Around the time rapper King Kaka released his song criticising Uhuru Kenyatta’s government for its litany of failures earlier this week, a group of Kikuyu musicians posted to the social media a song calling on the Mt Kenya region to uphold thayu (peace) and support their muthamaki (king). The said king is introduced as Uhuru wa Kenyatta in a 2011 video grab featuring the late John Michuki declaring the then prospective presidential candidate as kiongozi wa Wakikuyu (the de facto Kikuyu leader).
The pro-Kenyatta song, Turumie Thayu (Let’s uphold peace), brings together secular and gospel Kikuyu-language artistes, Mbiri maestro Musaimo wa Njeri, Ben Githae, Kamande wa Kioi, Hezeh Ndung’u, Gerald Chege, Joseph Theiya, Irene Menjus, and Lady Wanja. They are not necessarily responding to King Kaka’s anti-establishment Wajinga Nyinyi (You Fools), which has captured the Kenyan imagination because of the boldness with which it expresses our pains under a government completely insensitive to our plight.
Posting of the Kikuyu song in certain networks is meant to counteract King Kaka’s masterpiece. But Wajinga Nyinyi has an edge over its counterpart not only because of its panache in saying what most Kenyans would have liked to be the first ones to tell their government, but also because it is in Sheng, a cosmopolitan language of the urban youth that combines Kiswahili and English with ethnic languages.
King Kaka excoriates the Kenyan public for being led by the nose by corrupt ruling elites, who are only good at giving false promises in party manifestos and looting when they ascend to power. For their part, the Mt Kenya musicians criticise elements from the region who have abandoned their Muthamaki at a time he needs them the most to consolidate his legacy.
Unlike King Kaka’s marvellous tour de force, the uninspiring Kikuyu song is not meant to go viral. It’s composed for an ethnically inclined coterie of fans. In fact, there is a sense in which genuine supporters of our dear president (like me and my dog Sigmund here) will pray the song doesn’t reach certain ears because, in its worship of our muthamaki, it maladroitly reminds the Mt Kenya community of the said leader’s sacrifice in our defence during the 2007 post-election violence.
Cryptically coded in the song, the “sacrifice” is open to a lot of (mis)interpretation if it lands on the wrong ears.
The Kikuyu musicians align themselves with President Kenyatta’s Kieleweke political faction against his deputy William Ruto’s Tangatanga cabal, which is seen to have come to create divisions in the House of Mumbi.
For his part, King Kaka criticises politicians in both camps, although we need a new beginning that kicks both to the curb.
In a clumsy refrain that provokes gross Freudian connotations, the Kikuyu artistes pledge that they are waiting for their muthamaki to blow biringi (the whistle) before they decide their course of action. In context, our leader is expected to tell us who to vote for in the 2022 presidential polls.
Unlike King Kaka, the Kikuyu musicians seem to see nothing wrong in a dictatorship. Stolen from the Bible with zero creativity, the muthamaki in the Kikuyu song is an all-powerful conqueror, ordained from above by some supernatural force. His weaknesses should never be discussed in public; we are presented as ciana (children), from whom the King’s njaga (nakedness) should be hidden.
Yet, as scholars of central Kenya’s history and culture (eg, John Lonsdale in The Moral Economy of the Mau Mau) have noted, the T-beam of individual and collective self-worth in the region is the feeling of wiathi (freedom and self-mastery). Although Kikuyu oligarchs have systematically eroded that wiathi over the years to produce mental slaves who follow them blindly, the community still delights in turning the tables on the powers that be.
In most Kenyan societies, a muthamaki was chosen by the people on the basis of the individual’s sobriety, intellectual acumen, upright moral character, emotional self-togetherness, and philosophical good taste.
Ironically, among our so-called leaders, there is not a single muthamaki in the strict Kikuyu sense of the word. This is the point that King Kaka makes throughout Wajinga Nyinyi, wondering why on earth we vote for such miscreants.
With plummeting coffee and milk prices, the Mt Kenya economy is in a shambles. I’m a small-scale tea farmer there, and the proceeds from my farm this year can barely buy my dog Sigmund a decent meal this Christmas. So I very much doubt the musicians’ sincerity in this support of toxic Kikuyu chauvinism.
Apart from Irene Menjus and Kamande wa Kioi, the musicians in the video seem to have been forced, most likely by financial circumstances, to participate in the pro-muthamaki performance. Their hearts are not in it. They haven’t worn their best costumes for the occasion; they are uncoordinated in their gestures and body movements; and awkward lip syncing is evident throughout the performance.
The greatest losers in participating in the evolving chauvinistic sensibility in Kikuyu music are Musaimo and Lady Wanja because, unlike the other artistes, they have a legacy of philosophical depth, painfully cultivated for decades with melodic masterpieces and scintillating live performances. The rest of the artistes in the video are mainly entertainers at low-budget funerals.
Disrespectful to women, Kamande’s songs are, for example, about how you should forcibly kiss your former female teachers wherever you meet them for the evidently nonsensical things they taught you in school.
The less said about Githae the better, as he has made a career cavorting with unpopular dynasties. His voice is unimpressive; it is so strained and grating, it literally gives me constipation whenever I hear him do what only a few of his close friends would seriously consider to be singing.
Mwai Kibaki, whom Musaimo has in the past sung in defence of, especially against supposed nemeses such as Raila Odinga, didn’t need songs about his legacy at the end of his presidential tenure because his accomplishments were self-evident. By contrast, our current crop of so-called leaders will have to conjure up a legacy of their own through cheaply hired court poets.
Like the brand of American heroism created through swashbuckling Hollywood action movies after the superpower’s humiliation in Vietnam, our almighty government will have to pay artistes to create fiction about its non-existent successes.
Critics might argue that King Kaka, who like Githae was an ardent Uhuru supporter in the 2017 campaigns, doesn’t offer solutions to the problems he presents in his new songs. But should an organic intellectual have to do that if the problems just need the use of common sense to resolve?
I’m guided by Wole Soyinka’s wise words in the preface to his play Opera Wonyosi to the effect that once a society is reminded of the root of the “banalities assailing our daily life” in a powerful work of art, it will “move to act in its own overall self-interest.” To Soyinka, artistes need do no more than offer a “scientific” analysis of the issue at hand.
I’ve asked the celeb artiste via WhatsApp if his new song is just another populist ploy to make a quick buck through spectacle, cynically taking advantage of a traumatised society desperate for a messiah.
So as you wait for YouTube celebs and their armchair newspaper critics to bring you revolution instead of going out there to initiate it yourselves, my dog Sigmund (sipping on his arrowroot makeruro from central Kenya) warmly wishes you a Prosperous Christmas and a Merry New Year.
