Reading Praise, Protest, and Subversion in Thomas Wasonga's Tawala Kenya Tawala

Abstract

Throughout Kenya's history, patriotic music has created and fostered community, and continues to sensitise people's needs, hopes, aspirations, and fears. Patriotic music is often evident and popular, especially during national day celebrations. The Permanent Presidential Music Commission (PPMC), established in 1988 under the then government of President Daniel arap Moi, is the body responsible for selecting and presenting music for entertaining the presidency on these important days as well as during state functions, presidential tours, or on the president's return from international trips. Commentators have observed that the process of selecting the music to be performed for the president entails scrutiny of both the quality of the songs and the message they communicate to ensure that they conform to the social and political ideals of the government. The PPMC's process in deciding on what and whose music is to be selected can be read as a process of curation towards a political agenda, reinforcing government slogans and agendas. A search for literature on music censorship in Kenya disclosed a limited number of articles that either deal with the specific functions of government-appointed music bodies within national holiday celebrations performances, or that engage to varying degrees with the possibility of regarding the said performances as sites of resistance and subversion. The body of scholarly works on censorship within the context of performance and musicology in Kenya remains limited. Using choral music as the main genre, I show how the internal discourse of the songs analysed in this article palimpsestically call attention to the problematics of viewing political choral music as only songs of “praise” while remaining blind to the way in which music negotiates oppressive undercurrents.