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African Affairs 2005 104(415):225-249; doi:10.1093/afraf/adi012
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© The Author [2005]. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of Royal African Society. All rights reserved

Article

Popular music, popular politics: Unbwogable and the idioms of freedom in Kenyan popular music

Joyce Nyairo and James Ogude

Joyce Nyairo is a Lecturer in the Literature Department at Moi University, Kenya
James Ogude is Associate Professor in African Literature, University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa

Abstract

This article details how Gidi Gidi Maji Maji's popular song Unbwogable moved to occupy centre-stage in the political arena of Kenya's December 2002 general election. The first part of the article deals with the politics of the song's production, its entry into the public domain and the politics of interpretation that influenced the patterns of its consumption. The second part is a nuanced reading of the text — the lyrics — dramatizing the shared experiences, memories and socio-economic immobility that distilled into the Kenyan people's common voice of defiance and determination to institute change. The third part emphasizes the contingency of events that culminated in the National Rainbow Coalition (NARC) appropriating Unbwogable, thus completing its movement from popular song to national popular culture event and, ultimately, to political discourse. After the elections this discourse of resistance and invincibility was rewritten to include victory and it is precisely in this close association with the state that the slogan has run the danger of being colonized by a privileged few at the expense of the majority. The article concludes by underlining the elasticity of idiom.


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