The Invention of Traditional Music in the City: Exploring History and Meaning in Urban Music in Contemporary Kenya

This paper examines the conditions that have shaped the emergence of “theme nights”—a new musical experience rooted in ethnic cultures in Kenyan urban cities. It explores the hidden meanings of traditional music as it travels from its rural contexts into the urban spaces. The paper argues that the emergence of “ethnic music” in the cities is contingent upon the democratization of the political space and the promotion of the vernacular radio stations in the post-Moi dispensation in Kenya. These in turn have given impetus to the rise of new consumers and a unique experimentation with musical formats that draws on traditional and international genres to create a novel popular cultural experience. The result has been the hailing of new audiences; the creation of spaces within which a de-politicization of ethnicity and the collapsing of artificial boundaries of difference is engendered. The paper further argues that the new musical phenomenon offers the possibilities of examining how repressed masculinities, sex, and sexualities and a nostalgia for the “traditional” play themselves up in a heterogeneous city space defined by a range of competing identities. It concludes that self-fashioning, the desire for pleasure, fantasy, and freedom—the adventure of the self outside itself—finds its ultimate articulation in these forms of popular musical genres wrenched out of their origins in ritual and tradition.