• Kuruga wa Wanjiku thrills in duet with Muthoni wa Wainaina about a woman's chest
Image: PIXABAY
When John De’Mathew was alive, he was the undisputed king of contemporary Gikuyu music. His burial was presidential.
A lot has happened since then. Samuel Muchoki from Subukia has erupted as a star in this mountain music industry. A cop, many know him by his stage name Samidoh. The moniker is a portmanteau word for Samuel of money (Doh), or wealthy Sami.
Subukia is the birthplace of many great musicians, including Francis Mwangi, known as Wa Subu, Simon Kinyua, known as Syck Junior, and all the mighty Salim family. Subukia is in Nakuru county, and my maternal grandfather is buried there, not far from Wanyororo Primary School.
Subukia is a settlement scheme, where a number of Gikuyu families originally from Nyeri settled in successive waves since Independence. My own grandfather David Wanjohi was a man originally from Nyeri, but who settled in Nakuru like many of his peers after the State of Emergency.
A Mau Mau detainee, after release, he came from Manyani only to find his land had been appropriated, save for a small portion that he left to my uterine grandmother, and moved my other two grandmothers into the Subukia territory in search of greener pastures. It is here in Nakuru county where my father got his first job as a motorcar salesman in 1969. 1969 was a very good year for him. He also got the love of his life and started a family with a daughter of Wanjohi, who middle-named me after her father.
Nakuru. Subukia. Nyeri. Gikuyu culture and heritage. All these form a consistent and crucial component of my worldview. No wonder I marry the names of my maternal and paternal grandparents to come up with my moniker when penning poetry. Wanjohi wa Makokha. It was first suggested to me as an idea by a fellow hybrid, the late writer Binyavanga Wainaina, who died exactly four years ago at Aga Khan Hospital in Nairobi. He was born and raised in Nakuru.
This Gikuyu consciousness and maternal lineage has made me settle down in Kiambu county as my base of work and penmanship. I have collected a range of friendships from this part of Kenya, and one of them is the writer and sociologist Gilbert Mwangi. Through our interlocution and association, I have been brought to speed on Gikuyu popular music.
He pointed to me the rise to eminence lately of a musician from Murang’a. Kuruga wa Wanjiku. Born in the seventies, he is our age-mate and hails from Kiharu constituency, a revolutionary location that gave Kenya the likes of the veteran opposition leader Kenneth Matiba.
It is represented in the current Parliament by Ndindi Nyoro, who was behind Gilbert Mwangi and me in our undergraduate varsity years at Kenyatta University. Mwangi and I had lost touch with each other since we left college. I ended up pursuing intellectual life and a career in university education.
Mwangi would take advantage of his BA subject of sociology and advance in it. He now works with the correctional facilities of Kenya and helps to rehabilitate and reintegrate in society our children who fall on the wrong side of the law.
However, at a recent event to remember eminent Kenyan writers who died years ago in April, we reconnected at Cheche Bookshop & Cafe, after many years, courtesy of Njuki wa Githethwa of Comrades Book House, our literary host. Ever since, we have been in contact with my good comrade Mwangi, and much is what I have learned, again, from him, even through our shared social media spaces.
Recently, he did a post on a new song by Kuruga wa Wanjiku that is the talk of town among the speakers of Gikuyu. The song features the popular sports radio personality Catherine Muthoni wa Wainaina, also from Nakuru, better known in Kenya by her nickname Mzima Mzima. This song that has soared to the tops of the music chart and has taken over clubs from the Mountain to Lake Nakuru is called: Maisha no Maya (This is Life).
Mwangi observed a philosophical reason why, partly, the song has become so popular since it was released on Valentine's Day this year. Unlike the earlier singers, who would not be caught unleashing a line that directly makes reference to female ‘topography’, the new song celebrates the chest of a mature woman and how best it should be prepared in terms of clothing and hygiene for an outing.
The song is a combo that takes the call–and–response, dialogic rendition, common in African music with male and female partners, like biblical lovers from Song of Solomon, oozing seductive stanzas to each other in a transaction of exuberant, exquisite emotions.
The man invites his lover for a night of delights and jubilation. The woman rises to the occasion and articulates her preparation. They both then rationalise, in saccharine metaphors, the meaning of the adage that life is for the living.
Mwangi finds this boldness in the personas of Maisha no Maya both refreshing and bold. It points to a new vivaciousness in contemporary Gikuyu music. The coquettes of earlier songs and the traditional notion of stoic masculinity among the Agikuyu are debunked by Kuruga and Mzima. In their stead, they present to us a bonhomie pair that releases the simple message to all: you only live once. Live and let live.
Both the trending song exudes attractive aesthetics of spirit, rhythm and euphony. Its video lacks the wanton display of naked body parts or exaggerated carnal gyrations of video vixens that borders on juvenile mischief and female objectification. It is a welcome celebration of life in this season of Shakahola mass death reports.
However, the song’s punchline – Nyondo icio ithambio na ihakwo mafuta - is quite agricultural. It emphasises the need to use oil to prepare buxom bosoms for pleasure. Is that not what we do when we head to the shed to milk?