Remembering benga: Kenya's infectious musical gift to Africa

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/jul/09/music-benga-kenya-guitar-finger-picking

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On a recent visit to South Africa I was struck by the guitar licks I heard playing in a cab in Johannesburg. “Isn’t that Kenyan music?” I asked the driver. His face immediately lit up: “This is Ken wa Maria! I grew up with this kind of music back in Zim,” he said.

Wisdom, as the cab driver was called, had listened to the Kenyan guitar music benga while living in Zimbabwe during its 1970s heyday. The music playing in his cab was from a recent CD by popular Kenyan artist Ken wa Maria, one of the few musicians who still play anything close to the original benga sound.

The roots of the genre can be traced back to the shores of Lake Victoria in eastern Kenya in the 1950s, when musicians from Kenya’s Luo community began adapting traditional dance rhythms and traditional stringed instruments like the nyatiti (the lyre) and the orutu (fiddle) to the acoustic guitar.

Related: Kenya Special's musical history lesson

The first generation of benga musicians were particularly influenced by Cuban rumba, which had found its way to east Africa through the Congolese guitarist Jean Bosco Mwenda and his cousin, Edward Masengo’s acoustic guitar music.

The two, who lived in Kenya in the late 1950s and early 1960s, had a profound influence on the guitarists they mentored, in particular their “finger-style” of playing, which abandoned the plectrum and allowed for more distinctive and intricate melodies.

Much of the credit for the early development of benga goes to the pioneering Kenyan guitarist, John Ogara, who by the early 1960s was fusing rural rhythms with elements of music from urban centres. According to Retracing the Benga Rhythm, an exhaustive compilation album released by Nairobi label Ketebul Music, the first use of the word was in 1963 in a song called Monica Ondego, by The Ogara Boys.

The legendary benga musician Daniel Owino Misiani often claimed that the term benga was adopted from his mother’s name, Obengo. But according to Ketebul’s research, the word had gained currency even before Misiani started playing, deriving instead from the Luo word for beautiful.

What is without doubt is that Misiani – whose album Benga Beat stands as one of the greats – became the standard bearer of benga from the 1970s until his death in 2006. His trademark political and social commentary got him into trouble many times – according to an obituary in The Independent, he was jailed on several occasions, and denied a passport 1987 (wa Maria continued this tradition of dissent when he was arrested for mocking a regional governor during a protest in December 2014, Nairobi News report).

Benga on the move

In the 1970s, the head of record company EMI’s Kenya office – and veteran politician – Phares Oluoch Kanindo made and exported thousands of benga records from their heartland on the western shores of Lake Victoria to west and southern Africa.

Related: Congo, where rumba meets r'n'b

The music was particularly popular in Zimbabwe, where local musicians began to play their own variations, called kanindo.

Politician Kanindo was also at the forefront of the adoption of elements from Congolese music into Kenya. He admired the showmanship of the Congolese musicians under his stable, and he mimicked the style of the popular groups from Kinshasa, in some cases, even directly translating songs from Lingala, the language spoken in Congo, into Luo.

The Kenyan benga bands, like their Congolese counterparts, began calling themselves “orchestras” and “jazz bands”, while musicians like Collela Maze added the prefix Dr to their names. There was an implosion of splinter bands, as with the popular Victoria Jazz, which resulted in Victoria Kings.

Though are still a few people making benga music – Atomy Sifa’s drum machine take, or American-Kenyan band Extra Golden’s more throwback style – there are undoubtably fewer and fewer musicians playing it today. Yet benga has still spread its wings to all of Kenya, and far beyond, and remains one of the most distinct rhythms of this east African nation.

So it should’t have been a surprise to find the guitar grooves of Ken wa Maria playing in a Johannesburg cab, many thousands of miles from benga’s birthplace on the shores of Lake Victoria.

A version of this article first appeared on This is Africa