The Rift Valley Muzik-Fest and a Sounded Ethos

It’s 8:00, Saturday morning – too early to be awake after the festivities of the night before.  But I really need to pee, and bright sunlight is already leaking in through the top of the tent, so I groggily zip open the door-flap and crawl outside.  The grass beneath my knees is tough and yellow – typical terrain for the central Kenyan highlands.  As I stumble through the campsite, I see some early signs of life between the hundreds of quiet tents: thin lines of smoke trailing up from campfires, some early-risers making coffee under an acacia tree.  I pass one circle of revelers who haven’t gone to bed yet; they’re lounging in lawn-chairs, smoking and chatting.

“Come have a beer!” shouts one of the happy strangers.  A beer is the last thing I want before breakfast, but they seem so friendly that I stroll over anyway.

“Did you just wake up?” asks this Indian-Kenyan guy. “Because you look like it!” 

“Wewe!” says his girlfriend, slapping his shoulder in mock reprimand.  She turns to me: “Believe me, you look better than he does right now.”  This is the prevailing mood at Fisherman’s Camp at Lake Naivasha: free, generous, jestering.  I have to decline many more offers of early-morning alcohol before I reach the outhouses.

Last week, Fisherman’s Camp was the site of the third annual Rift Valley Festival, a three-day music celebration, showcasing artists from Kenya and the UK.  The festival was initially founded by two brothers, Sean and Ivan Ross, who according to the event's website, “have years of experience promoting events in the UK and deep roots in Kenya.  They came up with the idea of a festival as the perfect means to celebrate on an international stage the richness of East African culture and music as well as promote the unity and beauty of Kenya.”

The Rift Valley Festival is ostensibly a meeting-of-worlds and a coming-together of different musical styles.  During the festival, Kenyan artists of various genres commanded the stage – DJs, rappers, dance troupes, and even the illustrious diva Suzanna Owiyo – interspersed with dance sessions deejayed by UK artists.  And when you looked out at everyone hipping and hopping and high-fiving under the strobe lights, the audience was undeniably cosmopolitan and multicolored. 

But I couldn’t help asking myself: was the festival really a mashup of “worlds”?  Over the course of the weekend, it seemed to me that the lines between “worlds” were still quite evident and not-yet-blurred.   Despite the high-quality musical performances, the festival was saturated with an East-meets-West self-consciousness that has long been the hallmark of Nairobi’s pop culture portals and leisure spaces.

Maybe I shouldn’t use the phrase "East-meets-West" to describe the Ross brothers' hyper-deliberate “international stage."  In his latest book, the renowned scholar and activist Hamid Dabashi argues that “the East” and “the West” are essentially fictive constructs that reinforce human divides each time we use them to designate massive swathes of geography and culture.  He refers to this time-worn branding practice as “other-worlding” – a way of imagining entire cultural constellations in opposition to our own, whether we hail from the fictional “East” or the chimeric “West.”  Even (or especially) for those of us with an uncomfortable foot in both worlds, the terms can feel reductive and divisive.

But Dabashi posits a solution to this constructed divide, a solution that he already sees at work in the revolutions in the Middle East: To dissolve our uncommon ethnos within a common ethos.  He believes that the divisions of humanity (if we must have them) should be along ethical lines: uniting those who are committed to common ideals against those who would repress or deny the realization of such ideals.  He writes that if we hope to face our imminent political and environmental crises with any grace or strength, we can no longer sort ourselves into crippling ethno-cultural categories.  In short, Dabashi proposes an ethical map of the world, a new ideological geography.

In Nairobi, more than almost anywhere else on earth, ethnos and ethos are constantly vying for supremacy as human categories.  And more often than not, ethnos seems to be winning out.  Many of Nairobi’s rappers define their art as either like or unlike American art; Somalian and Sudanese immigrants are often treated coldly when they cross the border; many expats try not to leave their “mini-European” neighborhoods; and, as was tragically revealed in the last general elections, tribal loyalties can even overshadow the desire for peaceful democracy.  Ethnos prevails in Nairobi as a site of both association and antagonism.

But then there are many bright and beautiful moments, in the city and beyond, that are marked by a uniting ethos.  There are spaces and times in which gatherings of Kenyans and Kenyan-wannabes (in our many-colored, multilingual, striped and storied complexity) are categorized only by what we love – by what we collectively know and believe. There are times when communities of Kenya-dwellers are animated by the same uni-joyous forces; and at the Rift Valley Festival, I witnessed quite a lot of communality and shared love of sound.  Maybe they were just hours of music-induced euphoria, but maybe also we believed in some of the same things at the same time: how good it feels to dance under the wide Kenyan night, how beautiful the music, how beautiful each other, how beautiful the world.

Unfortunately, some attendees’ die-hard habits of “other-worlding” were not entirely lost in the beats of the music-fest; on Friday, I met some British kids who had spent their whole lives in Kenya and knew only two words in Kiswahili: ati! (an expression of disapproval) and we njoo (you, come here).

Maybe I’ll take that pre-breakfast beer after all.

Da "Music Scene" (Etymology?)

Since the ostensible focus of my year in Africa is “the music scene,” I’ve been meaning to jot down some music-related observations from the City of Peace.

First, a long side-note: I recently read this interesting (if too well-structured) article by Kay Shelemay called “Musical Communities: Rethinking the Collective in Music.”  She writes that in recent decades, ethnomusicologists have been forced to reconsider the term “community” as a unit of study; as our global population becomes increasingly diasporic, techni-centric and mobile, it becomes difficult to use “community” to refer to a group of people living in the same space and sharing the same histories and traditions.  Instead, “community” tends to be something imagined, flexible, instable, a term too generous in its possible applications to be used in any technically nominal sense.  Shelemay thinks that as the word “community” loses some of its relevance, social theorists have started to focus instead on “ patterns of mobility, that… provide new models for studying routes instead of roots.”  I love that idea of conceptualizing humans and their relationships as mobile, chartable, linear – as routes that intersect at times, routes that run parallel for long or short whiles, routes that get tangled into knots in those places where communities stabilize for a period.  It’s a conceptual model that accounts for both spatial and temporal change. 

In my personal conversations/relationships lately, it seems like people are taking stock of their lives and fleshing out their identities and describing their pasts in a way that resembles drawing constellations.  Very few people I know identify with just one or two locatable nodes on the globe, or “communities.”  Instead, they are multi-nodal people, with warm, important communities that they belong to (or belonged to) in different times and spaces.  To me, the interesting part of this personal-identity-model are the liminalities, the connecting threads, the parts of every person that tie all their home-spaces together, the phantom lines in the night sky that you draw between the stars to make a picture that makes sense.

Anyway, what I wanted to mention was how Shelemay identified alternative words that scholars are using to describe “musical communities” – terms that have more specificity than “community,” or at least have not been so hollowed-out.  These include:

(1)  Subculture (theorized by Mark Slobin, Dick Hebdige)
(2)  Art worlds (coined by Howard S. Becker)
(3)  Musical pathways (coined by Ruth Finnegan)
(4)  The music scene (theorized by Edward Said, Barry Shanks, Will Straw)

All of the above would potentially work as units of study, but the term “music scene” seemed to be the most applicable in Tanzania.  Will Straw describes “the music scene” as “a rubric that reconciles two contrary pressures: one towards the stabilization of local historical continuities, and the other which works to disrupt such continuities, to cosmopolitanize and relativize them…The point is not to designate particular cultural spaces as one or the other, but to examine the ways in which particular music practices produce a sense of community within the conditions of metropolitan music scenes.” 

I love that definition, because in Tanzania, most musical performances seem to espouse these seemingly-opposite impulses to (1) be proudly and uniquely Tanzanian, to rework historical national tropes into new sounds; and on the other hand, (2) to be modern and cosmopolitan, to de-Tanzania-ify the sounds, to create something with a broad-base appeal.  Many artists (especially in hip hop) are constantly trying to create sonic art that is self-complete and self-justifying, i.e. not reliant on historic-national context for its power; at the same time, every successful Tanzanian artist needs to be tuned-in to the national pulse, either engaging with issues of national consequence, or purposefully circumventing them.  With bands who perform in traditional Tanzanian styles (i.e. ngoma, kwaya), these contradictory impulses are not quite as obvious; their performances are, by definition, deeply embedded in national tradition, and the only hint of that second impulse is the desire to “update” their sound, to make their performance feel “fresh.”

Since that side-note went too long, I’ll write about actual TZ music in the next post!

January Bluez

January lives in a cement-block, blue-door, one-room apartment with his coworker Onesimo.  It’s small – just enough space for two beds side-by-side, and a dresser.  In the daytime, they keep one bed folded up against the wall to create some standing room.  There’s one large window, with a Masai-shuka strung up as a casual curtain, and the ever-present Tanzanian mosquito net bundled close to the ceiling.  Over the dresser is a pretty big mirror, and the dresser-top is littered with typical male necessities and vanities: un-lidded Vaseline jars, condoms, aftershave, small metal razors, one long-toothed comb, a tin of shoe-shine.

When January finally invited me to come over, I was very pleased.  Seeing the inside of a guy’s room – how he lives, the objects he keeps safe, what he lets fall to the ground, how he arranges his small domestic life – is exhilarating, illuminating.  Intimate in the same way that secret-telling is intimate.  His transistor radio takes up significant space in the tiny room, balanced on an overturned plastic bucket so it’s level with the bed.  He fiddles with the dials as we talk without even looking at the radio, finding all the right frequencies, memory or instinct in his fingertips.  

January steps outside to take a phone call, and I start examining the small things on the windowsill by his bed.  A cassette tape: Bob Marley’s Legend.  A pamphlet titled “10 Tips for Great Sex.”  One well-worn book: the autobiography of Malcolm X.   I pick up the book, and it falls open to a section that has clearly been read more often than the rest.  January comes back into the room, and I grin and hold up the book and ask him if he liked it. “Sana,” he tells me, and takes the book from my hands the way a mother takes back her baby from someone who’s been holding it carelessly. 

“But there’s a book I love even more,” he says, and reaches into a backpack hanging from the wall.  He pulls out a scrappy brown envelope, and from the envelope, a thick volume titled Birds of Eastern Africa.  He hands it to me, “My bible.”  I know January loves birds; when we’re together, even the birds that seem small or dull to me are a total distraction to him, they command his utter interest.  When we're hanging out, his eyes follow any movement in the sky or in the bushes: zoning in, analyzing, naming.  Afterwards, he tries quickly to reengage in the conversation, but it’s like talking to someone who has just had a dream or seen a spirit, someone touched by a divinity you didn’t see yourself.

I flipped through the bird-book – more than 400 pages, 4 to 5 birds to a page – and January was looking over my shoulder, mouthing things to himself as I turned pages.  It slowly dawned on me, with every worn-out page, that he had memorized every single species in the book – their colors, wing shapes, names, migration patterns.