Múgiithi music as social discourse in urban

Kenya:
use of religious musical genre in recreating
Agìkúyú cultural institutions
Kuria Gìthiora, Michigan State University
1. INTRODUCTION
Every Colonized people in whose soul an inferiority complex
has been created by the death and burial of its local originality –
finds itself face to face with the language of the civilizing nation;
that is, with the culture of the mother country (Frantz Fanon
1967: 18).
Despite their socio-cultural and commercial successes and given
the forbidden nature of some of the lyrics and discursive
practices adopted by both Múgìthi and Kenyan Hip Hop, it can
be argued both musical genres also embody an anti-hegemonic
perspective in their language usage. Hip Hop often and
deliberately violates normatively prescribed sociocultural and
linguistic conventions of both “Everyday American English
Language (EAL)” and Standard American English (SAE)
(Smitherman 2000, 272). Mũgithi, similarly, defies kawaida
(Everyday), polite Gĩkũyũ and ‘African English’ (Schmied 1990)
spoken in Kenya. Consequently in this language contact
situations typical of Kenyan urban space, Mũgithi whose main
medium is Gĩkũyũ, gains meaning within its specific social and
dialogic or inter-textual contexts while also performing both
global and local cultural discourses in its song-texts. While
much has been written about various aspects of both US Hip
Hop and Kenyan Hip Hop, little has been documented about the
Mũgithi genre, which recreates Gĩkũyũ traditions and socio-
cultural discourse(s) through Gĩcandi performances and
poetry.
Mũgiithi or “train” music which is mostly composed in Gĩkũyũ,
is a popular weekend song and dance, held usually in the
evenings in modern indoor or outdoor social and entertainment
establishments in urban Kenya, in towns and cities such as
Nairobi, Mombasa, Nakuru, Thika, Murang’a, Nyeri, Nanyuki,
Nyahururu, Naivasha, Meru, Kisumu and Eldoret among others.
The music is also popular with many non-Gìkúyú speaking
Kenyans. Additionally, what was once described as the Múgithi

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phenomenon that begun in the early 1990s amidst political

repression in Kenya, has become only one of the “theme night”
music variety replicated by other communities using various
Kenyan languages in dances and performances in various hotels
and restaurants as well as in media outlets such as radio, film,
television and the Internet. Since its beginnings in the early
1990s, the music genre has become a sociocultural institution
that stresses the reciprocity of performers and audience in what
has become typified behavior (Berger and Luckmann 1966).
Mũgiithi song and dance performances are largely an adult
phenomenon enjoyed by many enthusiasts across gender and
various Kenyan socio-economic classes. While Mútonya (2007)
has elaborately discussed the aesthetics of Múgithi, there is still
a huge research gap and literature on Mũgithi. This paper
suggests that, the music genre should continue to be studied as
both an important music form, and a newly emerged
sociocultural discourse in urban Kenya through its creative and
articulate use of Gĩkũyũ, Swahili, and English languages and to
some extent ‘Sheng’ (Githiora 2003), an urban Swahili dialect,
along with a “call” and “response” singing pattern often
accompanied by the adept incorporation of mainstream religious
musical practices and discourses in recreating Gĩkũyũ cultural
institutions. Magahi nonetheless fist started a conduit and outlet
for expressing various anxieties resulting from political
repression coupled with both adverse economic and
sociocultural circumstances and environments in Kenya
particularly in the 1980s and the 1990s. Both Múgithi and Hip
Hop continue to play important roles in sociocultural and
political commentaries on a variety of issues in the country.
Like Kenya Hip Hop that deploys massive amounts of Sheng
[Swahili-English language commonly spoken among urban-
based Kenyan youth [On Sheng, see Githiora (2002) and Githinji
(2006)], Mũgithi, has become part of urban folk life in Nairobi
especially among the middle-aged Kenyans. The song and dance
performances of Mũgithi feature a single guitarist, and the
genre’s name has been appropriated from a popular Christian
church hymn in Gĩkũyũ (and English), that both admonishes its
followers to leave their sinful ways while prevailing upon them
to enter the train bound for heaven. While male artists
dominate the genre with both Salim “Junior” and Salim

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“Mighty,” Mike Rua and the late “Mwarimũ” (from Swahili

Mwalimu or ‘teacher’ in Gĩkũyũ) are some of the most popular
Mũgithi male artists, Wangari wa Kabera is perhaps the only
popular female artist illustrating how male-dominated the
musical genre continues to be. These artists often copy music
repertoires from more seasoned and historically mainstream
popular Kikuyu musicians, considered skillful modern gìcandì
players/singers that include Joseph Kamarũ, Wanganangú,
Wagatonye, Nduru, Mũsaimo, among others. These nightclub
based Múgithi players all use both music skill and humor to
engage with and to also throw challenges at Gĩkũyũ tradition,
the Christian church, the nation, the government and western-
dominated modernity. Mũgithi can be also be considered an
embodiment of a counter-language found in such genres as rap,
toast, signifyin, narrativizing comedy, drama and song, which
are all bound up in one music genre (Smitherman 2000).
While dancing to Mũgithi is hardly a great spectacle, the socio-
cultural and linguistic discourses along with attendant
discursive devices and aesthetics require- as in Hip Hop- skilled
verbal dexterity and precision in word-use dexterity, deep
linguistic and cultural knowledge coupled with appropriate and
well-timed vocal accomplishment. Overall, being an
accomplished and celebrated Múgithi artist with the necessary
verbal blend of skills and aesthetics (as well as an ardent and
loyal celebrant fan to boot) requires appropriately delivered and
well-timed discursive strategies, articulation and knowledge of
various music sets. In many respects, Mũgithi is like Hip Hop, as
practiced in both the US and in Kenya, as it also seems to help
galvanize an urban-based audience into one imagined
community (Anderson 1983). During its performance Mũgithi
acquires a unique poetic form, and helps reaffirm a Kenyan
identity amongst participants, while at the same time offering
them a site to help recreate themselves in variously imagined
ways, through a modern version of traditional dialogic poetry,
Gĩcandĩ - a traditional and popular form among the Agĩkũyũ.
Like a good artist, who understands issues and its audience,
Mũgithi excels in this role and also acts as a sociocultural
institution in much more unique ways than many other
contemporary music genres or even other well-established
social, religious, political institutions.

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2. Setting the Scene: Gĩcandĩ poetry in Mũgithi

Mũgithi genre can be traced back to the gĩcandi form of dialogic
poetry, which played an important part of Gĩkũyũ oral literature
and is for example used to help stylistically narrate modern
Kenyan literature (Ngũgi wa Thiong'o 1993; Kabira and Mũtahi
1988; Mũtahi 1991; Gĩtatĩ 1993). According to Valentino
Ghilardi:
The gĩcandi is a kind of Gĩkũyũ universal poem of the
highest poetry in which the performer paces freely,
passing from one field to another. He touches on all the
leitmotifs more or less at length. He passes from feasting
merriment to the darkest sadness, from the comical to the
tragic and from lyrical to gruesome or even apocalyptical
expressions. He disdains vulgar themes. (Ghilardi
1966:184; quoted and translated in Njogu 1997: 48, italics
added)
Njogu (1997) suggests that, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o claims a space
for the Gĩcandĩ genre in Gikũyũ literature by novelizing
(narrativizing) the genre and in consciously and overtly utilizing
it to define the narrative of the novel, Caitaani Mũtharabaini
(1980). In the novel, Njogu adds, the narrator is depicted as a
Gĩcandĩ performer unconstrained spatially and temporarily. It is
the Gĩcandĩ player who has the divine duty of telling the story of
his people’s struggles in postcolonial Kenya. Moreover, Njogu
observes, the riddle like nature of another work by Ngũgĩ
Matigari (1987), and its spirit of search for answers is a
“sideward glance” at Gĩcandĩ. In Moving the Center (1993) also
by Ngũgĩ, the writer asserts that the British colonial
government destroyed the pre-colonial Gĩkũyũ poetry festival
because the colonial administrators did not want to see the
continuation of a festival whose content they did not
understand. Ngũgĩ’s use of the stylistics of Gĩcandĩ is a clear
manifestation of the value he finds in the cultural repertoire of
the Gĩcandĩ genre of the Gĩkũyũ people.
Among the Agĩkũyũ of Kenya there used to be a Gĩkũyũ
poetry festival, or shall I say, competition, which drew
large crowds. The best poets of the various regions would
meet in the arena, like in battle, and compete with words
and instant compositions. These poets had even developed

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a form of hierograhics, which they kept to themselves. The

British killed this kind of festival (1993:19).
The term Gĩcandĩ refers to the dialogic poetry and the musical
instrument that accompanies the performer. The term is a
“nominalization of the verb gũcanda which means to dance”
(Wanjikũ Kabira and Karega Mũtahi (1988: 28)). It also refers to
the onomatopoeic (hissing) sound made by seeds in the
instrument as the poem is performed. According to Njogu
(1997), the general consensus is that Gĩcandĩ is poetry
composed by at least two poets who enter into dialogue with
each other. The poetry is a sort of a verbal duel of words and is
performed with an accompanying instrument (Gĩcandĩ), which is
adorned with engravings.
To perform Gĩcandĩ is both to create and re-accentuate prior
texts, which, is a dialogic process (Bhaktin 1981). This seems to
follow Street (1993), who views “culture as a verb.” Thus the
one-man guitarist, who plays the role of the Gĩcandi singer as he
leads his Mũgithi audience in gũcanda, is performing in the
nominalization of the verb “gũcanda,” which means “to dance”
(Kabira and Mũtahi 1988: 28). Consequently by deploying
language in the semiological sense as a symbolic system and
capital (Bourdieu 1991), with its infrastructures, history, and
grammar, one can conclude that Mũgithi song and dance
becomes as much a site of language and culture learning as it is
a symbolic space of identification, bonding, investment,
enunciation and desire for lost African traditions and the anxiety
represented by western-dominated modernity.
Because many lyrics in Mũgithi are considered offensive and
transgressive in mainstream society and publications, I will use
a small sample of the Gĩcandĩ poetry from Njogu (1997: 62),
which might assist our understanding of the two genre’s
dialogic and intertextual nature, which is also similar to Hip
Hop’s. It might also help explain why Hip Hop both in Kenya
and elsewhere find such performance so naturally appealing and
useful in their compositions:
Poet A: Mwana arĩ njomoya yake
Na ndinamĩigĩrĩra riitho
Yathiire kũ na ndiĩrwo?
Poet B: Njomoya nĩ gĩcango kĩa mũnyaka

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Gĩkagirwo Gĩcandĩinĩ
Nĩ ihĩtia kwaga gũkorowo kuo
Poet A: Mũturi ũgũtura rware
Ndumĩra njomoya ya Gĩcandĩ
Gĩtarĩ nayo ĩi ũũru
Poet B: Njomoya nĩ kĩrengereri
Gĩĩkĩragwo mũthia wa Gĩcandĩ
Poet A: The child has a njomoya
And I haven’t set eyes on it
Where did it go?
Yet I was not told?
Poet B: Njomoya is a lucky copper chain
And it is attached to the Gĩcandĩ
It is an error for it not to be there
Poet A: You, blacksmith forging in the plains
Make me a njomoya for the Gĩcandĩ
For the Gĩcandĩ without it, is bad
Poet B: Njomoya is an ornamental copper-wire chain
Attached to the mouth of the Gĩcandĩ
According to Njogu (1997: 62) the copper chain referred to in
the poem has at least two synonyms; njomoya and kĩrengereri.
The chain is believed to bring about luck and blacksmiths are
involved in making it. Poet A therefore addresses the
blacksmith directly, making him an active participant in this
social imaginary. In most Gĩcandĩ performances, the inscribed
text and the Gĩcandĩ gourd itself (with the seeds therein) and
the poetry’s composition dialogically merge indistinguishably.
The performer considers the inscribed text an integral part of
his or her performance and thus would make constant reference
to the pictograms in the poem (Njogu 1997: 62). In future, it’ll
be interesting to draw a connection between the copper chain
(along with the belief about the luck it brings about to the
artists) and adornments that help establish Gĩcandĩ as the site
for the social imaginary with contemporary bling! Bling! culture
and repertoire for Hip Hop artists globally.
3. Localizing Global Hip Hop through Gĩcandĩ dialogic
poetry
Gĩcandĩ poetry is reflected in theme and form, in both the
localized Kenyan Hip Hop and in Mũgithi, especially in the latter

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in which lyrics are often copied verbatim (word for word) from
gicandĩ poetry or from other popular Kenyan songs (equally
fashioned along the poetic culture of gicandĩ) from the late
fifties, early sixties, seventies and eighties by artists such as
Daniel Kamarũ, Wagatonye, Wanganangú, John Ndicũ, Nduru,
Wahome, Mũsaimo, Rũgwĩti and Daniel Kamau (DK) among
others. Others are songs by Daudi Kabaka and Fadhili Williams
who sing in Swahili. Mũgithi’s adaptation of country-western
songs by Kenny Rogers, Don Williams, Dolly Parton, Charlie
Pride, John Denver and Jim Reeves are particularly popular.
Mũgithi lyrics are usually sung to a simple beat led by the one-
man guitarist. The song “Uhiki,” first popularized by
“Hardstone” aka Harrison Ngũnjĩrĩ, considered Kenya’s first
truly famous Hip Hop artist, is among many other favorite
traditional songs in Gĩkũyũ that are often played during Mũgithi
nights. Revelers in the club where the performance is
happening will often join in the dancing by forming a line that
closely resembles a train. While the music repertoire is mainly
Gĩkũyũ songs, it also includes others from a variety of Kenyan
languages including Kiswahili, Kikamba, Dholuo and popular
country music in English by country singers mentioned earlier.
In “Uhiki” (Gĩkũyũ: ‘wedding’), “Hardstone” successfully mixed
traditional Kenyan music with an already globalized US Hip
Hop. It is from this localizing of global musical genre that one
gains a better understanding of the origins of Kenyan Hip Hop
in the 1990s. According to Nyairo (2004) “Hardstone” first
became popular with the song “Uhiki” in 1997, gaining him
attention and launching his career, on account of the song’s
unconventional form in which, embedded within the mix was a
diversity of musical traditions – from ethnic folk songs to
American rhythm-n’-blues, to Swahili taarab and Jamaican
Reggae. Arguably, each of the songs in the “Uhiki” album
appealed to a particular moment in Kenyan musical history;
each captured a specific local market, and all of them combined
to testify to the existence of a complex web of global networks
that constantly shape and revise popular music in local contexts.
Hardstone’s “Uhiki” stands as a seminal moment in
contemporary Kenyan popular music. It confirms the fluidity –
also seen in both Múgithi and Gìcandi - with which popular
music circulates from one place to another virtually unbounded

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by either spatial limitations or geographical distance. In this

regard one can argue that, the variety of genres and styles
Múgithi embodies is a fitting salute to both musical and cultural
intertextuality, along with the fluidity, hybridity and mobility of
postcolonial popular art forms. “Uhiki” is easily identifiable with
US popular music, as it is constitutively intertextual. According
to Nyairo (2004), it demands that, referents in the music, point
to a global context with both European and American
influences. It can thus be argued that popular music mirrors
prevailing culture and other social practices in the Kenyan
context, and also embodies an entire nation’s sense of itself.
Kenyan Hip Hop also seems to help render real meaning to the
idea of the Black Atlantic (Gilroy 1993), in the sense that the
African Continent’s popular music discourses are enabled by
various global dynamics, and easily re-connect with those of its
Diaspora in a reversal circuit. This is in spite of Gilroy’s limited
view of a Black Atlantic that is confined to the African Diaspora
in the UK and the Caribbean. Contemporary Kenyan culture now
enriched by both Mũgithi and Kenyan Hip Hop also seems to
provide evidence of ongoing global transactions within these
two musical genres. Hip Hop’s diverse narrativization, toasting,
and signification strategies are heard in their widened range
whilst at full throttle when “Uhiki” is punctuated by an African
American Language (AAL) influenced Hip Hop chant delivered
in an African-centered call and response format. The same is
heard in the chant “Hardstone in the house, you put up your
hands and you scream!” (Nyairo 2003: 44). While both “Uhiki”
and Hardstone its creator, remain important landmarks in the
birth of Kenyan Hip Hop, the popularity of localized global Hip
Hop and that of Mũgithi also display both innovativeness and re-
invention of African-centered, sociocultural discourses and
reconnections. These discourses resonate in the multilingual
“Uhiki” which is sung in Gĩkũyũ, Kiswahili and English using
Kenyan, American and Caribbean rhetorical and discursive
strategies and discourses. These are mixed with “rapping” that
clearly exploits oratory strategies and devices, including aspects
of African Oral Tradition that include common African-centered
discursive practices that enrich the music. Embedded within
these now reconnected Black Atlantic discourses and discursive
practices are aspects of dialogic poetry used in Gĩcandĩ’s

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rhetorical strategies and verbal dexterity. Such recreation of

the social imaginary of the Black Atlantic follows “the aesthetic
rules which for example govern Hip Hop, premised on the
dialectic of rescue, appropriation and recombination” (Gilroy
1993: 103).
Interspersed with the conversation lyrics of “Uhiki” are
instrumental rhythms of soul musician and Motown icon, the
African American singer, Marvin Gaye’s “Sexual Healing”
(1982). The song thus displays signs of a “reversal circuit in the
Black Atlantic” especially when Hardstone finally resorts to
mixing the Gĩkũyũ dialogue with a Swahili prayer and at the
same time framing “Uhiki,” along the same the lines as
“Twisted” by Keith Sweat (1996) — itself a remix of “Sexual
Healing.” This brings the Black Atlantic and its Pan Africanist
re-connections to a full reverse circle. Ultimately, “Uhiki” re-
appropriates and globalizes Hip Hop practices to help engage
the listener with traditional discourse between a Gĩkũyũ father
and his son. The son challenges his father, calling him “mũthee”
or “old man” as opposed to polite “baba” (father), which is
disrespectful, but speaks of the new assertiveness based on both
the anxiety and desire to challenge both established Gìkúyú
tradition and authority as well as western-driven modernity by
the young man now caught between the two cultural
sensibilities. The Gĩkũyũ father does not understand why his
son, who recently married and whom he helped pay the dowry
with his precious pedigree cow, is at loggerheads with his newly
married wife.
Such cultural discourse and dissonance in Mũgithi are
comparable to Marvin Gaye’s transgressiveness in “Sexual
Healing” (1982) which displays influences from Negro
spirituals, Soul music, Rhythm n’ Blues all expressed in the
counter-language characteristic of AAL (Morgan 1993). In his
song Marvin Gaye implores his woman to sleep with him or he
will masturbate, in effect symbolizing the antagonizing aspects
of a conservative African American culture against the ever-
present socio-cultural tensions and fissures that allow
promiscuity amidst the various contradictions and liberal
interpretations of contemporary western modernity. The
transgression of social graces that go with traditional African
American and Gĩkũyũ familial discourse conventions betrays

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“Uhiki’s” message that tradition is dynamic and vital. In both

cases, music becomes the celebratory site and occasion for
narrating and articulating the changing aspects of an
increasingly globalized Black culture embodied in both African
and African American cultures. It also marks the struggle for
discourse in recreating the social imaginary of the Black
Atlantic as seen in Mũgithi and Hip Hop, whether U.S or
Kenyan.
4. Mũgithi as social encounter and struggle for discourse
Mũgithi and to some extent Kenyan Hip Hop are about the
search for and engagement in an appropriate discursive space
and strategies. In the case of Mũgithi the dancers delve into the
dance and music as a form of nostalgia, desire, social encounter
and struggle. The genre is also about the search for a new
identity, and the impact this struggle has in trying to create a
challenging discourse that tackles the gap between tradition
and modernity. In many ways Mũgithi weekend nights in urban
areas of Kenya provide both the space for this engagement and
entering the social imaginary as a unified nation (Anderson
1983). Following a Bahktinian (1968) analysis of discourse,
dancing to Mũgithi both signifies and celebrates the temporary
turning of the “world upside down,” within this carnivalesque
space and marketplace context. Mũgithi is also about
recuperating traditional discourse (referred to as “Black Talk,”
by Smitherman (2000) in the U.S) as it offers participants
“moments of identification, that is, where and how they saw
themselves in the mirror of their society” (Bhabha 1994;
Ibrahim 2003: 173). The dance and celebration also moves
beyond the simple subversion of both Gĩkũyũ tradition and
modernity by resorting to the use of normally forbidden
linguistic and social practices. These include word contests,
touting and teasing similar to the earlier described “no holds
down” all-night activities of the Gĩkũyũ past known as maraara
nja and mambura carnivalesque events (Kenyatta 1938; Kabira
and Mũtahi 1988). The all-night mambura was permitted in
order to give space for free expression to all participants, and
courage to the initiates. During these celebrations, the young
and old, female and male could sing and dance and engage in
the most forbidden talk and taboo topics referring to, for

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example, the physical and/or sexual strength of males, or beauty

of women.
During the course of Mũgithi night, taboos are likewise
temporarily broken and subverted on the dance floor. This is
enabled by the spontaneous and formulaic utterances led by the
lead singer who also throws challenges at the established
sociocultural order and authorities in general. In this manner
the relative comfort and space of Mũgithi nights help bridge the
gap between language structure and its social context or
habitus and fields (Bourdieu 1991). Such structures exist in
people’s bodies and minds as sets of relations in the world. They
also include a person’s beliefs and dispositions. Thus urban
Kenyans can effectively deploy Mũgithi as the space to help
recuperate nearly forgotten sociocultural practices which helps
to recreate and recuperate past memory as well as to bridge the
gap between a western sanctioned individualism on the one
hand and to now socially re-imagined communal belonging as a
member of the Gìkúyú nation, culture and tradition on the other.
These language practices help the dialectic engaging between
the inside or inner private “self” or “I” with the public “me”;
practices that help to liberate previously silenced traditional
voices. This is perhaps because modernity has largely
disallowed most meaningful participation in traditional cultural
institutions and practices.
Additionally, the linguistic interaction and related practices help
to contribute to the uniqueness of Mũgithi in its ability to play
the role of a conduit, similar to Hip Hop’s and to help re-
articulate — at least for urbanized Kenyans, their suppressed
traditional voices or human uniqueness of the “other” in the
opposition to “me” where both supposedly exist in balance
within this dialectical relationship.
In order to reveal what is hidden within culture, Mũgithi’s
sociocultural and political discourse might help expose the
linguistic mechanisms through which culture is naturalized
along hegemonic and dominant mainstream structures and
paradigms. Also studying Mũgithi as an active verb (Street
1993) that represents a repressed form of Gĩkũyũ culture might
also help reveal how power relations and culture among
urbanized Kenyans interact and are connected, among various

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ethnicities, across gender, age-groups and inside the socio-

economic hierarchy and huge divide for which Kenya is
notorious. Thus by entering a social imaginary or discursive
space in which Mũgithi participants are already imagined and
constructed, they are also treated as traditional heroes and
characters by the one-man guitarist who personalizes his songs
by shouting out participants’ names in the audience, and citing
individual tributes to those select few. In this re-imagined
Gĩkũyũ and modern hegemonic discourse and setting, the one-
man guitarist challenges tradition and modernity even as he
both individualizes and communalizes the entire linguistic and
sociocultural discourse during performance.
Ultimately, the social imaginary produced by Mũgithi is directly
implicated in whom to identify with, namely the one-man
guitarist now playing the role of the male Gĩcandi player and by
extension, Gìkúyú culture and tradition. At the same time,
engaging in Mũgithi influences what and how participants are
able to access traditional Gĩkũyũ stylized social discourse
through an avenue provided by the one-man guitarist whose
musical repertoire also includes agile dancehall light
footedness, merry-making, trickery and verbal dexterity. The
one-man guitarist also engages in both wide ranging and
spontaneous use and the articulate improvisation of riddles,
parables, proverbs, narratives in which participants are able to
actively participate in and critique prevailing social, cultural
and political issues.
5. CONCLUSION
This paper has identified various aspects of global culture that
are domesticated (localized) through various musical practices
and strategies that help reflect the Kenyan social, cultural and
political contexts through such music genres as Mũgithi, and
Kenyan Hip Hop lyrics. We also identified the reformulated
versions of the emergent and localized music, and related
sociocultural practices that help us reassess and understand the
various dynamics embodied in these globally recreated
discourses found in these songs. Consequently the paper
argues that, modern-day Kenyan musicians and especially
Mũgithi and Hip Hop artists have either retained or continue to

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re-create traditional musical forms and practices by remaking

modern music that is grounded in popular traditional forms.
The paper also observes how the re-appropriation of Gĩcandĩ
continues in the form of Mũgithi and in localized versions of
Kenyan Hip Hop by artists such as “Hardstone” aka Harrison
Ngũnjĩrĩ. In his song “Uhiki,” Hardstone raps and plays the song
alongside the traditional song commonly sung as a favorite
Gìkúyú courtship and marriage ballad, “Nyúmba ya Mwarì Witú”
[…ìì nyúmba ya mwarì witú ìgìtìtìo na ithanjì, ìì na icuthì cia
ng’ombe….” [my sister’s house is built with reeds and
flywhisks….]. This stylistic re-creation and rendition of Gìkúyú
traditional song works in Gilroy’s words (1993), as agents of the
“reverse circuit of the Black Atlantic.” The words can also be
viewed as a fitting epitaph to how both African tradition and
modernity are tragically entwined in the agonizing triumphs,
anxieties, paradoxes and contradictions of what both Gìkúyú
culture and tradition as well as modernity entails. In the process
we also see the continuous redefining, reinventing and
reconnecting among various groups of Africans in the continent
and the Diaspora. We also read a dialectical relationship
between urbanized and rural Kenyan cultures. Finally, while
we’re able to see some of the re-connections through the
various music genres discussed in this paper among Continental
Africans and those of the Diaspora. Further research is needed
to continue making similar re-connections and to help establish
and construct dialogue of how various modern world cultures
continue to influence and inform one another in multiple ways.

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