“Until all Africans stand and speak as free beings, equal in the eyes of all men…the African continent will not know peace. We Africans will fight.”
—Haile Selassie, 1963 address to the United Nations

Nairobi—Six graffiti portraits gaze in on the yard: Malcolm X, Haile Selassie, Bob Marley, Tupac Shakur, Biggie Smalls, and Dedan Kimathi, the 1950s freedom fighter who is Kenya’s version of Che Guevara.

“That guy could swim under crocodiles, man,” Kamau is saying. “He was invisible, everywhere at once. Government troops ambushed in the south — Kimathi. Later the same day, another battle five hundred kilometres away — Kimathi!”

Kamau’s own weapon of choice, as he likes to say, is a microphone. Twenty-nine years old with a fang-like chipped front tooth and chin-length dreadlocks, he’s part of the hip hop trio Kalamashaka, whose lyrics express a world view shaped by life in the ghetto. Kalamashaka, in turn, forms part of Ukoo Flani Mau Mau (“Another Mau Mau Clan”), a well known artists’ collective in the Nairobi slum of Dandora. We’re standing in their headquarters, an open-air compound sheltered by the broad canopy of an acacia, talking about the faces on the walls.

“We were going to paint Marcus Garvey too,” Kamau says, “but we ran out of room.” Both reggae and hip hop are immensely popular in Kenya; they blare from the stereos of practically every car, taxi, and ghetto blaster in Nairobi. And the boundaries between them are starting to blur. The two merge before my eyes when a Rasta named Nanda, his dreads wrapped up in a turban, joins us and starts playing acoustic guitar, providing a soft rhythm over which Kamau starts to rap in Swahili. Bits of English emerge from the flow – “colour,” “power,” “ghetto.” “We hate bling,” Kamau tells me later. “We’re trying to raise consciousness, not money.”

While hip hop, a relatively new arrival, is growing at break neck speed, reggae has the deeper tradition. That helps explain why rappers like Kamau wear dreadlocks and regularly quote Jamaicans.

“We’ve always identified with reggae’s message,” Kamau tells me when I ask him how the sounds of a tiny Caribbean island managed to erupt half a world away. “You know, reggae was born in the slums. It’s all about rebellion.”

This truth was reinforced in 1982, when Nairobi was rocked by an attempted coup. Kenya only had one radio station at the time; it was hijacked by the rebels, who broadcast an uninterrupted stream of reggae for the duration of the coup. Once the government regained control, the genre was banned from the airwaves. That, as Kamau said, “only made us like it more.”

This may sound odd to those westerners who associate reggae with Caribbean beaches, fat joints, and good vibes. We tend to hear the suggestively syncopated rhythms and ignore the lyrics, skipping Trenchtown in favour of Montego Bay. Reggae, subversive? Most of the lines which do make it into the mainstream – “Could You Be Loved,” or “Three Little Birds” – are divorced from politics, reinforcing the impression that reggae is best served with a mojito rather than a Molotov.

But the lightest of scratches reveals frustration bubbling beneath the surface. Peter Tosh, who would later be assassinated by unknown assailants, sang “I don’t want no peace. I want equal rights, and justice.”

His former bandmate carried on the same vein: “Until the philosophy that holds one race superior and another inferior is finally, and permanently, discredited and abandoned – everywhere is war.”

Bob Marley fans might be surprised to learn that he lifted this line from a speech delivered to the United Nations in 1963 by the then emperor of Ethiopia, Haile Selassie. Further proof that, philosophically speaking, reggae was born in Africa.

It’s been trying to get back ever since. Selassie, who was called Ras Tafari prior to assuming the throne, inspired the movement that bears his name not least for his promise to welcome every black person who could make his or her way to Ethiopia. The year he addressed the UN happened to be the year Kenya gained its independence. Liberation was sweeping the entire continent – thirty-four countries broke free between 1956 and 1966. But half a century later, neighborhoods like Dandora have only multiplied throughout Africa. The philosophy of racial superiority may have been officially discredited, but it hasn’t been abandoned. And war, if not quite everywhere, remains widespread.

And so you have groups like Ukoo Flani Mau Mau, who fight the only non-violent way they can; whose doors are permanently open to any boy or girl in the hood who would rather learn how to breakdance or sing or paint than sniff glue or rob a bus or turn a trick. “Each one teach one” is the company motto, meaning every person is expected to pass along their skills to someone younger. Masters and apprentices alike come and go, a steady stream of performers whose presence fills the yard and arms those inside with a voice.

Tags: international, kenya, performing arts

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Posted on Thursday, September 20th, 2007 at 4:21 pm. Follow comments through the RSS 2.0 feed. Comment or trackback.