Beyond just bringing back memories of when he’d listen to the radio and learn Deutsch, Reuben Kigame’s 1988 trip to West Germany had one other importance. Much as it was his maiden out-of-the-country trip (he’s since been around the world, visiting the United States at least 15 times) which first took him to Switzerland, where he underwent eye checkup to see if his eyesight was salvageable, Kigame recorded his second album in Berlin, having released an earlier one in 1987. But the biggest implication of the trip emanated from “Luther the Reformer: The Story of the Man and His Career,” a book Kigame had picked up at the Thika School for the Blind and taken with him to Vihiga.
“That book introduced me to the place of someone speaking up against what’s not right, in the way that Martin Luther stood up to the church, something that isn’t a common occurrence,” Kigame says. “And secondly, I saw a clergyman pursuing academics, and that influenced me. Luther was very studious, and just like him, I grew to love reading.”
That book changed Kigame’s life forever, it radicalised him even, so that being in West Germany was a sort of pilgrimage to the land of Martin Luther, Kigame’s lifelong hero. Like Luther who stood against the sale of indulgences as he pinned his 95 theses on the door of the Wittenberg Cathedral, later on in life, Kigame, too, embarked on the fight against prosperity gospel and the concomitant sale of oil and soil. Combining this spiritual uprising and Kigame’s love for Gorbachev made for an interesting evangelist.
“I learnt from Luther that if you’re a Christian, you don’t shy away from politics or from engaging society. The mistake the church is making today is dichotomising faith and life, and that shouldn’t be the case,” Kigame argues. “Your faith informs how you live. It is that dichotomisation that has brought us here, so that even when you announce you’re running for office, the first reaction from the church is that politics is dirty. If you live as if faith is all about Sunday and a Friday kesha somewhere, then you miss the point.”
Like Luther, Kigame loves the church enough to be its fiercest critic.
“The contemporary Kenyan church is a letdown,” Kigame says when I ask him about the state of the church today. “It has gone further from Christ and become an empty shell of music and empty sermons, a faith based on greed and personality cults. It has refused to engage with politics, quite different from the likes of Henry Okullu, David Gitari, Ndingi Mwana a’Nzeki and Timothy Njoya. Those people spoke truth to power.”
The contemporary Kenyan church is a letdown. It has gone further from Christ and become an empty shell of music and empty sermons, a faith based on greed and personality cults
THE STATE OF THE NATION
And what is Kigame’s view of the state of the nation?
“I’d like to look at the state of the nation the way one looks at a patient in a hospital,” Kigame says. “Usually, you have the General Ward, the High Dependency Unit (HDU) and the Intensive Care Unit (ICU). I see Kenya in Jomo Kenyatta’s day as being in the General Ward. In Daniel arap Moi’s day, we went to the HDU, then in Mwai Kibaki’s day, we went back to the General Ward. But Uhuru and Ruto have taken Kenya right into the ICU. We are in collapse mode unless something drastic happens in the next election.”
To Kigame, even if he’s the only one who will stand up to be counted — and he believes he isn’t the only one — he’s committed to go all the way and vote out the current regime and all that it represents. It is here that Kigame opens up that for the longest time as people reduced him to just a singer, he’d been plotting an ideological revolution. I ask him what form the revolution will take. “You either have a bullet or ballot revolution,” Kigame says. “The bullet revolution never works. The best revolution is one in which you are a participant, not just giving instructions.”
And what utopia does he propose?
“It’s not utopia, it’s reality. It’s here, I feel it, you feel it, I touch it, everybody wants different,” Kigame says about his idea of a new Kenya. “It’s not a dream, we know things are bad, we know that we are cheated, we know that we are exploited, so we actually want something different. We will get different. We must get different and we will get different, and I am part of different. It is going to happen. And happening doesn’t mean that I become President, it just means that the discourse becomes different.”
Kigame ropes in Esther in the Bible, and says he’ll face the king and tell him he’s naked.
“Even if I perish,” Kigame says, “I perish.”
ENTRY TO MUSIC
When Malawian President Lazarus Chakwera visited Kenya in October 2021, one of the groups that went to meet him on the sidelines was a contingent of 12 representing the church. Among them was Reuben Kigame, who says he’s not necessarily a title holder within the church since he hasn’t been ordained, but who was found worthy of an invite.
And when the group walked in to meet Chakwera, the Malawian’s first words were directed at Kigame. “Have you stopped singing those wonderful country songs?” Kigame was surprised that Chakwera knew he sang, and that the President also knew exactly one of the genres Kigame explores. “I still do,” Kigame replied. “Growing up, I listened to your music and sang it with my family,” Chakwera said. “What you are aspiring to is correct. Go for it.” Kigame felt seen, something which isn’t common.
“I was inculturated into the music,” Kigame says when I ask him what music means to him. “It has helped me express myself where words fail, where understanding fails, where limitation exists. But on the other hand, music helps me find my way away from the limitations of this world. Blaise Pascal says there is a God-shaped vacuum in the heart of every human. My music helps people fill that void in some form or shape.”
Some 29 albums later, Kigame still believes he hasn’t been heard. I ask him whether he is the lone voice in the wilderness. He says no, even the lone voice in the wilderness is heard. He isn’t the town crier, and pins it on the stereotypes that blind people should stick to singing by the roadside and receive alms. The other assumption is that all he does is sing in church, and that he should stick there, when in fact he sees himself as one with the likes of Miriam Makeba, Hugh Masekela, Fela Kuti and Bob Marley, singers and citizens of the world who speak to the human condition more than just drop ballads.
“It’s beyond the music, it’s beyond the sounds, it’s beyond the idioms, it’s what you believe because it comes through the music,” Kigame says of his musical orientation. “If you believe in justice you’ll love Bob Marley, if you believe in diversity and culture you’ll like Fela Kuti, you’ll enjoy not just because of the aesthetic, but you’ll go beyond.”
SINGING UNHEARD
In Kigame’s first album, ‘What A Mighty God We Have’, released in 1987, there’s a song titled ‘Give Them Freedom’, which the singer wrote after watching the movie Sarafina. It was a response to apartheid. Then there were songs such as 'Another Country’, ‘Why Kill Tonight’, ‘I have A Dream’, ‘Sweet Bunyore’ and ‘Africa Receive Your King’, all of which are social commentary but are rarely spoken about. Kigame’s latest, which is less than a month old, is ‘Tumechoka’, which he plays for my colleagues and I at his studio.
“I sing about a lot of social stuff that people don’t listen to, and when they do,” Kigame says, “they don’t hear me.” To Kigame, people want him to go and bring the roof of the church building down with his powerful voice and instrumentals, and leave it at that. His going into society is frowned upon, and it’s not just in Christian circles. At the state level, Kigame has always been a frequent performer at functions, with President Mwai Kibaki going as far as awarding him the Order of the Golden Warrior for his service to music and media. However, Kigame says he won’t be invited to speak in places that matter.
“Society is structured in such a way that persons with disabilities only make it to certain places — sing your song and go. If I spoke and if an able-bodied person spoke, they’ll listen to the able-bodied person. It’s like blind people aren’t supposed to be in politics.”
But be that as it may, Kigame is still keen on engaging society’s entire breadth.
“A lot of what people call secular isn’t secular,” he says when I ask ,”Just because something isn’t sung in church doesn't mean it’s secular. I use Bob Marley’s ‘Redemption Song’ to teach my students guitar. For me what is secular is what is destructive, derogatory. But anything that addresses itself to culture and life isn’t necessarily secular. Things that speak to lived reality are as Godly as anything else.”
This is how Kigame’s influences range from Bob Marley, UB40 and Alpha Blondy, to Kenny Rogers, Dolly Parton and Skeeter Davis, to Congolese bands of the 70s and 80s such as Mangelepa, Super Mazembe, Lipua Lipua, to East Africa Community acts like Jamhuri Jazz and DC Milimani, and the list goes on, to West, South and North Africa too. “I hear the world,” Kigame says. “I don't know how else to consume the world.”
Look out for Part 3. This story is a collaboration between The Star and Debunk Media whose editor-in-chief is Isaac Otidi.
Edited by T Jalio
