Recreating discourse and performance in Kenyan urban space through Mũgithi, Hip Hop and Gĩcandĩ

Abstract

This paper examines the one-man guitar Mũgithi music dance and performance popular in urban Kenyan urban space together with localized Kenyan Hip Hop. The music genres are seen as cultural practices that perform global socio-cultural discourses, and which can also be read for the ways in which they both indicate and formulate contexts. A close examination of the two popular genres shows how they continue to borrow from a variety of cultures and poetic forms. Both Mũgithi and Kenyan Hip Hop music also embody such forms as Gĩkũyũ poetic tradition known as Gĩcandĩ. The male-dominated tradition is somewhat comparable to such well known traditions as West African praise-singers and Imbongi male Zulu biographers in terms of their praise-singing performances and poetry. Consequently the borrowing and fusion between Gĩcandĩ on the one hand and Mũgithi and Hip Hop traditions on the other, help to display dynamic stylistic variations along with creative dialogic inter-textuality (Bakhtin 1981). This paper suggests that, given the creative and popular nature of the two musical genres, and the often controversial sociocultural discourses they embody, both Mũgithi and Kenyan Hip Hop music enjoy wide acclaim and ‘covert prestige’ (Trudgill 1972), irrespective of the perceptions that they are both transgressive and subversive sociocultural and political representations of ‘the wretched of the earth’ (Fanon 1967).