Leaving Binyavanga in Lamu to Go Drink Busaa in Eregi

We had been booked in Lamu for the entire Christmas period, after which we would be flown back to Nairobi. But what the Kwani? guys forgot was that they were dealing with a Luhyia man, who gets an irrepressible urge to travel back to his tribal land to be with his people at Christmas time, to eat ugali and chicken cooked in a pot the traditional way, and thereafter pay a visit to the drinking dens in Shichiko village in Eregi to catch up with his kinsmen over a pot of traditional busaa beer after a year of being away in what my people call iruguru (literally, abroad).

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Remembering Grandmaster Masese, King of the Obokano 

In the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic, Dr. Pete Larson (of the Dr. Pete Larson and his Cytotoxic Nyatiti Band), an epidemiologist, nyatiti player, and founder of Dagoretti Records, approached the late Grandmaster Masese (real name Dennis Dancan Mosiere) about doing a project on the Obokano music of the Kisii people from the Nyanza region of Western Kenya. Masese was a master of the Obokano, a traditional eight-stringed lyre similar to the Nyatiti of the Luo and the Litungu of the Luhyia. The project, which Masese had started working on by conducting several interviews in his home village in Nyamira, was hampered by a lack of funding, and soon after, his unexpected death.

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