Kalenjin popular music and the contestation of national space in Kenya

Abstract

This paper addresses how Kalenjin popular music, played mainly on the Kalenjin language KASS FM Radio based in Nairobi and also broadcasting on the Internet, participates in the consolidation of Kalenjin identities by recasting the collective national space – as governed by the nation-state – as a sphere of influence potentially injurious to imagined Kalenjin cultural and economic interests. It becomes a music of identity that deploys history, mythology and narration as a means of reshaping Kalenjin self-definition and culture. But while paying attention to these forms of ethnic self-definition, and how they are used to counter the homogenizing and hegemonizing logic of the national space, this paper also addresses the contradictions that circumscribe the music's gesture towards the pure ethnic while operating from a space that is already hybrid and multicultural, shaped by a confluence of non-Kalenjin ways of life, values and ideas. The conclusion shows how the emergence of new sites of power brokering has challenged the nation-state's governance of the public domain.

Keywords:

• Kalenjin
• popular music
• identity
• national space
• Kenya

Notes

1. Nyairo and Ogude, “Popular Music,” 383–400.

2. The term Kalenjin is derived from the Nandi word meaning “I tell you,” and was coined by students in the elite Alliance High School in the late 1940s to refer to the Kalenjin as a collectivity: see Kipkorir, Marakwet, and Anderson, Eroding the Commons, introduction.

3. The Nandi were the best known Kalenjin sub-ethnic group, due to their protracted resistance against British conquest. Nandi resistance, under the leadership of Koitalel Samoei, lasted from 1895 to 1906: Matson, Nandi Resistance.

4. Ogot, “Mau Mau and Nationhood,” 15. The Sabaot of Mt Elgon are excluded from Ogot's list.

5. See Cohen, The Symbolic Construction of Community.

6. Ogot, “Mau Mau and Nationhood,” 12.

7. This is not to imply that a homogenous Kalenjin community exists. Kalenjin dialects are not mutually intelligible over the entire region, although a pan-ethnic Kalenjin consciousness does exist and is often articulated in broader Kalenjin projects.

8. The Kibaki government made several attempts to withdraw the Kass FM's broadcast licence, and twice in one year broadcasts were suspended for several days.

9. Sambu, Was Isis Asis?

10. .On the history of the orkoiik, see Anderson, “Black Mischief,” 851–77, and Anderson, “Visions of the Vanquished,” 164–95.

11. Connell and Gibson, Soundtracks.

12. Titlestad, “Listening to Bloke Modisane,” 579.

13. Kotut, Rift Valley, audiocassette. Land tenure was amongst the most contentious issues in the 2003 draft constitution, many Kalenjin understanding it to mean that land would be redistributed.

14. Kotut, Keiyo, audiocassette.

15. Nagel, “Constructing Ethnicity,” 154.

16. This is not to deny the fact that political mobilization of Kalenjin ethnicity was highly effective in the 2007 general elections, when they voted in support of the Orange Democratic Party (ODM).

17. Tapotuk, Muren, audiocassette.

18. The administrative district of Mt Elgon is in Western Province, not Rift Valley. But this has not alienated the Sabaot from Kalenjin ethnic consciousness.

19. Yewah, “The Nation as a Contested Construct,” 47.

20. Rennan, “What is a Nation,” 19.