"Modify": Jua Kali as a metaphor for Africa's Urban ethnicities and cultures

Mary Kingsley Zochonis Lecture -
Saturday 02 July 2005
Brunei Gallery, SOAS

Dr Joyce Nyairo (Moi University, Kenya) gave the 2005 Mary Kingsley Lecture at the AEGIS conference at SOAS on the 2nd July.

INTRODUCTION
This evening, I want to reflect on urban Africa, on the forms of representation that this fluid space has engendered, on the cultural imperative that drives these forms and on the significance of urban cultural practices in the creation and the expression of a modern African identity. Understanding Africa's urban cultures is both urgent and important not least because the United Nations estimates that by the year 2020, Africa's conurbations will be amongst the largest in the world.[1] In addition, some projections indicate that in the next few years of this millennium, 'more of Africa's people will live in towns than live in the countryside' (Anderson and Rathbone 2000:1). In any case, for many decades now urban practices have steadily influenced individual aspirations, continuously radiating out into the rural hinterlands to shape notions of progress and modernity. Indeed, the volume on Africa's Urban Past edited by David Anderson and Richard Rathbone demonstrates that 'the extent and depth of urbanization to be found in a survey of the history of the continent is remarkable'. Africa, these editors argue has, even historically, been anything but 'a place of predominantly rural cultures' (2). As such, the somewhat dismissive views of urban existence as an unfortunate contaminating outcome of colonialism have proved to be shallow approaches in the task of unpacking Africa's urban realities.

The age-old tendency to read Africa purely in terms of its otherness, of warring ethnic identities and in terms of ''originary'' and ''authenticity'' deprives us of an understanding of the ways in which Africa continually reconstitutes and energizes itself. To this extent, the growth of urban studies in the Humanities is a fresh re-thinking of the African archive and an opportunity to see Africa in interaction with other places. These changes in perceptions of the African space demand a change in methodologies of research. For if polities and cultures are not fixed and static entities, then the nature of change in these societies needs to be debated and the points of multiplicity must be brought under scrutiny. To this end Richard Werbner (1996:1) argues that 'ethnic identities are merely a small fraction of the many identities mobilized in the postcolonial politics of everyday life'. He goes on to emphasize that what is now required is an 'analysis of how, over time, and in a plurality of contested arenas, postcolonial strategies improvise multiple shifting identities'. The call to understand these multiple identities was recently echoed by Terence Ranger (2005:6) in a paper delivered at the World History Colloquium in Berlin where he traced the evolution of research into African cities.

We have moved, then, from an older literature on African cities which saw them regionally to one which sees them both globally and locally. The older historical sociology of African cities was both too broad and not broad enough in its perspectives. It focussed on African regions of migration rather than international connections. But it assumed that the oscillations of regional migration were incompatible with the creation of local African urban identities. Its discourse was that of de and re-tribalisation rather than of the emergence of African urban communities.

Ranger calls for approaches that will highlight the processes by which people remain local while at the same time being global. This challenge demands a theoretical strategy that interrogates Africa in terms of questions of circulation, flows and transnationalism. For as Achille Mbembe and Sarah Nuttal (2004:351) argue in their introduction to a journal issue on 'Johannesburg, the Elusive Metropolis',

Africa like, everywhere else, has its heres, its elsewheres, and its interstices … historically, the continent has been and still is a space of flows, of flux, of translocation, with multiple nexuses of entry and exit points. As evinced by numerous recent studies, the continent we have in mind exists only as a function of circulation and of circuits. It is fundamentally in contact with an elsewhere … it is also a space that circulates, that is constantly in motion.

Reading urban Africa from the framework of mobility, circulation and flows allows us to interrogate the ambivalence of concepts such as ''authenticity'', and to approach fluid categories such as ''tradition'' and ''modernity'' with a far more open mind than has previously attended to anthropologies of African societies.[2] Rather than accepting the assumed purity of these terms we can now begin to unpack the geo-cultural referents informing the composition of the practices that these terms set out to define. From this we can also locate the evidence to challenge the commonly held view that urban Africans exist on the margins of true culture.[3] And to talk of circulation within the global cultural economy does not necessarily mean that we focus solely on the movement of ideas and products from the West into Africa. To do so would be to miss the complex fluidity and motion that obtains within each one of these spaces. As a recent study of Miami's urban imaginary concludes, we need to revise the idea of 'ethnicity and circulation as the importation of fixed, inert identities into a fixed, inert space' (LiPuma and Koelble, 2005:177). Debunking bounded categories in this way allows us to see the agency, the connections and exchange within African spaces. AbdouMaliq Simone (2001:25) speaks of the 'incessant sense of preparedness' in African cities, ready always to 'switch gears', 'to engage in processes and territories elsewhere'. These elsewheres involve other cities on and beyond the continent, rural enclaves, borders and frontiers; for cities, it seems, are about a straddling of divides, a range of geographies across real and imagined frontiers. Indeed to belong to a city, as Ranger (2005:19) states, is precisely to belong to more than one place at any one time, 'something continuously created and contested'.

The approach that I have adopted in this study very deliberately focuses on the agency obtaining in African cities. This is necessary because all too often, talk of African cities is invariably turned into a litany of Africa's boundless chaos.[4] The focus is usually on the decay - both moral and physical - on the marginalized slums and third-rate housing riddled with insecurity, hunger and disease, and on unemployment and infinite poverty, as if Africans have had no other ways of occupying towns. To limit the study of Africa's urban life to these overwhelmingly bleak themes is to completely miss the point of the vivaciousness and opportunity that abounds in these spaces. Kenneth King's (1977, 1996) work on the growth of the informal sector in Kenya has been amongst the foremost scholarly works that have consistently read potential and agency in Africa's urban economy. I am inspired by King's deep interest in the energy and vibrancy of urban Africa. But rather than dwell, as he does, on the dynamics of commerce and economics prevailing in these places, I want to use the practice of jua kali which he has elucidated to explore the creative impetus of cultural life in modern Africa; to demonstrate the ethos of acquisitiveness from many different elsewheres that propels it and that shapes its urban identities.

1.1 SOUNDTRACKS
Any attempt to investigate global systems of exchange and interaction, particularly in an urban context, must bear witness to the power of popular music to negotiate space and time. 'Like all forms of sound, [music] is inherently mobile' (Connell and Gibson 2003:45). For one, when people are moving - whether freely or as a consequence of coercion - they carry their musical practices to their new abodes. The mobility of music it seems, has much to do with the recuperative musical practices of diasporic populations. Further, modern recording technologies have, since the invention of the gramophone, turned music into a highly portable cultural artefact. Indeed, economies engaged in the production and distribution of music have sprung up and are linking communities across borders and oceans alike. The advantages to be gained from even more portable forms, such as the Compact Disc (CD) and digital formats like MP3s exchanged on the Internet have greatly accelerated the speed, quality and quantity of both the production and the distribution of music. Albums can be recorded, say, in Kenya, fine-tuned, mixed and digitally cut in South Africa, and finally released simultaneously in Kenya, South Africa and London.

Listening to the actual song-texts, we begin to appreciate that soundtracks- those lines of the diffusion of popular music - can be reconstructed as significant markers of cultural exchange, as evidence of the continual association of peoples and regions - however unequal or skewered those relations might be.

1.1.2 'Uhiki - DJ Pinye's Remix': the birth of Kenyan Hip Hop
In June 1997 a local budding artiste, Hardstone, aka Harrison Ngunjiri, captured the attention of live audiences across Nairobi with a song entitled 'Uhiki ― Pinye's remix'.[5]

PLAY
'Uhiki' opens with the recreation of a traditional Gĩkũyũ homestead depicted in a dialogue between a father and son. It is a dialogue which (re)asserts the traditional role of the Gĩkũyũ father in the marital affairs of his sons. This traditional Gĩkũyũ atmosphere is enhanced by strands of the Gĩkũyũ folksong 'Nyũmba ya Mwari Witu' (our sister's home) which becomes the chorus as the song proceeds. As the dialogue develops, the first bars of what we gradually recognise as the instrumental rhythms of the Grammy Award-winning hit, 'Sexual Healing', emerge. 'Sexual Healing' was recorded in 1982 by the African American musical icon, Marvin Gaye. In 1996, another American, Keith Sweat, introduced refreshingly new lyrics onto Gaye's reggae-influenced song in a remix entitled 'Twisted'. We can draw many parallels between Keith Sweat's remix and Hardstone's 'Uhiki'. From an altogether less erotic angle, Hardstone pursues the theme of the perils of romantic love initiated by Marvin Gaye and repeated by Keith Sweat. Confirming urban Kenya's fascination with Rastafarianism and reggae music, or perhaps underlining Gaye's own debt to reggae, Hardstone changes dialect in the third verse of his song and raps in Jamaican patois. This multi-lingual approach, apart from attesting to the diverse cultural legacies informing Hardstone's narrative, also works to show the theme of aborted romance as a universal human experience. And to add to the conflation of acoustic practices in 'Uhiki', the voice ensemble's harmonies are punctuated by the insistent and familiar American hip hop anthem 'put up your hands and you scream'.

Hardstone's 'Uhiki' was a seminal moment in the birth of Kenyan hip hop. It heralded a new era in terms of musical style, production and audience reception. By far its most striking feature is the use of remixes as both locally authenticating devices - in the sense of speaking to a traditional Gĩkũyũ context - and also as affirmation of its commitment to American hip hop's discursive practices. For, as Paul Gilroy (1993:103) argues, 'the aesthetic rules which govern [hip hop] are premised on a dialectic of rescuing, appropriation and recombination'. It is tempting to interpret Hardstone's engagement of Gĩkũyũ cultural practice as a mark of deeply embedded local traditions, as a nativist gesture. But there are many aspects of the song that undermine this position and repeatedly point to the text's situatedness within a modern cultural dispensation. For one, if one listens carefully to the dialogue between the father and son, one picks out a number of dissonant elements, some of which are occasioned by the contact with Western modernity. 

The dialogue itself is ironically poised against the celebratory title of the song, for it speaks of a situation of marital tension between newlyweds. In the dialogue, the father responds to the matter from within the conventions of Gĩkũyũ cultural practice. His concern is that the pedigree cow that he paid out, as precious dowry for his son's bride, seems to have gone to waste, and, what makes matters worse is that this has happened so soon. But marital discord is not the source of the subversion of traditional discourses that is reflected in this dialogue. The old man's acute concern for his wasted wealth seems to sit at variance with the lament of unrequited love that constitutes the rest of the song. It signals the tension between generations, each seeming to function within value systems that make no sense to the other. The dissonance between generations may also be read in the strained accent that relates the narrative and which betrays the persona as a non-native speaker of Gĩkũyũ, one who is clearly unfamiliar with nuances of double-vowel intonation in that language. For instance, in the phrase 'woka ũtukũ' which is used by the father as he asks 'who is that coming in at night?', the presence of consecutive double vowels between the two words requires the speaker to collapse them into one utterance and enunciate it as 'wokũtukũ', thereby effectively bridging the double vowel into one syllable.[6] And there are other instances in which the failure to observe the social graces that go with ethnic Gĩkũyũ familial discourse betrays 'Uhiki's' inherent sense that tradition is dynamic and vital: it is not represented as hypostasised and normative, but as a complex cultural matrix that can be evoked, violated or reworked.

Taditionally, the folk song, 'Nyũmba ya mwarĩ witũ' would be performed during courtship and marriage ceremonies, celebrating values of female chastity, domesticity and family. Additionally, this song is also a statement of ethnic nationalism and pride given that the Gĩkũyũ myth of origin centres on Gĩkũyũ and Mũmbi and their nine daughters from whom all Gĩkũyũ clans are descended, and after whom they are accordingly named (Kenyatta 1938). The folk song has, therefore, always been invoked as an expression of family cohesion, ethnic unity and purity. It is a call, in other words, to ethnic citizenship, intended to ward off threats to the group's integrity, territory and spiritual foundation. Juxtaposed within ''foreign'' musical elements, the use of this folksong in Hardstone's 'Uhiki' seems an ironic statement about the long distance that has been travelled from an oft-idealised time of ethnic and cultural purity. For even as the lyrics pay homage to these moments, the song's instrumentals take us further and further away from traditional settings and resituate us in the contemporary moment.

As I mentioned earlier, the song's remix strategy is modelled on Keith Sweat's 1996 project using 'Sexual Healing'. What Hardstone does, therefore, is to latch onto a successful musical idea of a contemporary American artiste, thereby drawing in a youthful Kenyan urban audience. And Kenya's urban audience has consistently been reared on a Western musical repertoire, from country to pop, soul and rhythm-and-blues.[7] Not surprisingly then throughout 1983 Marvin Gaye's 'Sexual Healing' was a clubhouse standard at Nairobi's discos. It was also aired on radio though the state-owned Voice of Kenya -which was the only radio broadcaster at the time - steered clear of its strong erotic content and only played the instrumental version of the song. Clearly the popularity in Kenya of a Grammy winning African American artiste in the 1980s signals the historic link between the sounds of marginalised black America and the aspirations of Kenyan urban youth.

Interestingly, 'Sexual Healing' is itself a richly hybrid text. Simultaneously an intensely erotic and a spiritual song,[8] it is heavily influenced by reggae, probably as a consequence of the ten months Gaye spent exiled here in London in 1981. Gaye's original, which is so personal and so sexually graphic[9] seems incongruous besides the metaphors of community and nation, and the decorum of the traditional Gĩkũyũ folksong. But it is not just differences in cultural practice that are noteworthy. Given Africa's capacity for what some have termed extraversion[10], we can identify that the apparently local - as it is represented in Hardstone's remix - includes an abridged and adapted version of postcolonial cultural discourse within it. We are not, then, speaking of some simple combination of ''traditional'' and global texts. Indeed, contemporary Kenyan popular culture seems, more accurately, comprised of markers of the foreign that simultaneously appeal to reworked constructions of traditional values and practices. And this as I hope to demonstrate tonight is no binary matter.

In effect then, 'Uhiki' is not about how the local gets drawn and absorbed into Western modernity, but rather it is about the artful forging of local derivatives of modernity, a project that is clearly fraught with potential contradictions, and sometimes, given its techniques of appropriation, often lacks either consistency or cogency. This complex relational logic is also apparent when Hardstone goes on to blend a Kiswahili prayer into the discourse of marital frustration. It becomes apparent that his narrative is a syncretic mediation of crisis (in this case both marital and cultural) through a blending of practices. After all, Kiswahili is itself a product of the fusion of East African coastal communities with Arabic cultures. The prayer expresses an anguish that literally has the persona breaking into a sweat. We are struck by the lyrical power of this prayer and its likely symbolic reference to foreign cultures as the troublesome bride as the song once again employs its hip hop tactic of defamiliarisation by switching dramatically to the locally stylised Jamaican patois appropriate to reggae. In the sections of reggae-rap we have the culmination of the 'Uhiki's' vast cultural canvas.

But of all the elements that sound off against, or subvert, the traditional Gĩkũyũ folk song, it is the typical hip hop refrain: 'Hardstone in the yard, yo! put up your hands and you scream,' that dominates the text. Even as the Kiswahili prayer continues in the background to the beat of 'Sexual Healing' this refrain reverberates as the critical code through which youthful local audiences are invoked and immersed in the activity on the dance floor. Calling for choreography that allows the young audience to revel in uninhibited expression bridges the distance between American cultural practice and emergent Kenyan identity. The variety of genres and styles in 'Uhiki' is a salute to musical and cultural intertextuality, to the fluidity, hybridity and mobility of postcolonial popular art forms. We might well be tempted to read 'Uhiki' as a farewell to traditional ethnic practice and the gateway of global hip hop trends as the hallmark of contemporary Kenyan popular music. Alternatively, though, it may well be seen as the starting point in acknowledging the extent of the daily blending and negotiation of cultural varieties that is entailed in all of postcolonial existence.

1.2 SOUNDTRACKS IN FICTION
Tracing the soundtracks that dominate urban Kenya is an exercise that can be just as easily achieved through the reading of contemporary fiction. I will give a quick demonstration through Binyavanga Wainaina's award winning story Discovering Home (2003). Set in 1995 the story gives illuminating snapshots of the dense variety of cultural, political and economic experiences that define today's Africans. From the racial politics of South Africa, to the politically and economically-engendered cynicism attending to Moi's Kenya and on to the contingent recovery of Uganda and Rwanda, Wainaina's protagonist locates varied moments of recognition, familiarity, and even the comfort zones that collectively constitute home.

The story's soundtrack rings with a variety that does not so much compete for the cultural allegiance of the protagonist but rather, that confirms the plurality that informs his being. First, the ceaseless repetition of 'Brenda Fasie's latest hit' which dominates his farewell party as he leaves Umtata, South Africa. Arriving in Kenya, Nairobi's matatus blare out Hip Hop tunes and display stark images of Tupak Shakur (9). The upcountry bound vehicles are appropriately filled with the sounds of Kenny Rogers' 'The Gambler', as if to announce the ground rules that every visitor to the city must learn. Once he arrives in Nakuru, the protagonist is thrown into reminiscence by the Congolese Lingala tune pouring onto the street from the nearby shops. And when on his drive to the rural Mwingi in the Eastern Province the bubblegum music of Sisqo zips around the protagonist's mind 'like some demented fly, always a bit too fast to catch and smash' (18). In Mwingi, later that night, the Congolese ndombolo dance dominates the dance-hall, at once a statement of the elsewheres that permeate every urbanizing location in the country redefining the whole notion of rural existence by drawing links with distant places. Out in Mwingi Kenny Rogers and Dolly Parton are handy props for assuaging the pain of loneliness and heart-break.[11] Accompanying this dance repertoire are local derivatives of blues music such as Waigwa Wachira's early 1980s hit 'Marry Me' whose greatest appeal lay in converting Western wedding vows into handy lyrics. And as the journey to discover home climaxes at the Uganda-Rwanda border the emotion's surrounding the impending family reunion leave the protagonist's grandfather crying against the backdrop of what the protagonist labels 'some very hip gospel rap from Kampala' (51).

Beyond its culturally polyphonic soundtrack which is so deeply connected to the protagonist's sense of self, Wainaina's story is striking for its revision of the fictional images of post-colonial urban life. Earlier generations of Kenyan writers repeatedly painted the city as the locus of moral decay, frustration and lonely despair.[12] Roger Kurtz (1998) and Nici Nelson (2002) have demonstrated that the stark dichotomies between on the one hand, the comforting but materially deprived rural and on the other, the morally corrupting and treacherous city have been dominant themes in Kenyan fiction. Binyavanga Wainaina's Discovering Home confronts urban existence in ways that re-position these binary tensions by giving a more nuanced, less condemnatory reading of the city's mixed blessings.

I take a walk down River Road, all the way to Nyamakima. This is the main artery of movement to and from the main bus ranks. It is ruled by manambas, and their image is cynical, every laugh a sneer, the city is a war or a game. It is a useful face to carry, here where humanity invades all the space you do not claim with conviction. The desperation that is for me the most touching is the expressions of the people who come from the rural areas into the City Centre to sell their produce. Thin-faced, with the large cheekbones common amongst Kikuyu, cheekbones so dominating they seem like an appendage to be embarrassed about, something that draws attention to their faces when attention is the last thing they want. Anywhere else those faces are beauty. Their eyes dart about in a permanent fear, unable to train themselves to a background of so much chaos. They do not know how to put on a glassy expression (10-11).

It is true that even here the urban novice stands out for his inability to blend into the tempo of the city. But even then, the city is not all about mean-faced immorality, alienation, helplessness and deprivation. It may very well contain all of these things, but along with them it houses what Michel de Certeau (1998:156) would term 'surreptitious creativity'; it engenders vitality and determination. Listen to Wainaina's description of matatus as:

those brash, garish public transport vehicles, so irritating to every Kenyan except those who own one, or work for one; I can see them as the best example of contemporary Kenyan art. The best of them get new paint jobs every few months: Oprah seems popular right now; the inevitable Tupak. The coloured lights, and fancy horn, the purple interior lighting, the Hip Hop blaring out of speakers I will never afford. Art galleries in Kenya buy only the expression for which there is demand in Europe and America - the real artists, the guys who are turning their lives into vivid colour, are the guys who decorate matatus (9).

The energy here is palpable and the tide of mixed emotions accompanying daily experiences such as matatu rides is itself a testament to the complexity of life in the city, a place that attracts and repels all in the same breath and one where agency and ingenuity are a prerequisite.

This is Nairobi! This is what you do to get ahead: make yourself boneless, and treat your strait-jacket as if it is a game, a challenge. The city is now all on the streets, sweet-talk and hustle. Our worst recession ever has just produced brighter, more creative Matatus (10)

In Wainaina's story city life is a fluid mix of poetry and dance, pleasurable and compelling. Seemingly, the matatu touts have, more than anyone else, mastered its complex routines.

Watching them with my no-hurry eyes, they seem like a form of jazz: Every trip, finding sophisticated and spontaneous solutions to getting their route accomplished as quickly as possible in Nairobi's ageing, colonial road system, designed for a small driving middle-class. Public transport must just find a way to make do. Oh and they do (9).

And this 'making do' is not a matter of a resigned attitude to urban chaos, it is in fact, borne of an aggressive determination to succeed which is symbolized in Wainaina's story by 'the confident sun' that shoves aside the 'smoggy haze' that profiles Nairobi from afar (11). The city's economy may be driven by a relentless chase for money, but that does not necessarily mean that all of it is ill-gotten wealth or that the people are constantly desperate, hungry or depressed. These people are marked out by their sheer resolve which is a source of renewal that is always so fresh and invigorating.

A man wearing a Yale University sweatshirt and tattered trousers staggers behind his enormous mkokoteni, moving so slowly it seems he will never get to his destination. He is transporting bags of potatoes. No vehicle gives him room to move. The barrow is so full that it seems that some bags will fall off onto the road. Already, he is sweating. From some reservoir I cannot understand, he smiles and waves at a friend on the side of the road, they chat briefly, laughing as if they had no care in the world, then the mkokoteni man proceeds to move the impossible(11).

When the protagonist's journey comes to an end the complexity of his identity - which we may already have guessed at from the varied soundtrack accompanying his movement into self-awareness - is brought into sharp focus with his observation of the polyglot grammar that cements the long-awaited family reunion. 'In French, Swahili, English, Kikuyu, Kinyarwanda, Kiganda, and Ndebele, we sing one song, a multitude of passports in our luggage' (51). We hear the pride in this plurality, a position that rings in stark contrast to the all-pervasive sense of alienation in first-generation Kenyan fiction where cultural multiplicity was always read as unfortunate rootlessness.[13] In Discovering Home the delight in multiple identities that is arrived at here on the border of Uganda and Rwanda has been a dominant motif in the story. In Narok the protagonist encountered a Masai schoolgirl whose fluent command of Sheng - that flexible fusion of ethnic vernaculars, Kiswahili and English - left him pondering on the idea of Kenyanness in terms of its inherent diversity and contradictions.

If there is a courtesy every Kenyan practices, it is that none of us ever question each other's contradictions -- we all have them, and destroying someone's face is sacrilege. There is nothing wrong with being what you are not in Kenya -- just be it successfully. Every Kenyan joke is about somebody who thought they had mastered a new persona and failed. For us, life is about having a fluid disposition. You can have as many as you want (38-39).

Increasingly, local cultural production is beginning to dwell on the reality of multi-ethnic urban existence as a site of welcome variety and depth. In 1999 a young Kenyan rap artiste, Ndarlin P, released his debut track '4-in-1'. This song is framed as a running commentary from a matatu crew cruising Nairobi's Eastlands neighbourhoods and this part of the city is shown to be an ethnic melting pot. The magic of Ndarlin P's art comes from his ability to mimic the polyethnic nation by rapping in Kiswahili that is 

spoken in 3 different accents (Kamba, Kalenjin, Hindi) in addition to employing 5 distinctly different languages - Kiswahili, English, Sheng, Kamba and Gĩkũyũ. The title may also be a reference to the 4 different identities that Ndarlin P performs in the song. First he is the combative matatu driver, then an inquisitive Asian, next he poses as rapper - 'a gee from the westside, Nailovi' - and finally as an ardent suitor who depicts the culinary variety and recreational excitement to be found in the materially deprived slums around Nairobi's Industrial Area 'ghetto'. It is particularly instructive that Ndarlin P's suitor owns up to his slum identity with neither shame nor self-pity. His sense of this place is that it is worth belonging to.

• Nie ndigikuhenia I won't cheat you
• ati ''witu ni Buru Buru'' saying ''I come from Buru Buru
• nyumete ghetto noma I come from a troubled slum
• iria ya inda the Industrial Area one,
• ya mukuru[14] Mukuru

Reading through Discovering Home, one is acutely aware that all too often the flows that bring trans-national elsewheres to modern Kenya are borne of the vagaries of nation formation in the neighbouring countries. This is the story told by the Caine Prize winner Yvonne Owour in Weight of Whispers (2003). This story of the psychological baggage carried by Francophones who have been forced to seek exile in Anglophone Kenya is captured in Rene Kuseremane's growing desperation and in the story's musical soundtrack which both regions are shown to share despite their linguistic differences. The memory of Joseph Kabaselleh's 'Independence Cha-cha' comforts the exiles in Nairobi's dance clubs (19) and later it becomes the voice of conscience that reverberates within the frames of Kuseremane's growing dementia (36). In the months before his final breakdown Kuseremane's guilt and isolation is sharpened even as he tries to emulate 'the worker ants of Nairobi, the ones who walk to work, manouvering through the shadows of the dawn' to the sound of Franklin Boukaka's 1972 masterpiece 'Le Boucheron' which blares out of their 'radios in crocheted pouches held against ears, in pockets, or tied to bicycle saddles' (31). So applicable to the plight of Kenyan workers this song's 'tender plea' seems to indict Kuseremane for his role in the chaos that has now befallen his own countrymen (31). Nairobi does not provide escape from his homeland instead it amplifies the indelible connections.

1.3 PLACES AND SELF IN OBITUARIES
Thinking through these representations of the ways in which people build their sense of place and of self, I turn now to look at modern Kenyan funerary practice and in particular at the newspaper obituary as a site for the articulation of identity and the display of cultural values. Typically, the Kenyan newspaper obituary is a text constructed in 3 parts. The first part is the heading in bold print, often the bare statement: 'death and funeral announcement'. As we shall see, variations to this formula indicate varying reactions to bereavement. The second part of the obituary text is the photograph and the accompanying caption of the deceased's name. The photograph is as much a statement of the identity of the dead as it is an interpretation of his/her life by those who select it.[15] Whenever it is unavailable it is invariably replaced by the sign of the cross, an eloquent commitment to a higher order that fills the omissions in the deceased's life with spiritual significance. The obituary is completed by a narrative text carrying further information about the deceased his/her last station at work or school or residence and followed by a roll-call of relatives and information about the impending funeral. Between them, these three parts of the obituary text are dominated by the following themes - collective responsibility, education as social status/advancement and the prestige of global networks.

Obituaries have become an integral part of the daily newspapers[16] and this is itself an indication of the spread of new socio-cultural practices and of the modern society's embrace of what were initially Western practices of communication. Western style obituaries typically recite a short biography of the deceased, naming his/her life's achievements and listing his/her very immediate family members with economic precision. In Kenyan print media obituaries the biography is normally absent and instead the greatest emphasis is given to the naming of the relatives of the deceased some of whom are even given further prominence by the use of bold print. But rather than term the biography as absent, we should perhaps argue that the narrative biography in local announcements has a radically different content and function from that found in Western-style obituaries. For while the written texts of local obituary notices carry some variations they are altogether united by the location of family, both nucleus and extended, as the most important biography of the deceased. The pervasiveness of this ethnic interpretation of life is made all the more apparent when one looks at a seemingly avant-garde obituary notice such as that of the cosmopolitan poet Jonathan Kariara. Though stripped of an elaborate roll-call of relations, his notice posted in December 1993 nevertheless projected him as a man rooted in family.

The Death has occurred of Jonathan Kariara, Writer, Actor and Teacher. He comes from a large, loving and loved family and leaves behind two sisters and two brothers. He joins the many more who went ahead of him.[17]

In keeping with local practices establishing the family connection was critical to correctly identifying Kariara. But this kind of economy is indeed a rare exception, for too often obituaries seem to outdo one another in a bid to underline the centrality of family and the sense of collective responsibility that drives local existence. How far out a notice goes in listing members of the extended family has a lot to do with the ethnic extraction of the deceased (or more precisely of his/her family members who are the ones that draft the notice). Typically, the communities of Western Kenya - Luo, Luhya, and most notoriously the Kisiis - reflect their close sense of kinship by casting out the widest

harvest of relations. The announcement of an individual's demise is thereby turned into a space for the contestaion of death and the assertion of immortality through this establishment of networks of departed and surviving kith and kin in a coming and going that goes on forever.

Indeed, the roll-call of the deceased's predecessors, relatives and off-spring stamp the mark of longevity and insert the deceased into the space of perpetuated existence rather than one of receding memory. This roll-call is a graphic representation of J.S. Mbiti's (2002:25) notion of the 'state of personal immortality ' within the African concept of time. This state is achieved precisely on account of lineage for as Mbiti states 'unless a person has close relatives to remember him when he has physically died, then he is nobody and simply vanishes out of human existence like a flame when it is extinguished' (Mbiti, 2002:26). In Kenyan obituaries, relatives go to great lengths to establish the lines of perpetuation. Sometimes they invoke the names of long-dead ancestors with whom the deceased may have had little if any credible contact, thereby linking 'personal immortality' with 'collective immortality' (Mbiti, 26). And as a rule they underline continuity with a roll-call of living relations some of whom are only very remotely related to the deceased but who must get a mention within this space as part of a cultural project that emphasizes kinship and shared responsibilities over individual exploits.[18]

Thinking through the socio-cultural work that obituaries in Kenya do one realizes that much of the significance of the roll-call of relatives lies in the designations and/or descriptions that accompany each of the names. Nearly ten years ago, in the heyday of former President Moi's politics of patronage, the local dailies carried the obituary of an elderly lady from Luo Nyanza. There was nothing particularly distinguishing about either her name or her photograph. But somewhere along the line of her list of relations, was one rather curious if somewhat pointed entry: 'grandmother-in-law to Hon. Dalmas Otieno, Minister for Industry'. In the scheme of patronage politics it was, of course, critical that the minister's supporters should know that he was bereaved. Also, implicit in this entry was not simply the fact that an old woman in rural Nyanza had a well-married grand-daughter, but more particularly that this relationship did, or should have, earned her a few favours in her time. Equally important, the entry was a timely avenue through which the other relatives who were listed along with the honorable one could let the world know that they were indeed, politically well connected.

In this new grammar of death in Kenya, the significance of a person's life is often debated through a description of the perceived successes of his/her off-spring. If you want to know what struggles over recognition are taking place in the Kenyan socio-economic sphere a useful place to look is at the obituary pages where people's titles do the work of advertising their social and material worth. Prof and Dr ( which is shared by medical practitioners, academics and, somewhat controversially, pharmacists) are old established routines. Today Eng., Arch., Geol., and Adv., establish new social protocols and urge a reframing of the society's measures of modern success so that educational qualifications are seen as markers of a sustained acquisition of modernity's socio-economic props. When these titles precede the names of one's off-spring, the consensus that the obituary is inviting from readers is that the deceased has led a successful life and left a legacy that should be envied by all. And wherever any of these titles apply to the deceased person, once again the appropriate unanimity being sought through the obituary is that his/hers has been a life well lived. Another marker of success is read in the presence and the extent of a family's global networks. Whenever a family can name a trans-national relative - so-and-so of USA or UK or Botswana or South Africa, the point is not simply to locate the individual's correctly but also to display the family's long extensive association in the networks of modernity.

The sheer creativity that goes into these modern ways of establishing pedigree and evaluating life was recently dramatized in the death and funeral announcements of Mwalimu (teacher) W.J.C. Namwamba that appeared in the Daily Nation of March 6 and March 10 2005. In the first announcement the deceased was elevated into social prominence by the ingenious accolade 'mwalimu wa walimu' (Kiswahili for teacher of teachers). Then in the tribute cum announcement of March 10 the obituary went so far as to tell us that in his lifetime Namwamba 'educated two Vice-Presidents, 4 cabinet ministers, 7 Members of Parliament, 35 medical doctors and 30 engineers'. These statistical markers of his success were placed alongside a roll-call of his off-spring each flagged by his/her profession - Eng., Prof., Geol., Arch., Mw with one of his siblings providing the additional colour of 'Hon. Prof. … (MP, Butula)'. In addition, the first line of the obituary had already signalled the family's sustained accumulation of material capital by announcing: ' The Namwamba Family of Wekhonye Farm Kitale, the Abamadeya International Community (Kenya, USA, South Africa), the Abamulembo Clan, and the Abanyala Association (Trans Nzoia) regret to announce the sad demise of…'. Ironically, and in keeping with the culture of communalism and shared responsibilities that persists in contemporary Kenyan life, even this particularly lavish display of privilege and global status was ultimately followed by an invitation to the general public to 'a fund-raising to defray burial and funeral expenses'.

While death has sometimes been thought of as powerful to the extent that it marks the delimitation of 'bare life'[19] the style of local obituaries demonstrates, in a Foucauldian sense,[20] how death can actually be used to bestow visibility and therefore, power on the bereaved. The important thing is not what or who makes us die, but the processes by which we are empowered into living in particular ways. By prominently constituting themselves in various formations around the deceased, the bereaved rob death of its power to erase and exploit the visibility of the printed obituary as a stage upon which various acts of appropriation and contestation are performed. The power that has been robbed from the dead is seemingly transferred by the obituary to his relations (be they living or dead). Again, one could argue that the obituary also performs the function of bestowing the deceased with a new, momentary life. For so long as s/he appears in the newspapers, s/he is present beyond the fact of being a corpse; the newspaper attests to her/his existence and from it readers are triggered into discussions that keep the person in the present. That the dead should feature so palpably within the pages of what is current and living is a remarkable instance of the way death inscribes itself into contemporary societies even as science continually develops attempts to defy, or at any rate, delay it. (Baudrillard 1993).

The photographs in local obituaries do more than simply confirming the identity of the dead. In some instances, they can be read as an articulation of the urbanism of an entire family. Some families will chose to run different photographs of their deceased member over the several days that they post the announcement. In a country where the culture of photography is necessarily associated with materiality an abundance of photographs can actually be seen as a statement of affluence. Consequently, an announcement such as was posted for Mzee Kabari Kaguongo Wagura on May 2 2005 and which carried 3 photographs respectively dated 'In 1978, In 1995, Recent' can be read as part of the practice of establishing urban pedigree. It articulates the longevity of the family's engagement with the culture of Western modernity.

Obituary photographs have also become a means through which religion is visibly projected as a medium through which people live in many places at the same time. Take for instance the death announcements of the female members of the Presbyterian Church of East Africa (PCEA). These are always instantly distinguishable through the photographs in which the deceased had been captured posing in the trademark blue and white headscarf bearing the legend 'Woman's Guild'. In terms of the life the deceased has led membership to this religious association is seen as a principle marker of her identity. It is a testament of her faith and piousness and the photograph is meant to confirm her reward in a continued life in a heavenly abode. A heading now common in notices from members of the new-age Kenyan evangelical faiths has propelled this projection into another life even further. Their obituary notices are no longer secularly headlined 'Death and Funeral Announcement'. Instead they carry the religious banner 'Promotion to Glory', or more recently 'Promotion to Higher Glory'. The religious discourse in such headings will sometimes be enhanced by the label 'Brother in Christ' or 'Sister in Christ' as a title to give better and further particulars before the deceased's name. The focus is no longer on earthly existence except to project it as a means, a moment of transition into something bigger and better. In part therefore, local existence is experienced as a perpetual ethereal link to another world. So much so that the ultra-Christian obituary notices now open, not with 'It is with deep sorrow' or 'We regret to announce…', but with the newly coined expression: 'It is with humble acceptance of God's will that we announce….'.

In January last year, the Daily Nation carried an obituary notice that shocked many Kenyans on account of its radical contemporaneity.[21] This Sheng worded notice, the first ever to be written in this demotic street language, was so unconventional it seemed designed to work in opposition to the protocols and conventions that ordinarily guides obituary notices. More particularly, it seemed an assault on the grammar of controlled decorum that attends to notices of professed Christians especially those of the ''born-again'' persuasion. This notice's closing prayer 'God bless the QcKenyans', sounded like an off-key afterthought, juxtaposed as it was against the seemingly celebratory and unconventional opener: 'It's true! Dominic Kenya Maribo is dead. Still can't believe? Uamini, basi sikia (read on)'. In addition, the final invitation to friends to participate in the funeral arrangements sounded equally irreverent:

Details of a requiem mass at Langata on Friday afternoon will be given in the meetings - Pigia mabeste wako simu (call your friends) waambie … wa kamu…Mr. Kenya is dead lakini come tu celebrate life yake na tumsindikize home vipoa.

The lines 'Pigia mabeste wako simu, waambie … wa kamu' are straight out of the refrain from a popular tune of the time - Nonini's Wee Kamu (2003), a song filled with references to sexual innuendo, particularly in the title's allusive invitation to sexual orgasm. Its rap lyrics are bold in their assertion of a liberal attitude to teenage sex.[22] This particular intertextual association with a thoroughly contentious popular culture moment[23] further robs the closing prayer of its requisite humility. In this announcement even the family roll-call carried unusual and seemingly flippant digressions. For instance, 'Husband to Martha Syanda (she is still Mrs. Kenya).' One can read two different issues in this first digression. One, unlike in the West, in many African ethnic traditions death does not dissolve marriage and this digression establishes that position. Secondly, given local tendencies towards polygamy - and in many instances, the second spouse is only discovered after the death of the man - the assertion 'she is still Mrs. Kenya' can be a public declaration of the deceased's monogamy. Even when it came to naming the late Dominic Kenya Maribo's children, there were entertaining asides: 'Father to Ann (Rongai), Gedion, Paul and Alice (JVA/Kenya), Peris, Wabbz (Teita Est.) … ngoja kuna wengine…[hold on, there are still more] Jose and the lovely twins Sarah and Tush'. Then after listing the deceased's nephews and brothers the remark 'Enyewe, nikubaya lakini utadoo!' (things are bad, but what do you do).

Everything about this obituary indicated an alternative way of mourning. The acceptance of death seemed anything but religiously inspired speaking instead of a starkly secular practicality, so unusual in a country where non-believers and marginal practitioners studiously avoid publicity, preferring to be buried under the overwhelming statistics that declare 82% of Kenyans to be Christians (Kamaara 2005). In the feature article on the family that appeared in The Daily Nation three days later, it indeed emerged that this was a bold Kenyan family. Over the years they had found ways to express their identity as modern Kenyans, firm in their belief that 'they could not culturally identify with any community…Sheng was the medium of communication in their home' (1). Even their fifty-year-old mother is a fluent speaker of Sheng. And their sense of multiple identities which is seen in their chosen tongue and in the cross-cultural marriages of some of the off-spring has an interesting history. The deceased's father 'had two wives - one a Muslim, the other a Christian. In order not to appear to be favouring either religion, [he] opted for neutral names like Kenya, Uhuru and Kenyatta for his sons'. To contain the struggle over which one of the deceased's children would carry the stately name Kenya, 'they added a prefix Qc, to it', concealing their Kamba extraction even as the pronunciation of Qckenya alludes to it. Their decision to bury Dominic in his rural Mwingi home confirms the complex blending of old and new that attends to the creation of urban ethnicities. As with the famous SM Otieno burial saga the idea of transforming ethnic identities meets its strongest challenge in the grammar that attends to death.

1.4 THE DIFFUSION OF SHENG
The story of the Qckenya family which emerged from the unusual obituary that they posted points to a reality in modern Kenya, that of forging new identities by editing old cultural practices and evolving new hybrid ones. It should not surprise us that today a Kenyan family can claim Sheng as its language of choice. Chege Githiora's (2002) work on this urban peer language shows its growing spread in the city both in geographic and generational terms.[24] Recent work on postcolonial Kenyan culture has shown the functional movement of Sheng from strictly private domains of inter-personal communication to the public spaces of everyday life. Some of my earlier work (2004) highlights the significance of Sheng in the overwhelming resurgence, indeed the renaissance, of Kenyan popular music in the last seven years. Mbugua-wa-Mungai's (2004) work on the urban folklore in Nairobi's matatus has shown that Sheng is a critical part of the youth's identity politics. But far much more important than Sheng's centrality in the recreational culture of urban Kenya is the fact of its diffusion into the commercial and socio-political spheres of Kenyan existence. As I argue elsewhere, 'Sheng has moved from marginal spaces in the so-called African locations of the city, to the air-waves on FM radio, to advertising billboards, and even to celluloid as we have recently seen in Andiah Kisia's November 2002 film, The Aftermath' (Nyairo and Ogude, 2003:396). In all these spaces it has become the language in which weighty moral questions are debated and the values of a generation are communicated.[25] Such was the fervour that led to the appropriation of the music duo Gidi Gidi Maji Maji's term and anthem unbwogable as the banner of the Kenyan people's collective defiance against KANU's politics. Indeed the portability and elasticity of this idiom of resistance and invincibility supplied the fragile National Rainbow Coalition, however momentarily, with a new grammar of political victory.

The growing volume and visibility of Sheng alerts us to the fact that ''tradition'' is an ever-changing topography rather than a consolidated pristine object that can be transported wholesale into the present. I will demonstrate this point further through a TV commercial dubbed the 'verbal battle' that was commissioned by Population Services International (PSI) as part of their HIV/AIDS awareness campaign.

SCREEN
Apart from the fact of using Sheng as the medium of communication there is a whole urban history embedded in this advert.[26] What we see here is part of the legacy of urban children's recreation specifically, their joking contests known as mutenguano or mchongoano. The practice of mutenguano dates back to pre-independence Nairobi, a battle of wits through which children steadily collapsed the ethnic barriers imposed upon them by local traditions and enhanced by the colonial segregation policies that were applied within the African location as part of the battle to contain Mau Mau in Nairobi (Anderson, 2005:193). In mutenguano ethnic references are entirely absent. People are criticised for their failure to understand and absorb modern practices and never because they hail from one or another rural location. What is instead underlined is the capacity of all to belong to the town as members of a community that has specific mores and practices. Mutenguano has therefore been one of the creative ways in which children have claimed the urban space, generating new idioms and expressions, sharpening verbal dexterity and challenging the dominance of rural ethnic mores within the national cultural grid by establishing a worldview that celebrated the idea of an urban identity. What we see in the PSI advert, is the way in which an urban social memory is being harnessed both for its nostalgic capital and also for its value as a template of social critique deemed to be effective in perceiving and articulating the gravest moral challenge of a generation. The entry of distinctly urban folklore in the mediation of national issues and debates has deep significance for the cultural identity of the nation which must now own up to the fact of the whole experience of modernity as a legitimate constituent of contemporary Kenyan culture.[27]

CONCLUSION
I believe that I have now set out a broad enough canvas of contemporary cultural texts to allow me to go back to the riddle I set out in the title of my address tonight. *** What does jua kali have to do with local cultural practices? It is simply this: at every turn in the cultural development of our society the driving force has actually been the ethos of change. Indeed, it has been about the active agency to manage the nature and pace of that change rather than simply a romantic and spurious commitment to a return to the ''authentic'' and ''originary'' cultural practices of our people. Like the jua kali artisan who thrives on the margins of the structured economy in a culture of transgression whose genius lies in his instinctive capacity to appropriate and rework whatever resources are available to him, local cultural practices are an acquisitive blend of continuity, appropriation and modification and its urban identities are made within this bricolage. Indeed, we cannot read the flows in contemporary African culture as evidence of continual movement towards a yet to be achieved modernity for within these flows we have seen the substantial presence of continuities from the recent and not so recent past. What we have been generating ever since our encounter with Western modernity are complex hybrid creations that capture the flux of revision and signal traditions and identities that are always in the making rather than ones that are sacred, static evocations of a purist Africa. Our engagement with the global cultural economy is always attended to by a proprietary energy that instantly converts whatever we appropriate into local capital. And while mimicry and vapid imitation may be stages in the modification of imported styles and products, the goal of the acquisitive jua kali ethos is the renewal of local circumstances and resources; the revitalisation of local social, cultural and economic capital.

What all these innovations indicate is that ethnic identities and their cultural practices are forever being transformed, and the question of whether this amounts to dilution or enrichment is more of a political concern than a meaningful description of contemporary culture. This kind of appreciation of the cultural energy in Africa alerts us to the glaring disconnect between intellectual architects of African culture in their gospel of ''return to roots'' and contemporary practitioners of our arts. My discussion tonight has highlighted the fact that in preaching what is clearly now an antiquated gospel, these cultural gurus are no longer the barometer for what obtains on the ground, and neither are they the motor driving the ingenuity of our cultural production.