with which those in the studio had reacted to

the “disciplining” of the local “rude boy” by the police, many conversations I had

throughout my fieldwork in Dandora revolved around concerns over police. On the day

Chizee and I walked with Buju from Dandora to Komarock one of the things we talked

about was the police. As we were walking through the large open track of land set aside

for the railway line and the nearby Mowlem Power Station in Dandora I mentioned how

the police had recently stopped me and, in what I considered an unnecessary and

absurd show of force, threatened to arrest me for not having an ID. Chizee and Buju

both gave understanding nods. Chizee reasoned that the police had begun to feel

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emboldened to harass people like me - a white person - because of the recent security

crackdown in the wake of several terrorist attacks from Al Shabab and the launching of

Operation Usalama.10

Furthermore, Chizee added after ascertaining some of the pertinent details of my

encounter, even though I’m white, the police know I’m not rich (i.e. powerful) because

they found me on the side of town with matatus going to Eastlands. He said Police think

that whites who hang out in Eastlands, especially those who link up with musicians like

Chizee are potheads and easy targets for a shakedown. If policemen don’t want to

catch white tourists with pot to shake them down, they might also be involved in selling

them weed. Chizee told me once he was hanging out with some Norwegian visitors and

a policeman came up to Chizee and asked if Chizee’s white friend was interested in

buying pot. Chizee didn’t trust the cop and didn’t want to deal with the potential

problems which could come from being a middleman in such deals so he told the cop

he’d ask his friend but never did.

As we continued to walk, we talked a bit about police impunity and Chizee said

that the one rule with police is that you should never turn your back on them. He said if

you ever turn your back on them they could shoot you and claim that you were running

away.

We’re used to hearing police knock constantly And listening to the sound of bullets Many boys have been turned into sieves And others are still locked up in Kamiti [prison]

10 Operation Usalama, or Operation Peace, was a response by the Kenyan government to terror attacks committed by Al Shabab in Nairobi. The operation involved a roundup of many of the cities’ Somali population. See Balakian (2016) for details of this operation and the fallout for the Somali community in Nairobi.

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* * *

I was growing impatient waiting for Chizee to show up and his phone was once

again switched off. But just when I was getting ready to leave a dark slender figure

came around the side of the building and into the courtyard. “Eriko! Niaje?” Chizee

greeted me cheerfully. Taking out his keys he opened up the door to the studio and we

entered. As we waited for the computer to boot up, I made my proposal to Chizee that

we should go to the hip-hop night at Club Ebony to see our mutual friend perform. It was

a good idea, Chizee agreed. But then a look of concern came to his face. “Ah, but I

don’t have any nice clothes,” Chizee said, thinking out loud. Indeed Chizee had come to

the studio dressed in typical attire for an evening in Dandora: rubber sandals, dark

trousers and a t-shirt with a pharmaceutical company logo on it, which he bought in the

second hand market - hardly the gear to wear out to Club Ebony in Westlands.

That women won’t pay you any attention unless you have money was not only a

refrain in Chizee’s songs but a common complaint of many of the young men I spoke

with. It is part of a stereotypical view of young, attractive urban Kenyan women as “gold-

diggers,” concerned primarily with money and material possessions. But it is common

knowledge that there are women in Nairobi who go to even greater lengths to steal from

careless men in clubs, as Chizee warns:

In the club there are untrustworthy girls If you’re not paying attention, you’ll get something funny put in your drink When you black out they dip into your pocket Your phone and wallet – they go like a joke

But, as Chizee states, you are only vulnerable “if you’re not paying attention.” In

the time that I had known Chizee I found him to be someone who was quite cautious

when navigating locales where “paying attention” is of great value. Enlisting the extra

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muscle of Buju on our walk to Komarock is one example of Chizee’s prudence. Another

is the fact that he once told me that he sometimes carries two phones on his person –

especially if he’s planning on walking around at night. One phone - his actual working

phone – is kept hidden in a “secret pocket” near his genitals. The other phone (which

doesn’t work) is kept in his pocket as a decoy. I remember thinking this a slightly

extreme precaution. I had never heard another Kenyan friend describe doing this.

There’s being cautious, I thought, and then there’s stuffing your phone in your

underwear.

Chizee was odd. At least that was my perception. But that’s not particularly

unusual with producers. As Perullo (2011) notes in his in-depth study of music

production in Dar es Salaam, most producers are comfortable in “self-imposed isolation”

as they “enjoy sitting for long hours, often alone, in front of mixers, computers and other

devices manipulating and recording sound” (254). This description fits most of the

producers I met in Nairobi, including Chizee. Many of them were quirky loners. But my

perception of Chizee’s apparent difference from the others I hung out with at the studio

went beyond the producer versus artist dynamic. When we first met, for example, he

said he was a hip-hop musician from Dandora. I was very surprised that I had never

heard of him. By that time, I had been acquainted with Dandora hip-hop for several

years and knew most of the artists, if not personally, at least by name and major works.

But I had never heard of Chizee. My ignorance about Chizee had a lot to do with his

jagged itinerary, which marked him as someone who was from Dandora, but not

necessarily of Dandora.

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Chizee was born in Dandora in 1982 and lived there as a child. But at some point

his parents sent him to boarding school upcountry so that he wouldn’t fall into the “bad

company” that many young people in Dandora find. His schooling upcountry is one

marker of difference from his peers in Dandora. Despite his parents’ wishes for him to

stay away from Nairobi and focus on his studies, Chizee came back to Nairobi nearly

every weekend to participate in the music scene. He attended concerts, but also

performed whenever he could, usually only getting paid enough for matatu fare back

home. When telling me about those days as a teenage rapper, Chizee would pause to

take a deep drag from his cigarette, exhaling a plume of nostalgia before sighing, “it has

been a journey, Eriko. A long journey.”

Chizee has indeed journeyed farther than many pursuing his life in music. He has

spent time in Finland, Mozambique, Momabasa and Zanzibar. He says that he has had

more success in Mombasa and Zanzibar, and that he is a better-known musician in

Tanzania than he is in Kenya. Although his parents still lived in the nearby, middle-class

estate Buru Buru, Chizee hadn’t been back in Nairobi very long when I arrived to do my

fieldwork. The reason he had come back, he told me, was that MC Kah, had reached

out to him when opening the Maono studio and said the studio was searching for a full

time producer. While he admitted it was a “hustle” to work at a community studio where

few artists could pay to have their songs produced, Chizee maintained that he was

happy to be back in his neighborhood helping out the talented youth, who only needed

encouragement and access to resources to beat the tough conditions of growing up in

Dandora. Agreeing to come back to Dandora was an opportunity to give back to his

neighborhood, he said. After all, as Chizee put it in his song:

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I’ve eaten from these streets - I’m just ordinary

Ordinary, however, was the last thing Chizee wanted to exude when we went to

Club Ebony for hip-hop night. Realizing that his current attire would not suit the

occasion at all, he embarked on an impromptu clothing harambee.11 He started calling

neighborhood friends to see if he could wrangle up some fresher clothes. He had to

haggle and negotiate, but managed to get ahold of some nice designer jeans,

emblazoned with a dragon design, a polo shirt, and a letterman-style jacket. Chizee

conducted the negotiations for this clothing in the semi-privacy of the recording booth,

so I wasn’t privy to the exact terms, but from the length and the volume of the

discussion, it appeared to have taken some convincing to borrow the items he did. He

was unable to convince anyone to part with their shoes for the evening, however, and

was therefore stuck wearing his rubber sandals to the club. This, I’m sure, was a major

disappointment.

Having finally arrived at his outfit for the evening Chizee announced we could

leave. As he grabbed his keys, shut down the computer and lights and locked the door,

we spilled out of the studio into the cool Dandora darkness. We had to walk an

uncertain and unlit route to get to the matatu stage, but by now we were a small posse,

including me, Chizee, two of Chizee’s clothing donors, and a few others who had

wandered in during the interim. Along the way we met with Ala Ola, another rapper from

Dandora, and he joined us on our walk to the Matatu stage.

Once we arrived at the matatu, it became clear that not everyone was going to

the concert. A couple guys hinted that they really wanted to go but just needed to

11 Harambee literally translates as “let’s all pull together.” It is frequently used to mean political fundraising. But it can really be used to describe any kind of communal pooling of resources or labor.

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somehow “find” some “bus fare.” I was sensitive to this type of “asking without asking”

and typically tried to reply by “saying no without saying no.” In the end, it was only

Chizee, Ala Ola, and myself who boarded the #36 matatu from Dandora to town.

Matatus going to town at night are never crowded and we found a three-seat bench

open near the front. Chizee slid in first, next to the window and I took the middle seat.

But strangely, I thought, Ala Ola chose not to sit with us, but walked to the back of the

matatu. In retrospect, this was one of the things that made me suspicious that the

robbery had been planned. Had Ala Ola intentionally distanced himself from us on the

matatu so that he could set up the robbery?

It had started to rain when we boarded the matatu: the cool steady rains of

Nairobi in June. The rain increased as we passed through Dandora in the dark. By the

time we reached the Dandora roundabout the rain had caused a tempestuous jam. The

roundabout is usually blocked this time of day, but when it rains the movement becomes

glacial. I’m not sure exactly why the rain causes traffic in Eastlands to come to a

complete standstill, but it does. And for this reason matatu conductors hike the prices

when it is raining. Sometimes they double the price. As Chizee notes in This is How We

Livin’

Whenever it rains, it’s a blunder The electricity goes out and bus fares are raised

We were stuck in the roundabout for at least 30-45 minutes. Every five minutes

or so we’d creep further by a couple of feet. Sometimes we’d come to rest with the

vehicle tilted in such a way that the rain would funnel through a crack in Chizee’s

window and soak into his borrowed letterman-style jacket and dragon-emblazoned

jeans. I felt bad watching Chizee feebly try to fix the window, but didn’t offer to switch

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places with him. The slowness of our movement through the roundabout belied the

frantic energy surging around the vehicle. Bodies darted between the hodgepodge of

cars and busses, plastic sacks or newspapers draped over their heads. Our conductor

was out in the rain with several other conductors shouting directions, yelling at the driver

to give it gas, turn hard, brake! Brake!

There was a particular precariousness associated with coming to rest in a giant

pothole, because it meant giving the huge, passenger-laden matatu enough gas to push

its tire over the lip of the crevice, but then immediately slamming on the break as soon

as it lurched forth, lest we knock into another stuck vehicle only feet in front of us. If

there is any fender bender the whole ride is lost, as the conductor and driver must

dismount to argue with the opposing parties about fault and compensation for damages.

If this ever happens every passenger on the matatu immediately climbs down and starts

searching for another matatu to board.

Fortunately, we didn’t have any collisions that day, just the interminable jam. As

we waited in the quagmire and my boredom reached its limits I decided to call Blak. I

knew this would likely be a futile effort because Blak had been “mteja” for days. But by a

minor miracle he answered his phone when I called him. It turned out he was planning

to go to the show at Club Ebony. I told him we were still stuck in Dandora but would be

glad to meet him when we got to town. He proposed that we could meet at the National

Theatre and go together from there.

The rain had finally stopped by the time we reached town so we decided to walk

from the stage on Racecourse Road to the National Theatre. About a half hour later we

arrived at the National Theatre. Looking around we finally saw Blak emerge from the

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shadowy area behind the theatre. We decided to walk to the show together. Chizee

mentioned something about how it was dangerous to go from the National Theatre to

Ebony Lounge on foot because it meant passing through a bad place. But Blak insisted

that we just walk, as Club Ebony was no more than a five to ten minute walk. I was

confident and secure that four of us wouldn’t be hassled. Although I knew that in Nairobi

you can never be completely protected from harm, I also knew that keeping your cool

and being able to negotiate certain difficult situations was something that Chizee, Blak

and Ala Ola all had valuable experience with.

We started off from the National Theatre passing the historic Norfolk Hotel with

guards out front. We passed the line of taxis that parked opposite the Norfolk and one

taxi driver jumped up and ran to his door. “Yes, Taxi? Where are you going?” he asked.

I politely informed him that we were just going nearby and didn’t need the ride. On we

walked past the Kenyan Broadcasting Company and over the Nairobi River. We turned

up Museum Hill and started to climb with the sharp sloping banks of the river to our right

and the large imposing wall of Waiyaki Way overpass.

We were on Museum Hill. It had started raining again, but not too heavy. I

remember having a casual conversation with Blak about how as a married man I never

go out at night anymore, instead spending evenings with my wife at home. He laughed

and said it was the same with MC Kah now that he had a girlfriend. It was just a

mundane conversation. Then it happened suddenly and in a blur. While we were

ascending museum hill a young man passed by hurriedly and cut me off. Before I knew

anything he was holding a machete against my neck. Simultaneously, two other young

men with machetes grabbed me and forced me to the pavement. I braced myself for my

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companions to help fend off the attackers, but when I looked up I saw them all running

away! My heart sank as the realization came over me. I was alone, stupidly alone.

I submitted to the thieves while they took my phone and the cash. I didn’t tell

them about the other hidden pocket where kept my passport and a larger bundle of

cash. But they were thorough, patting me down. One of them felt the passport and tried

to take it. But he couldn’t find the zipper. Angrily, he yelled at me to open it for him. The

extra time it was taking clearly agitated the two others, who kept yelling at both of us to

hurry up as they kept a nervous lookout. Once, a car slowed down to see what was

happening, but the other thieves threw stones at it and the driver sped away. It’s

common knowledge that you don’t stop your car in Nairobi after dark. For any reason. I

was by myself, helpless and hoping they wouldn’t find any cause to use the sharp edge

of the machete.

All of a sudden, out of nowhere, a passing garbage truck squealed to a halt in

front of us. I looked up to see three men in soiled green jumpsuits bound from the back

of the truck carrying broken bottles. One of them had a flashlight. They leapt over the

guardrail and chased the assailants down the brushy slope of the Nairobi River. From

the darkness of the thick vegetation I could hear the snapping of branches, the smack,

pop, and plunk of stones hurled at shadowy and fleeting targets. From the safety of the

road above I listened to the sharp, confused yells of the garbage men attempting to

mount a mad operation:

“Ha! Wewe!” “Kuja! Kuja Hapa!” “Wanatoka hapo!”

I feared for the men who were risking their lives rushing into the river; these three

garbage men who didn’t even know me. I was worried that other thugs might be down

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there, waiting in the darkness. But I also hoped deeply that they would catch the

thieves.

While waiting in suspense for the garbage men to emerge from the river bush,

movement caught my eye. I turned and looked up the road towards the top of Museum

hill and I saw a figure standing alone in the middle of the road, in the rain, a black

slinking silhouette against the orange glow of a streetlight. He was approaching slowly

down the hill towards me. I considered whether this could be another thief; that didn’t

seem right. He didn’t walk in a straight line down the hill. He sort of zig zagged back and

forth, cautiously descending, as if the street were a treacherous mountain slope,

threatening to give way to a cascade a the slightest misstep. As the figure got closer, I

could recognize that it was Blak. His face looked like betrayal. His dreadlocks were

matted down and dripping with rain as he kept nervously running his hands through

them. He mumbled something about trying to find the others. It didn’t matter; I wasn’t

listening.

The garbage men returned from the brush, climbing back over the guardrail.

They asked if I was okay. I said I was fine, although my legs were shaking

uncontrollably. They offered to walk me to the Central Police Station. At first I declined,

having no confidence that the police would be of any help. But they said I needed to

report it so I could get an official abstract. I agreed to let them take me to the station.

I scanned the ground once before we left and that’s when I noticed it: one of

Chizee’s rubber sandals resting upside down on the pavement. I went over and picked it

up. My first thought was to throw it into the river, but I didn’t for some reason. Instead I

dropped it back down on the pavement. Let him come back and find if he wants. Blak

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came up to me and noticed the Sandal. He picked it up. I didn’t care. We walked slowly

back down Museum Hill. Two of the green-suited garbage men flanked me on either

side, while the third one slowly drove the truck beside us. I was soaking wet and my

shirt was torn. We passed the Kenyan Broadcasting Company, the National Theatre,

the line of Taxis, the historic Norfolk Hotel with the guards out front. Blak followed us at

a distance, silently carrying Chizee’s sandal.

This is how we living in…I stay true to myself, real to myself This is how we living in…This feeling in my chest gotta be the best There’s always something good left to take another step

Interlude: Electricity

There is a strange sound, which can often be heard emanating from the

entryways and courtyards of residential flats in Eastlands. It is a high-pitched chirping,

like baby birds waiting to be fed, or like crickets noisily filling a bucolic night. But in

Eastlands this particular noise is something else: the digital sound of prepaid electric

meters when they are low on funds. I had one in my apartment and it would start

beeping whenever it went below 20 Kilowatt/Hours, or about $5. It is an inconvenient

and annoying nuisance that I could easily solve by making a payment via cell phone to

the power company. In residential compounds in Eastlands the meters are generally not

dispersed in individual apartments, but all clustered together on a wall in the entryway.

When I visited homes or home-studios in these apartment blocks it was not uncommon

to find nearly all of the meters sounding the alarm of low funds. Twenty meters beeping

at once, and out of sync with each other, is a cacophony. Many residents live constantly

in that zone of less than $5 credit on their meter, so their machine is endlessly

squawking. Residents only add a little bit of credit at a time – a dollar here, a dollar

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there – in order to keep the lights on. They either can’t or don’t see the need to put

enough money on their machine to make the chirping go away.

It’s understandable that they have other priorities for their daily expenditures.

Why put an extra dollar in the meter when you have enough electricity to at least watch

your evening Argentinian soap opera? Why spend that money that could by tea, sugar,

soap, or dinner? There is also the concern that even if you had the disposable cash to

invest in the meter, there’s no guarantee that power won’t be cut at any moment and

without warning. Indeed, the lack of a reliable infrastructure for electric power is one of

the most regular and pressing challenges to physical production of hip-hop in Eastlands.

Electricity, and its regular supply to studios, is critical to hip-hop production in

Nairobi. When it is interrupted, as frequently occurs in Eastlands, it causes a major

headache for artists and producers. Countless hours are wasted when power fails.

Many days I showed up at a studio to find its denizens passing time playing chess,

cards, or smoking cigarettes – waiting for the electricity to come back so they could

continue their work. The blame for the inconsistent supply of electricity is mostly on the

Kenyan government. More precisely, it is the Kenyan Power and Lighting Company

(KPLC) that is loathed and mocked by Kenyans who have felt the frustration of sudden

and irregular blackouts. Showing their propensity to joke about their city’s infrastructural

shortcomings, Kenyans have infamously nicknamed the KPLC, “Kenyan Paraffin Lamps

and Candles”, or alternatively, “Kenyans Please Light Candles.”

But the lack of consistent electricity is not always the fault of the government.

There are failures to pay the bills, when the chirping meter is ignored too long and

power disconnected. And then there are the frequent “accidents” that down power lines,

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just like anywhere else. One of these more peculiar accidents, which interrupts the

power supply in Eastlands is not, however, a familiar occurrence in most other parts of

the world. Sometimes the power goes out because of a short caused by thieves getting

electrocuted while trying to steal oil from the transformers. Transformer oil is used

primarily to cool and insulate high voltage transformers. But in Nairobi there are many

unscrupulous restaurants and market cooks who use it as “cooking oil.” They prefer to

acquire the stolen transformer oil on the black market rather than purchase real cooking

oil because it is cheaper and lasts longer. I had long heard of this dangerous practice

and it subsequently made me weary to eat in any public establishment. But I had not

seen what happens when a thief gets zapped in pursuit of this oil until one day it

happened in Dandora. Thankfully, I didn’t see the gruesome scene first hand, but I did

see the image that circulated on social media.

The picture, which showed up on my Twitter feed one morning, shows a young

man (a boy, really) hanging upside down from power lines in Dandora. His feet are

tangled in the lines and his limp body dangles several feet from the pavement below. He

has no shoes and his shorts are snagged on some part of the apparatus, which is

tugging them away from his bony hips. Gravity has pulled his shirt off; it now hangs

down from his lifeless arms by its sleeves, exposing his sinewy torso to the early

morning sun. He must have died in the night and dangled there for hours waiting to be

discovered. A crowd gathers below with their cell phones pointed at his contorted

lifeless body hanging in the morning light. This grisly image was beamed through

Kenyan social media. It was commented upon and these comments by-and-large

reaffirmed that he got what he deserved: death by electrocution – a just penalty for

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“milking” oil from the transformer, for stealing light from the people. There was little, if

any, compassion for the boy who had died trying to undoubtedly earn a little money to

stay alive.

Despite the revolting scene that appeared on Twitter that morning, and the

seeming lack of compassion from commenters, I had gained a certain appreciation for

the approbation leveled at any kind of thieves by the populace. I had been robbed and

in the face of a complete mistrust of the police, and in the darkest corner of my mind -

had wished those who robbed me would meet a similarly terrible end. I felt this even

though they were just kids themselves. I also knew something of the grinding frustration

of losing power in the middle of a project. Here is an excerpt from my fieldwork journal

that conveys a situation when we lost power during a night recording session.

* * *

The lights flickered twice and went out. The silent darkness of the power outage took no more than a second to arrive. Annoyingly ill-timed and uninvited, night fluttered into the studio jerking our recording session to an abrupt halt. For a moment, at the lights’ first spasm, each of us had still briefly entertained a glimmer of hope that the current would hold; that our session might go on. After all, power surges are common and don’t always precede an outage. Sometimes the lights simply twitch, then go right on lighting. The half beat between shudders when a shiver of uncertainty rolls through the studio and we collectively hold our breath is a nervous ritual – an anticipatory affect we share in the moment. That instant when the studio electricity trembles on the brink between keeping the session going and calling it a night is a flash of hope. Then in an instant the inevitable realization sets in that the power is really gone. And it’s not coming back. There was a chorus of groans, a curse word or two as we sat in the puddle of cold silence that had just been thrown on our session. The energy that just seconds earlier had fueled us as we scribbled out verses in exercise books - as we practiced delivering lines to the blasting, looped

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beat - was now just a trace. Vanished. We remained silent in its residue, finally feeling the throbbing flow of blood to our aching, tomato-red eyes. “Eriko,” Blak says after a minute of silence. “Maaaan, this sucks!”

* * * The most probable explanation for the power outage described above is that the

electricity was temporarily turned off by the government as part of a Load Shedding

scheme. It could have been that the meter wasn’t fed, or that a boy had been

electrocuted trying to milk the transformer. Regardless of the cause, it put an abrupt end

to our recording session and our night. Not knowing when or if the lights might come

back on, Blak and I left the studio and hopped on a matatu heading to the west side of

the city where we both lived. We would have to return to the studio another time and

redo what wasn’t saved. It was an anticlimactic end to an otherwise excitingly creative

night working on a new project. At least as we left, the cursed cacophony of the chirping

meters had been momentarily cut along with the power. In the silent darkness we were

able to talk and plan for another day.

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CHAPTER 6 BLAK

Figure 6-1. MC Blak from 2014 documentary, “Maono Ya Kah”

2010: The first time I met Blak was behind the Nairobi National Theatre, in an

area called bakawala.1 His hair was closely shorn and his face clean-shaven; he wore a

faded polo shirt with blue jeans. He was sitting on the grass with his back against the

bricks, covered in shade cast by a large security wall. Like several other artists who use

this space as a daily gathering place to talk, coordinate activities, and if lucky sell some

of their art, Blak was engaged in a casual conversation with friends, passing cigarettes

and the occasional joint between themselves and chatting about the news of the day.

Not knowing any of them, I sat down nearby.

A little while later two plainclothes police officers suddenly appeared from around

the corner of the theatre. They proceeded to pat down all of the Kenyans who were

present, but ignored me entirely. Finding no contraband they left after a few minutes.

When they were gone several faces cracked smiles, letting a little nervous laughter leak

out. Blak was quick to point out the police were “scared” because I was a foreigner. The

others nodded in agreement. That, he explained, is why the police didn’t search me or

try to extort a bribe from the Kenyans in my presence. “They don’t know who you are;

1 From the English “Back Wall.” This refers to the large brick security wall behind the National Theatre.

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they think you might be an important person. And they’re embarrassed to talk to you

because their English is bad,” Blak said. Many Nairobi policemen are not Nairobians,

but recruited from upcountry locals. Thus, many younger Nairobians perceive them as

uncouth country bumpkins, deserving of ridicule.

2011: A year later I was back in Nairobi, and attending a party in a nice

Westlands apartment provided to employees of a Swedish NGO in Kenya. Blak’s hair

was a little bushier and he hadn’t shaved in a while. I immediately recognized him from

that time at the National Theatre. He also remembered me and we laughed about the

encounter with the policemen who refused to pat me down. Blak chuckled as he

reiterated the prestige that “those country policemen” still held for mzungu like me.2

There was a stockpile of cold beer at the party and as the night wore on Blak

became increasingly intoxicated. When it was time to leave the party, several people

tried politely telling Blak that the party was over. But Blak refused to put the bottle down.

Finally, it was left to his long time friend, MC Kah, to take the bottle from Blak. A couple

years later when I reminded Blak of that night, he agreed that Kah was probably the

only one at the party who could wrestle the bottle out of his drunken hands without

getting punched in the face.

We left the party and got in a matatu heading to town. I sat in front with the

driver, a plywood partition separating us from the passengers in the back. Somewhere

on our way to town a fight broke out behind us, prompting the driver to screech to a halt,

jump out and rush around to the side door. Next, he forcefully removed Blak from the

2 The word for “white person” used throughout East Africa. It’s not usually intended as derogatory, but a playful way of addressing someone who is an obvious outsider. Although it can be used in a negative sense, depending on the person and the tone.

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vehicle and the two proceeded to hurl a brief but acrimonious set of insults at each other

before Blak staggered over to the passenger window where I remained seated. “Hey

man, let’s go, man! I know a club we can walk to,” Blak slurred. He was barely able to

stay upright, but still intent to keep drinking. I politely declined, telling him I’d prefer to go

home. After all, I hardly knew him and common sense in Nairobi was to not trust people

you didn’t know. That was no problem, he assured me, shaking my hand before

stumbling off down the road beneath the orange glow of the streetlights.

Over subsequent encounters Blak and I came to share several more experiences

and develop a shared knowledge about a set of events and people. These encounters

and this knowledge is the subject of this chapter, which engages theoretical debates

about the relationship between anthropologists and their subjects, and how that

relationship impacts the process of ethnographic fieldwork.3 The purpose of doing this is

three-fold. Firstly, I wish to give a detailed account of one of the hip-hop personalities

who has been part of the revolutionary hip-hop community in Nairobi from the

beginning. It’s impossible to profile all of the diverse personalities and backgrounds that

come together under the imagined community of revolutionary hip-hop in Nairobi.

Instead, I seek to give a glimpse of one that had an impact on how I came to

understand hip-hop, while portraying as much of his thoughts about hip-hop and life in

Nairobi as I can.

Secondly, this chapter seeks to demonstrate the importance of time and tempo to

ethnographic fieldwork. Often, and this is the critique that Fabian (1983) made in his

3 Several anthropologists have taken an approach to ethnography that privileges an extended conversation with a single informant (Dumont 1978; Griaule 1965; Fabian 1996; de la Cadena 2015).

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book on the topic, anthropologists strip time and its effects from their ethnographic

renderings, thereby presenting their subjects as temporal others. The idea that an

ethnographic encounter occurred within and was subject to the effects of an

intersubjective time – coevalness, as Fabian called it – is often excluded from

anthropological accounts. Instead, the temporal backdrop to most ethnography is

relegated to the preface, acknowledgements section, or introduction, and usually stated

as a matter of fact: “this research was carried out from this month to this month, and

again from this year to this year.” Little attempt is made within the ethnographic

narrative to make the passage of time take on flesh for the reader, nor to show how time

plus experience is an equation that heavily influences the questions we ask and the

answers we get. The effect is that information, and the people who provide it, is

presented as if it was gathered in a sort of eternal ethnographic present, outside the

structure of time.

A narrative approach, such as the one this chapter takes, attempts to lay bare

the workings of time on this research project. In particular, I show how the development

of my relationship with Blak over a shared, intersubjective time, one characterized by

my coming and going as well as the lulls and rushes experienced in the field, inflected

both of our understandings of the nature of our relationship and type of ethnographic

project I pursued. Rabinow describes the way that the passage of time experienced

together with an informant helps to create a shared experience that is critical to the

understanding of how ethnography is practiced within the structures of time:

As time wears on, anthropologist and informant share a stock of experiences upon which they hope to rely with less self-reflection in the future. The common understanding they construct is fragile and thin, but it is upon this shaky ground that anthropological inquiry proceeds” (39)

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This shared set of experiences and the mutual understandings of their meaning,

however thin their mutuality, is what I hope to bring out in the narrative of this chapter.

Blak and I built and grew our repertoire of common sense understandings of the world

we shared through a series of shared experiences over time and in different

temporalities.

Although the development of our relationship didn’t happen in a uniform temporal

experience, it did happen in relatively small steps. That is until the night of the robbery.

At its surface the impact of that event, including the accusation that a friend made that

Blak had planned the robbery, combined with my feeling of being betrayed at my most

vulnerable moment by a person I had come to believe would stand up in such a

situation, should have destroyed our relationship. This is the viewpoint of “negative

reciprocity” which sees theft as the antithesis of positive socially constructive reciprocity,

and thus something that should be destructive of social relationships. As it turned out,

the experience of theft and my resentment towards Blak for whatever part he had

played in it, led to a deeper intimacy in our friendship. Applied to Nairobi in general, I

wish to highlight that while the constant threat of crime is never “good” for society, it is

not something that can be seen as merely destructive of social relationships. Rather,

shared experiences of crime and the threat of crime can be forces that create and

enhance social bonds.

2012: The next time I saw Blak after the incident in which he was kicked out of

the Matatu, was a year later. He was sober now, he claimed. We were standing on the

roof of the Kitengela apartment taking a break from recording Night Session, and

watching planes fly in to the airport. In just a few days I’d be on one of those planes

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heading back to the U.S.A. and my alternate life as a graduate student. I didn’t want to

leave, and the unavoidability of my return to that other reality chaffed at me as I took in

the scene with Blak. Several more hours passed before we finally tracked down MC

Mutant and Kitu Sewer in a small beer den tucked into a dark corner not far from the

studio. After some cajoling Blak and I rousted our inebriated colleagues from the thrall

of drunken laughter and set off down the dusty road back to the studio. On our way we

stopped at a roadside stand to pick up a bundle of miraa, a commonly used legal

stimulant in Kenya (cf. Goldsmith 1994; Carrier 2007). Miraa was the key ingredient to

night sessions in the studio, as the leaves and their reddish stems would be wadded up

and stuffed into cheeks to keep awake and alert throughout the night. They also helped

“to build castles in your mind,” as one young artist described the focusing effects of the

stimulant. The leaves have a very distinctive smell, sweet and a little spicy, the aroma of

which never fails to take me back to those 2012 night sessions in Kitengela. After

returning to the studio with the leaves, we set to the task of writing lyrics for the song.

Each person staked out a corner of the studio with a piece of paper and a pen and

began scribbling out punch lines as the song’s instrumental played on repeat. I still have

a stain in my notebook from when Blak drooled leafy green saliva onto the page as he

focused on crafting his lines.

* * *

The result of that night’s work was a song called Night Session, a musically

sparse recording whose only instrumentation is two acoustic guitar tracks, a refrain

“sung” by myself, and verses contributed by Blak, MC Mutant, and Kitu Sewer. I came

up with the theme and music for the song as a response to my experience visiting the

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studio in Kitengela. During previous weeks, I had made several trips to Kitengela with

the naive hope that I could stay at the studio for several hours during the afternoon and

leave early enough in the evening to make the long commute back to Nairobi before it

became too dangerous to be out. Each time I had attempted to do this my plans were

dashed by the actual rhythms of the studio, which really only comes to life at night.

That’s not to say that the studio is silent during the day. If the power was on, the

speakers were sure to be blasting beats and there would be a steady stream of people

flowing in and out. The problem, from my perspective, was that it was too crowded, and

too difficult to work on the collaborative task of writing and recording music with just a

few people. On a number of occasions I watched as the hours slipped away, waiting on

the actual business of recording to get started, only to resign myself to the fact that once

again I would be catching only a few fitful hours of sleep in the studio before waking up,

dirty and tired, ready to begin the long dusty commute back to Nairobi.

Energy and a focus came with the solitude of nighttime recording sessions.

Something subversive about working while the world around you sleeps, the ultimate

denial of the society that goes to work day in and day out, subordinated to the time-

discipline of the capitalist working world. In the frenzied night writing sessions, cheeks

stuffed chipmunk-like with miraa, eyes bloodshot and music pounding against the walls,

it felt like being at the center of something singularly important. There is a radical affect

that you share with those people you are immediately with during the recording process,

and to an extent, all others who have experienced the same ritual. This shared feeling is

not visible to others, but the conspiratorial wink you all share only makes the experience

more compelling. I can’t say for certain what the precise motivations are for every

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Kenyan I knew who joined and stuck with hip-hop through the long lean years. But they

surely must lie in studio sessions like these, where you experience the thrill and

euphoria of the creative process. If the only motivation to becoming a hip-hop musician

in Kenya was to chase this feeling, and the ecstatic burst it gives, I could understand it.

The excitement of recording Night Session began to dissipate in the early

morning hours, once everyone had contributed his verse. It was late, but still an hour or

two from dawn. I had already booked a hotel nearby, but everyone in the studio

adamantly rejected the idea that I would walk anywhere at this hour due to safety

concerns. So, once again we lay down on the floor of the studio and waited for daylight.

When the sun did come up and the town began to wake up, I walked with Blak to my

hotel room. I offered him to come stay, since I knew that MC Mutant and Kitu Sewer

would be going to their homes nearby.

We reached the hotel and received a sideways look from the woman at the front

desk as the two of us stumbled into my bedroom together. I can imagine what she

assumed was going on: a rich white tourist and his Kenyan lover. I was too tired to care.

We shared a single small bed, grabbing what sleep we could until a loud banging on the

door roused us. Blak jumped up and went to the door. It was the woman. She wanted to

“make sure I was okay” and barged past Blak into the room. She was obviously hoping

to find something scandalous. Instead she found me fully clothed on top of the covers,

groggily peering up at her. Looking sheepish, she asked if I was all right, then scurried

out. Blak and I went back to sleep.

Several hours later, Blak and I were eating our first meal of the day and laughed

about what that woman must have thought. It was still strange for me to see men

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sharing beds or curling up next to each other on the floors of studios, but I understood

that it was common to share close quarters in Kenya, especially where space is tight.

Moreover, the dangers of moving at night after a certain hour frequently necessitate

sleepovers between friends of the same sex. There is no stigma to it. Nevertheless, the

combination of sharing the experience of recording as well as a bed – and the co-

conspiratorial moment under the gaze of the hotel concierge – was a moment that, in

my eyes at least, changed the nature of my relationship with Blak. I think it changed for

him too, because as we sat there eating our beans and rice he began to open up to me

about things that I didn’t talk about with other informants.

Relationships were rarely something that I spoke about with collaborators in the

field, beyond maybe knowing who somebody was married to or sleeping with. But Blak

began to describe the heartache he was feeling over a recent breakup with an American

woman he had met while she was working on an academic research project in Arusha,

Tanzania (where Blak was staying at the time with Pete and Charlotte O’Neal). After

beginning their relationship in Arusha, Blak had gone to stay with her in the United

States, even meeting her family. But according to Blak they had put some pressure on

him to try to make some life changes, such as cutting his dreadlocks, going to a trade

school for a certificate to work on electronics, and eventually find a suitable job. Blak

made an honest effort to do this, he said, but was unable to follow through with job.

Meanwhile he had returned to Kenya and believed that he and his American girlfriend

were in a long distance relationship. Only recently had he found out that she was

pregnant with an Egyptian man’s baby. It had torn him apart, and was something that he

brought up several times in the subsequent years of our relationship together.

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The next night we all met again and recorded a second song. This one was

about empires, about how they come and go, rise and fall in the broad sweep of history.

At least, that’s how I pitched the song’s theme to the others. The recording of the

“Empire Song” and Night Session were not planned, but came about as the result of my

visits to the Kitengela studio, conversations I was having at the time, both with my

Kenyan friends, but also as a result of what I was reading and listening to at the time.

The fact that Blak was part of recording the two songs was purely the result of our

chance run-in at the National Theatre. In short, the impromptu recording sessions

represent the improvisational nature of both ethnographic fieldwork and how most hip-

hop recording sessions that I observed were carried out.

The subtle complexities and negotiations that exist between anthropologists and

their informants in the field, and how we approach the challenges and opportunities they

create, are firmly entrenched aspects of anthropological discourse. For example, in his

compellingly written narrative about his relationship with Ali, a Moroccan informant-

turned-friend, Rabinow (1977) gives a thoughtful commentary on the nature of

ethnographic fieldwork itself and the ever-present dialectic between ethnographer and

informant. One of Rabinow’s key insights has to do with the (tempo)ralities in which

fieldwork unfolds; what he referred to as a “dialectic between reflection and immediacy”

(38). Rabinow’s point was that in the field time is accelerated. The time we are granted

for reflection and incorporation of experience into our theoretical understandings of our

fieldwork objectives is significantly condensed. Therefore, not only is ethnographic

fieldwork highly improvisational, but requires that the improvising be done at an

intensified speed.

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In a more recent treatment of temporality and ethnographic fieldwork, Cerwonka

and Malkki (2007) make a similar argument about the improvisational nature of

fieldwork and the distinct temporalities to which it gives rise. While I doubt they disagree

with Rabinow’s point about accelerated time for processing information in the field, they

do complicate the notion of a single accelerated temporality governing fieldwork by

pointing out that the temporal rhythms ethnographers experience can shift frequently in

the field: “The tempo of ethnographic research (like most knowledge production) is not

the steady linear accumulation of more and more insight. Rather, it is characterized by

rushes and lulls in activity and understanding, and it requires constant revision of

insights gained earlier” (5).

This describes my relationship with Blak very well. Over the timespan that I knew

him while conducting research for this project our interactions were brief and cursory at

first, punctuating long absences in which neither of us likely thought much about the

other. But, later we began to have deeper engagements with each other. These were

still sporadic and unpredictable encounters, but when they happened there was more of

a sense of closeness, as we continued to build a mutual understanding of our

relationship. As Rabinow described his relationship with Ali, “there began to emerge a

mutually constructed ground of experience and understanding, a realm of tenuous

common sense which was constantly breaking down, being patched-up and re-

examined” (39). The shared catalogue of experiences and their interpretation that Blak

and I endeavored to build over time was part of an ongoing mutual engagement, one

that we both partook of for our own ends, and with which we each likely ascribed our

own wildly divergent meanings.

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In addition to this insight about the uneven temporal unfolding that occurs while

in the field, there is also the related aspect of temporality, improvisation and fieldwork,

that comes into play when an ethnographic project is carried out over the course of

several visits where the incorporation of experience and ethnographic reflections about

a place continue even while the ethnographer is removed from that place. As I came to

find out over several trips to Kenya: even the best-laid plans for fieldwork are dashed by

complications brought on by distance and the unsynchronized temporal rhythms of

academic research cycles trying to match up with grounded social realities unfolding at

their own stubborn pace. Every time I returned to the United States from Kenya, I kept a

picture in my mind of how things were when I left and how they had unfolded during my

stay. As I reflected on it all from afar, I created a set of expectations about how I would

continue my research when I returned. But in the ephemeral existence of Nairobi hip-

hop nothing ever remained as I left it: this studio had closed; that studio moved to the

other side of Nairobi; these guys were no longer working together; that producer found

Jesus and turned to gospel music. Whatever the circumstances were when I left, it

seemed that everything had changed in unpredictable ways by the time I returned, and

it confounded what I thought I would be doing. Every time I returned to the field, it felt

like I was returning to a home where everything I had worked so hard to organize before

leaving had been re-arranged by some unknown stranger, and I now had to start the

work or re-organizing everything again, knowing that I would never be able to get it to

appear exactly as it was.

In such a situation, I naturally tended to seek out anything resembling

consistency with the world that I had left. There were a few people who were important

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markers of constancy with the past Nairobi I had known; people whose help I sought,

most of the time with sub-conscious motivations, to make sense of the changes that had

happened in the intervening year(s) and to help me re-enter the new world as it had

emerged while I was away. Blak was one of those constants for me. He had a

steadiness about himself, an ineffable quality that I interpreted as a strong moral

compass. I gravitated towards him. In a field of constant motion, of shifting personalities

and moving objects, Blak had become over the years, one of the few people I counted

on to provide some uniformity with the past.

But there was another quality that Blak possessed, which influenced my level of

comfort with him as an informant. Blak, much like Rabinow’s informant, Ali, is an

insider’s outsider. This independence, this standoffishness certainly influenced the

growth of our relationship. Indeed, it fits the standard profile of most close ethnographic

informants to be both part of the culture being observed and also at its margins. He is a

part of the revolutionary hip-hop community and has been since the beginning. He

knows and is friends with many members of Ukoo Flani Mau Mau, but is not a member

of the group himself. Being from Kibera, and ethnically Luo, he could never really

embrace the Mau Mau aesthetic of the Dandora rappers, which tended to be dominated

by Kikuyu members and lionize Kikuyu heroes. Growing up he would commute to

Dandora and participate in the hip-hop there, and would intermingle with the Dandora

based Mau Mau hip-hoppers, but he was never a full member. Nor did he wish to be.

He kept himself at arms length, only getting close with people like MC Kah.

Earlier in his life as a rapper, Blak had battled in organized competitions and

even won a competition in Nairobi sponsored by the Clubhouse back in 2003 or 2004

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(he couldn’t remember which year). But the major event that validated his artistry had

come a year or two before that when he won an international poetry competition for

submitting a poem about the impacts of HIV/AIDS. He describes the chance encounter

that led to him submitting to the competition, which was based in the Netherlands:

I had split with my crew and Mom wanted me home cause I had been staying in all these neighborhoods. I was staying in Kangemi with friends then Mom decided I should come back home and I came back home, went to my uncle’s Cyber [Cafe]. Now I was helping, cleaning the place, making people coffee, tea and everything. And then one day I went in the morning and when I went in the morning I started cleaning and did everything. Then a certain lady came in, she was Dutch. She came in and I served her and she was doing her thing and she stayed there for long, from like 7:30 in the morning until 2pm. And then she asked me – because I was listening to some music – she asked me what I was doing. I said I was listening to some hip-hop. She’s like “Ok, there’s a friend of mine who does hip-hop and I’ll come with her tomorrow and introduce you to her. And she came with her the next day. When she came she introduced me to some website called “baobob connections.” So there was a competition on the site and she told me I can enter, and I entered. So then I did it and I won and I was called. So the whole family took me to the airport thinking I’ll never come back again (laughing).

For Blak, who had never travelled outside of Kenya, the opportunity to travel to

Amsterdam was exciting and held the promise that going abroad holds for so

many Kenyans. He and his family both assumed that he would be able to gain

financially from the trip and return to Kibera with money to help the household.

But while the travel, lodging, and per diem expenses were covered by the

Dutch organization, there was no payout for winning the competition. So Blak

returned to Kenya as broke as when he left. Recalling that moment, Blak says

that it really confused him that he wasn’t compensated for his art. Moreover, he

had to deal with the pressure of his family and friends in Kibera who had the

same expectations of monetary gain in Europe. “That’s why you get high, you get

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into drugs and get confused,” Blak told me, recalling that he was even mocked by

people he knew in Kibera, who called him stupid for coming back with nothing

and not staying in the Netherlands.

In recalling the constant desire from almost everyone around him to leave

the difficult life in Kibera to go abroad, Blak begins to philosophize about the false

promise of a “materialistic life.”

I’m not from a rich family [but] I’ve seen the life of the rich. I don’t just want the material life, I know it. Maybe if I had my material [life] like people wanted me, like my family and everyone, maybe I would not be here right now, I would have been dead and given them the material, that’s what they want. So I don’t regret not having money. Maybe if I had it maybe I would not be here. I wouldn’t have met you. I wouldn’t have met a lot of friends. I always tell them, maybe I would be doing something else I don’t want. There’s a reason why I am around. Most people think I should not be around, ya know? [Blak laughs and we both understand that he is referring to his issues with alcohol] But nothing in my life I’ve planned for, but they’ve happened according to how I want them.

2014: It was a ten-minute walk from the bridge where the robbery took place. I

was sandwiched between the two green-suited garbage men who had bravely chased

the thieves away from me and into the dark brush of the river. The third garbage man

drove the stinky lumbering truck in the street beside us, somehow keeping our exact

pace. The two men were talking to me, but I wasn’t hearing them. I was soaking wet, my

shirt ripped open and my eyes glazed over. Blak followed at a distance behind us, still

carrying General Chizee’s rubber sandal in the soft rain. When we arrived at the police

station, the garbage men all boarded their truck and left Blak and me at the entrance in

front of a stern looking police officer.

We entered the police station together, though we still hadn’t spoken a word to

each other. After checking in at the front desk we were directed down a dimly lit hallway

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to room number 4. As we walked down the hallway there was a pungent odor of urine

emanating from a nearby latrine. We passed a storage room with the doors left open.

Inside was a cache of police weapons, a rack of rifles and several boxes of bullets. We

entered room number 4 and sat off to the side of a wooden table used as a desk for a

police officer presently taking the information of a young woman who had also been

robbed. Blak and I sat on a hard wooden bench, waiting in silence. From the corner of

my eye I could see Blak still holding onto the sandal.

I explained the details of the robbery while the officer made notes. Blak

occasionally interjected to clarify some detail. After taking all of my information, the

officer handed me ticket with a number on it. He explained that I would have to return to

the police station the next day with the ticket to retrieve my abstract detailing the crime

and the items lost. He then dismissed us.

Earlier in the night we had passed a row of taxis parked in front of the National

Theatre, just a very short distance from the bridge. One of the drivers asked if we

needed a ride, and I told him that we’d just be walking a short distance. He said it was

dangerous to walk by the bridge at night, but I had rather arrogantly dismissed him as

just trying an angle to get the fare. Now, I had to return to the taxis and ask them for a

ride. The same taxi driver was waiting when I approached. It was humiliating to explain

to him that after ignoring his warning I had proceeded to get robbed and now needed a

ride to my home, but had no money on me to pay him. He would have to take my word

that I would pay him when I reached my apartment. As we got in the car the driver

proceeded to scold Blak who should have known better than to walk there at night,

especially with a white person. He told me that I was not the first victim he had given a

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ride to. He said I was lucky; that at least two other times he gave victims rides to the

hospital after a robbery had occurred on the bridge. He said one man he took to the

hospital had deep machete wounds and was disfigured for life.

While we were in the car, Blak’s phone rang twice. The first time, it was MC Kah

who had been waiting for us at the concert. Blak explained to him what happened then

handed the phone to me. I told Kah what happened, and made sure to condemn

everyone who ran away, instead of trying to help me when my life was in danger. I was

pretty harsh and I said it in front of Blak, who I still hadn’t said a word to since the

robbery. I was angry. I wanted to cut him and implying that he was a coward and no

friend of mine in a conversation with his friend, MC Kah was my way of doing so.

The second call Blak received was from General Chizee. I didn’t speak to him.

But after Blak had talked with him, he turned to me. “Hey, man?” he said timidly.

“Chizee wants to know if we can turn around and bring his sandal back to him in town?

Can we do that?” I almost laughed out loud at what seemed like an outrageous request.

“No,” I finally spoke my first word to Blak since the robbery. “Tell him he can come get it

from you, if he wants it.” We passed the rest of the ride home in silence.

The next few days and even weeks after the robbery changed the nature of my

fieldwork and my relationship with Blak. A friend of mine from Dandora, who I spoke

with the next day, was convinced that the robbery was a set up. He was sure that Blak,

Chizee and Ala Ola had planned to take me by the bridge and alerted some thieves

they knew. It wasn’t far fetched if you were familiar with even a small portion of the

stories that get told everyday about Nairobbery. I could believe that Chizee and Ala Ola

would do something like that. I regarded them as generally untrustworthy characters.

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Both of them were “hustlers,” by my estimation. But it was really hard to think that Blak

could participate in such a scheme. Especially since we’d known each other for years.

Nevertheless, I began to think more and more about it and try to piece together what

had happened. When we had boarded the matatu in Dandora Chizee and I had sat next

to each other, but Ala Ola had sat in the back rather than in the open seat next to us.

Why? I thought it was strange at the time, but now it seemed that it would afford him the

opportunity to make a call to inform his friends to be prepared to meet us. We could

have taken a matatu from downtown to the club, but Blak asked us to come meet him at

the National Theatre so we could walk together? Had he made that suggestion for the

purpose of having us walk by that dangerous spot?

The uncertainty and fear that I had been set up by these people caused me to

withdraw from fieldwork, and from meeting with others. I didn’t want to go back to the

studio in Dandora. I didn’t feel confident, especially if some of the people who knew

when I was coming and where I walked might be willing to set up another robbery. But

even if the robbery had not been planned, I still felt that I could no longer trust that being

with a group of people would protect me. In addition to my fear, I was angry and didn’t

want to go back to the studio and have to see or be anywhere near General Chizee or

Ala Ola.

As I withdrew and confined myself in the safety and comfort of my apartment,

Blak started to become a daily visitor. He came the day after the robbery and told me

that he had gone back to the place where the robbery had occurred and even walked

down by the river to see if any of my belongings had been left behind. He told me he

saw a group a “very bad men” down there hiding in a culvert and quickly left the scene.

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While Blak was still at my apartment, my wife, who is Kenyan came home and scolded

Blak for taking me through a place he knew to be dangerous. Blak seemed to feel

genuinely embarrassed. The fact that he came to my apartment and had gone back to

the place to search for my belongings were gestures that Blak made, which became the

foundation of a new relationship. In fact over the next several weeks, Blak came over

almost everyday. We decided we would work on a project, that we would write an album

of ten songs and then find a studio to record it in. Although our daily meetings were

supposed to be about writing the album, we spent time talking about many different

topics and sharing stories.

It was a few weeks after the robbery in town that I visited the home Blak shared

with his mother at the bottom of the Kibera valley. Kibera is a five-minute walk from the

relatively affluent Jamhuri estate where I lived at the time. From any vantage point

above the vast depression in which the slum lies it is easy to see why Kibera is called

“Chocolate City.” Looking down upon the huge settlement as it slopes towards the

Nairobi River one sees only a patchwork of chocolate-colored mabati – the rusted

corrugated metal rooftops that top the thousands of dwellings in the valley. The density

with which these structures are packed together hides the ground from view, creating

the impression of a large brown carpet covering the valley.

Since Kibera is so close to Jamhuri, Blak and I would sometimes take the same

matatu from town. Once, when Blak got off at his stop I asked him if he lived near the

road or if he had to walk a ways to get to his home. He laughed, “I live deep in the

ghetto, man!” Like other slum settlements, Kibera reveals the topography of wealth and

poverty in Nairobi. Whereas wealthy neighborhoods are located on higher ground to the

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west and north of the city center, the slums of Kibera, Mathare, and parts of Dandora

are all built on the sloping banks of rivers and swampy mosquito-infested, flood-prone

marshlands. Blak’s home sits at the very bottom of Kibera valley, adjacent to the

trickling, rubbish-strewn Nairobi River. Therefore, when Blak speaks of living deep in the

ghetto, he is referencing both the “depth” of his poverty and the physical terrain onto

which that poverty is mapped out.

Earlier that morning Blak had climbed up out of his home near the valley floor,

crossed the railroad tracks to enter Jamhuri, cut behind the construction of a new multi-

story residential building, and walked up the street to my apartment. We spent the

morning together talking, playing music and drinking sweet milky Kenyan tea with

buttered bread. When his phone rang, interrupting a writing session, it was his mother

telling him he was needed at home. A delivery of lumber had just arrived and Blak was

called to help carry it down to their home from the road where the truck dropped it. But

more than just the labor, Blak’s presence at home during the delivery was important as

he was expected as the man of the house to deal with the deliverymen as well as

provide extra security against theft of their new materials. Recent heavy rains had been

causing problems at his mother’s mud-walled dwelling next to the river. Blak’s mother

had been slowly saving money from her job as a washwoman at the University of

Nairobi to buy construction materials to shore up the house’s foundation and a second

level on the back, which she planned to rent for extra income. Unfortunately, materials

she had been stockpiling for the project had a tendency to “disappear” when not

constantly being watched.

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Hanging up the phone, Blak turned to me and asked if I’d come with him to meet

his mother. Sensing that the gesture of paying a visit to his home and meeting his

mother was a significant one I agreed, despite my reservations about going back into

unknown places with people whose motives I didn’t completely trust. After all, in my

mind, there was still a possibility that Blak had been part of the robbery on Museum Hill.

Nonetheless, the significance of Blak’s invitation was such that I believed paying him

the courtesy of accepting it was worth putting aside my misgivings. So I agreed to go,

making him promise that we would return before dark. Blak then disclosed something I

found surprising. He said, “MC Kah is the only other person who has known my

mother’s home, you know that, Eriko? No one else has ever been there, or even knows

my place.”

During one of our conversations at my apartment I brought up how it was really

hard to get to know Kenyans. I told him that in Kenya it felt different than in the USA. I

said that Kenyans are very nice at a surface level, but it can be really difficult to

penetrate beyond that. People aren’t as open here, I told him. I was taking out some

personal frustration and I realized that at the end of what became an extended rant

about Kenyans and their fakeness, I had brought up the example of the robbery. It

hadn’t been my intent to imply that Blak was one of the people I put in that category, but

I couldn’t help feeling like I had shot a barbed arrow at him with that comment. He

paused for a moment and seemed to think about what I had said. When he began to

speak, he didn’t try do defend himself against my implied accusation. Instead, he

offered his thoughts on closeness and friendship:

You have to get close, know each other’s problems, start visiting each other at home, know each other’s homes. Not so many people know each

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other’s homes. We broke those barriers, me and MC Kah, we went to that level. We know each other’s parents and even they have our phone numbers. Like if I’m not around, my mother just calls MC Kah, always disturbs him. Just getting that close, you know each other. But not deeply, deeply. But sometimes you have to stay together to know one another. It’s not easy for people to just get close like that.

Pausing after he spoke, Blak then laughed as he said, “Eriko, nobody on the streets

knows my real name, and nobody in my home knows my rap name!” Then, he smiled

and said, “but MC Kah, he knows my real name. You know, sometimes we used to get

funny and call each other by our real names [Blak laughs]. Like I used to call Kah “Oh,

hello, Samwell!” And Kah would answer, “Oh, Hey Odhiambo!” [Blak laughs].

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CHAPTER 7

GAZA

Figure 7-1. Mbombrace Christopher, an actor from the Civo neighborhood in Kariobangi

South, prepares to shoot a scene for the music video “Who We Are.”

One bright December day just before Christmas 2014, while taking a break from

shooting the music video for “Who We Are,” Mbombrace Christopher had us all laughing

as he told the story of the faceless corpse, which had appeared one night outside his

girlfriend, Leah’s house in Gaza.

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Figure 7-2. Railway line that goes from Dandora to town everyday. To the right is the

Civil Servants (Civo) section of Kariobangi Souty, which borders Dandora’s southern edge.

Gaza is what locals call the section of Civo (Civil Servants, named for a section

of housing originally designed to house Nairobi’s civil servants in the Kariobangi South

estate). Gaza abuts the railway line, next to a marshy area where thick hyacinth and

arrowroot form a canopy over a dirty palimpsest of plastic bags, discarded bottles, and

murky sludge. The raised railway line dissects the swamp in two, creating a thin corridor

of green lowland vegetation on either side of the tracks. Entering Gaza from the South

requires cautiously descending the slope of a narrow footpath, crossing over the mud by

delicately hopping over three or four half-sunken stones and finally landing on piece of

plywood. You then make your way up the embankment, walk along the footpath next to

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the tracks for about four hundred paces, and once again traverse a small ribbon of

swamp on the north side of the tracks before finally entering Gaza.

Figure 7-3. Director, Johnson Kyalo, prepares to shoot a scene for the video, “Who We

Are.” In the background, a typical-looking apartment building in Civo.

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How did this place come to be called Gaza? I’ve never visited the Gaza strip, but neither

have those who appropriated the name for this small corner of Eastlands. We both only

know it from images and stories in the news. But when I first visited this neighborhood

with Chris I understood the connection immediately. Like images of the occupied

territories of Palestine, large concrete buildings, many of which are unoccupied,

populate the landscape. Their concrete columns go up three stories before sprouting a

bouquet of rebar, resembling skeletal fingers reaching out from the grave. Below these

concrete carcasses rubble and stacked stones lay in dusty heaps; played on by local

children, and sat on by breaking workers.

Figure 7-4. Mbombrace Christopher acting during a scene for the video, “Who We Are.”

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Only, this Gaza isn’t a war-zone – at least not officially. And the buildings don’t

look the way they do because of bombs dropped from on high, or from mortars flung by

occupying tanks. And to call these structures abandoned would be a misnomer. They

are unfinished. Someone had some money and started to build an apartment complex,

but something happened – school fees, sickness, a wedding, the death of a relative –

and the money to finish construction just wasn’t there. Or, maybe there was a dispute

over the land the building was on, so construction was stopped midway through.

Figure 7-5. Mombrace Christopher preparing for a scene for the video, “Who We Are.”

In his lap is a bag of glucose powder intended to mimic the heroin that is often rolled up into joints and smoked in Nairobi.

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Figure 7-6. Local children pose for a photograph in Civo. Notice the building in the

foreground (right) has rebar sprouting from it. In the background (left) an unfinished apartment building.

The logic of building a structure here is: you do what you can when you can. “Haba

na haba hujaza kibaba” goes the Swahili proverb. Little by little will fill the measure. This

logic seems apt for the construction of many of the buildings in Gaza. First, you get the

land and immediately put something on it – a small shack, a foundation - anything so

another developer or squatter doesn’t grab it. Then you proceed to build as the money

becomes available: floor-by-floor, room-by-room. Haba na haba hujaza kibaba.

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Figure 7-7. Erik Timmons playing guitar for several local children on the concrete slab

where a faceless corpse had appeared one night.

On the day of the video shoot we found ourselves taking a break in the shadows of one

of these unfinished structures. It was a hot day as it typically is in Kenya at that time of

the year and we were feeling hungry and tired from shooting all morning. I played guitar

while we waited for the refreshments to be brought by Leah.

As we were sipping on orange Fanta and devouring Samosa’s we’d bought from a

local vendor, Chris pointed to a slab of concrete just meters away and began to tell a

story. “Last week we came to find a man had been shot and killed there. He was shot in

the face and very bloody. He laid there for almost a whole day, because, you know,

here in Gaza the police don’t care…” Thus Chris took center stage and, using his talent

for talking, he told the story of the faceless corpse.

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Figure 7-8. Mbombrace Christopher during a break entertaining us with his story.

A man had been shot in the face and it was difficult to see exactly who he was. But the

neighbors were all sure that it was a certain Luo man who lived nearby. They called the

man’s phone and there was no answer. They tried several more times and there was

still no answer. They naturally assumed that their suspicions were confirmed. They

called the man’s family to come. Chris described how the man’s family, observing Luo

mourning customs, sat by the cadaver wailing throughout the afternoon and evening. As

Chris narrated the story he sat down beside where the body had been sprawled and

theatrically imitated how the ladies mourned. Occasionally flinging a wrist in the air, and

crinkling his face as if fighting off tears, Chris shook his head as he mimicked the

lugubrious moans of the sobbing women: Ohhhhhhhhhh…sniffle,

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sniffle…Ohhhhhhhhh…blow, blow…Woiyee! Woiyeeee! These gesticulations were met

with great enjoyment from the all in the audience causing Chris to break character and

join in the laughter himself.

Figure 7-9. Mbombrace Christopher making everyone laugh as he tells his story of the

faceless corpse.

Continuing the story, Chris explained that late in the night, as the women sat vigil

next to their deceased kin, they heard rustling in the nearby rushes. They were

dumbfounded when their dead relative emerged. In fact, they thought they were seeing

a ghost. They screamed and caused such a commotion chasing him away that their

neighbors had to come out to see what the commotion was. Eventually everyone

calmed down enough to find out what had happened.

It turned out the man who had been shot was another man who had been carrying

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on an affair with a local woman. Chris said that the husband found out and had him

killed. In order to bolster the claim that it was a case of a jilted lover, rather than a

common robbery, Chris mentioned that when the police finally did show up, they went

through the man’s pockets and found that nothing had been stolen. The Luo man who,

apparently, was still very much alive, had simply been out at a bar getting tipsy and

couldn’t manage to pick up his phone when his worried relatives had tried calling.

* * * In the story Chris told of a corpse and a case of mistaken identity, the image of the

blown out and bloody face seems particularly important. Hollow and cavernous where

the bullet ripped it open, the face had no eyes. In this it resembled the exterior of the

buildings, which stood over the dead man, conjuring images of war-zone Gaza. These

buildings too are missing faces. The essential structure stands, but the exterior walls

are incomplete. Looking at them from afar one sees right through giant holes where

windows will, in theory at least, one day be installed. How odd it is to see a house

without windows! How hollow; how lifeless, how expressionless they seem! Windowless

buildings have no eyes, so they don’t stare back. They don’t return our gaze. They

simply stand there, rising from the ground like tombstones marking the dead below.

In Gaza, death is never far away. Corpses appear; like mushrooms they sprout

overnight, attached to the crumbling concrete. They become woven into the fabric of the

community. They live in the stories told to pass time in the hot afternoon sun. They mark

the uncertainty of life in Eastlands.

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CHAPTER 8 CONCLUSION

This dissertation has shown how temporality is a central concern to the

experience and artistic expressions of younger Kenyan hip-hop artists in Nairobi,

Kenya. By presenting ethnographic evidence from fieldwork with what I refer to as the

“revolutionary hip-hop” community in Kenya, but particularly on a smaller group of artists

from the eastern Nairobi estate of Dandora, the preceding chapters discussed how

these young hip-hoppers engaged with multiple temporalities and worked to make their

own autonomous revolutionary time. In the Introduction I told the story of my first and

only trip to the home of my friend and revolutionary hip-hop artist, MC Blak. I described

how that invitation to his mother’s home in the aftermath of the robbery we had

experienced together had a profound impact on my fieldwork and, I believe, was a

significant gesture on the part of Blak. In telling about this event I posed the following

questions as central to the work this dissertation wished to accomplish: what does it

mean to be “revolutionary”? How and why is revolution deployed by hip-hoppers in

Nairobi? What is disclosed about generational relationships in Kenya when young hip-

hop artists can’t feel pride in telling their elders what they do? How do shared

experiences of crime and insecurity influence cultural production and social

relationships in Nairobi? The chapters of this dissertation have provided some answers

to these questions, but also left more work to do. I will now briefly review what these

chapters have accomplished and the questions that remain unanswered.

With regards to the questions of what is “revolutionary” and how young Kenyan

rappers from Nairobi use this concept, the first half of the dissertation provided several

answers. Chapter 2 explored the idea of revolution, turning to theoretical conceptions of

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the concept by Marx and Benjamin. I drew on two key aspects from their writing on

revolutionary movements: 1) that revolutions seek to interrupt the flow of time (e.g.

Benjamin 1969); and 2) that revolutions often draw on the past to do so (e.g. Marx

1963). Using the song and video for “Angalia Saa” (Watching Time), I proposed that the

use of revolution by the creators of this work demonstrates these essential

characteristics of revolution. The video sought to interrupt the flow of Kenya’s national

time, which had forgotten the Mau Mau heroes whose sacrifice helped lead to the birth

of the nation, and the video drew on images from the Mau Mau past in order for the

artists to, as Marx wrote, “borrow from [other revolutions] names, battle cries and

costumes in order to present the new scene of world history” (15). The “new scene of

world history” that hip-hop artists wished to present in “Angalia Saa” was a vision of

youth from the lower-income estates of Nairobi, still in bondage and seeking freedom

through a revolutionary movement.

By drawing an explicit connection between the Mau Mau struggle and their own

as young Kenyans in the 21st Century the creators of this work attempted to insert

themselves into a revolutionary temporality that was autonomous from Kenyan national

history. Other scholars who have worked on the Mau Mau hip-hop group have given

differing interpretations of the relationship between the original Mau Mau and the

rappers from Dandora. Koster (2013) sees the rappers as continuing the revolutionary

struggle of the Mau Mau, while Mwangi (2010) doesn’t see the activities of Dandora hip-

hop artists as revolutionary at all. In Chapter 2 I discuss both of these interpretations,

arguing that the revolutionary aspect of this hip-hop has little to do with political activism

and more to do with attempting to redirect the flow of time.

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The insights of Marx and Benjamin on revolution were critical to the interpretation

I offered in Chapter Two. However, the connection is only made at the broadest

theoretical level. The actual material conditions and historical facts that formed the

backdrop to their respective remarks on revolution are very different from the present

conditions that form the backdrop of a creation of a revolutionary hip-hop aesthetic. This

is likely a limitation to further exploration of the relevance of Marx and Benjamin for a

deeper understanding of revolutionary hip-hop in Nairobi. However, further research into

revolutionary hip-hop that uses a historical-materialist approach may be very useful.

Unfortunately, such an endeavor was outside of the scope of this dissertation, and the

questions of the unique historical conditions and material realities that helped shape the

formation of a revolutionary hip-hop movement in Kenya remain issues for future

scholarship to explore.

Having used Chapter 2 to establish a definition of what is “revolutionary” about

revolutionary hip-hop in Nairobi, I continued in Chapters 3 and 4 to outline how that

concept is deployed. The main argument I made was that younger Kenyans use

revolution as part of the formation of an imagined revolutionary hip-hop community.

Following Anderson’s (1991) insights on national communities, I argued that it is

through the shared apprehension of a revolutionary time that hip-hop artists are able to

imagine themselves as part of a broader community. Chapter 3 made the argument that

the origin story of the birth of revolutionary hip-hop in Dandora in 1997 is critical to

members’ sense that they are part of a shared revolutionary temporality. Chapter 4

discussed the song and video for “All Over the World” in which MC Kah and fellow

participants in the song and video extend the imagined revolutionary community to a

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worldwide movement, but showing Dandora and it’s dumpsite as a central locus of

revolutionary potential capable of uniting a global hip-hop community.

However, the main finding from these chapters, that revolutionary hip-hop

represents and imagined community – which is built on a shared vision of time, but

which also interacts with several other culturally constructed temporalities – deserves to

be probed further. For example, to what extent does the idea of “revolutionary time” vary

amongst members of this community? This question is not explored in the scope of this

dissertation, with the exception of cursory narratives about a few artists I worked with

and how they saw themselves in the context of a revolutionary movement. Future

research on this community may wish to take a closer look at the subjective experience

of a larger sample of different members of the community artists in to uncover

differences in individual definitions and experiences of revolutionary time. One question

that should be asked is whether most artists even define themselves as living in a

temporality that is “revolutionary.” From conversations I had with hip-hoppers from

Dandora and with the evidence presented in Chapters 2, 3 and 4, it is my belief that

sharing in a revolutionary temporality is an essential characteristic linking the majority of

this community’s members. But only further detailed ethnographic work with a larger

sample of Nairobi hip-hoppers will be able to prove to what extent this theory is viable,

and what nuance must be added to it.

A second question that was only partially answered in this dissertation relates to

the generational understandings of work, youth and adulthood. In Chapter 2, for

example, I discussed how generational debates were central to the internal conflict

amongst the Kikuyu that helped create the Mau Mau (e.g. Lonsdale 1992; White 1990).

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As Lonsdale (1992) so masterfully pointed out, the Kikuyu internal debates about wealth

and virtue centered on ideas about labor and community. In Chapter 3 I discussed how

Kenyan debates about youth, work, and manhood, have also shaped how hip-hop

artists are seen by others in Kenyan society, and how they see themselves. I used the

example of Zakah to point out that revolutionary hip-hop artists like him see themselves

as members of a hip-hop “organization”, which promotes ideals relating to hard work

and discipline. In promoting this vision of revolutionary hip-hop, they are making a claim

about its value to society as well as their own civic virtue. This subverts dominant views

in Kenyan society that tend to relegate hip-hop to an idle activity, and not productive

work.

By noting that generational conflict was at the center of the formation of Mau Mau

in the 1950s and also an important factor in the identities and discourses of

contemporary revolutionary hip-hopers I did not mean to force any notion that there is

similarity between the two groups as such. Rather I wished to point out the shared

principles of work and (time) discipline that become important concepts in Kenyan

generational debates. In Chapter 3 I drew on Cole’s (2004) important application of

Mannheim’s “Fresh Contact” to contemporary debates about youth in Madagascar. It is

in Mannheim’s sense of “Fresh Contact” that Cole poignantly reminds scholars that

certain issues remain but are reworked anew with each generation. This dissertation

only offers a preliminary inquiry into generational debates and their importance to young

Kenyan artists. Mostly, I used Mannheim’s notion of “fresh contact” to discuss the

specific cultural process of translation and how different generations of Kenyans have

engaged the concept, including Dandora rappers when they released the song, “Tafsiri

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Hii” (Translate This). Regarding the notion that hip-hop is a legitimate form of labor, I

only made cursory mention in this dissertation. Further scholarship on how young artists

position their activities as a productive use of time and a livelihood they can be proud of

is necessary. The question of how generational debates about notions of time and

discipline help to frame perceptions of artistic labor is still open.

While Chapters 2, 3 and 4 focused on the building of an imagined revolutionary

hip-hop community, based on a shared apprehension of revolutionary time, Chapters 5

and 6 took a narrative, ethnographic approach in order to examine the limits of

community and friendship. In describing the event of the robbery and its aftermath I

showed how the ideals of the hip-hop community, represented in artistic expression and

discourses, sometimes conflict with the “sticky materiality of everyday life” (Tsing 2005).

Chapter 5 described my relationship with the producer, Chizee, his song, “This is How

We Livin’”, and the context of crime and insecurity in Nairobi. In particular, this Chapter

5 analyzed the way relationships to places and people are changed after dark. I argued

that understanding the “pendular” rhythm of Nairobi requires an understanding of the

difference between how residents relate to the city during the day and night.

Chapter 6 focused on my relationship with the hip-hop artist MC Blak as it

developed over several years and multiple encounters. In taking a narrative approach

Chapter 6 attempted to lay bare the workings of time on the gathering of ethnographic

data. I described the development of my relationship with Blak over a shared,

intersubjective time, one characterized by my coming and going as well as the lulls and

rushes experienced in the field, and how this shared time inflected both of our

understandings of the nature of our relationship and type of ethnographic insights it

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helped to produce. I also showed how the shared experience of the robbery produced a

new temporal rhythm. After that night our relationship was altered and set on a new

course.

Taken together, the first and second parts of the dissertation showed that

temporality and how it is experienced and talked about by hip-hop artists, both shapes

their notion of community and at times threatens to undermine the precepts of unity on

which that notion rests. By analyzing how time factors in the expressive and lived

experience of these artists this dissertation speaks to extant and emerging concerns

about time in the fields of the Anthropology of African Youth and the Anthropology of

Music. In studies of African Youth, for example, several important contributions have

been made to understanding younger Africans and the physical marginalization they

often feel in urban centers, as well as their own efforts to take control of certain spaces

(e.g. Diouf 2003; Weiss 2009; de Boeck 2004). This literature has tended look at how

young Africans interact with spatial dynamics in the African city. There has been less of

a focus on temporal concerns, although this theme has recently emerged (e.g. Mains

2011; Schertz 2013; Goldstone and Obarrio 2017). There has been a similar focus on

spatial concerns in the Anthropology of Music and Ethnomusicology, where the

soundscape concept has been particularly important over the last twenty years (e.g.

Feld 1990; Feld and Brennais 2004; Fox 2004; Hansen 2006; Hirschkind 2006; Meintjes

2003; Porcello et al. 2010; Samuels et al. 2010; Schafer 1994). But more recently,

scholars have urged that studies produced by anthropologists and ethnomusicologists

pay closer attention to the temporal aspects of music and cultural production (Faudree

2012; Born 2015).

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While time and temporality have been long standing concerns for anthropologists

(e.g. Munn 1992), the trend in scholarship on African youth and music has not given as

much attention to temporal concerns as it has to spatial concerns. This dissertation

contributes to this scholarship by demonstrating how time factors into the lives and

artistic production of revolutionary hip-hop in Kenya, this dissertation shows how young

Kenyans attempt to shape temporal experience through hip-hop.

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Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of

Nationalism. London: Verso, 1991.

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BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH

John Erik Timmons graduated with a Bachelor of Liberal Studies from Iowa State

University. He received his PhD in Anthropology from the University of Florida in 2018.

His research interests include Youth and Popular Culture in Africa, Urban Ethnography,

and East African History.