Passing the Dutchie in Lukenya Hills
Stanley Gazemba
It is a Friday afternoon and we are parking our bags on the roof rack of a tour bus outside The Heron Hotel in Milimani,
It is a Friday afternoon and we are parking our bags on the roof rack of a tour bus outside The Heron Hotel in Milimani,
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).
It had been about three months since I played in an orchestra.
In his Odinare Rap Challenge entry, Naivasha based rapper, Ace Bornzilla, makes a declaration, “Toka Vasho finest hip-hop beat assassin nimesign”, a declaration one might
From the small crowd of writers and literary-types present, we selected ourselves by the eyes without talking, and one by one we slinked off and assembled in the hotel lobby downstairs.
When I was eight years old, I visited my favourite barber Boni’s shop at least once a month. This was the only way I could
I like to think of opening acts at music concerts as starter meals. Typically, starters are consumed in anticipation of something else. They are meant
Since Wangechi stepped into the Kenyan rap scene with her unique flow and energy, and lyrics containing a confessional frankness, she has on occasion been
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.
For a brief moment in 2003, my favourite musician, E-Sir, would come back from the dead. It had been a few months since the news
