“I have a story about Nairobi”: narrator unreliability, ethnicity and the imagination of the Kenyan nation in “Khandpaka” by Awillo Mike and Ja-Mnazi Afrika

Abstract

This paper reads the popular song “Khandpaka” by the Kenyan music group Awillo Mike and Ja-Mnazi Afrika (2009) as a rhetorical act that argued for the inclusion of ethnicity, rather than its exclusion, in the imagination of the nation in the Kenya of the first decade of the twenty-first century. The paper’s focus is on the ironical presentation of a humorous story in “Khandpaka.” The amusing narrative in “Khandpaka” – the song title is the English word “handbag,” pronounced with a Kenyan African first language influenced accent – is told by a narrator who recounts the day he took his wife on a sightseeing tour of Nairobi on what was her first visit to the Kenyan capital city. The paper shows that the narrative is a conflicted attempt by an unreliable narrator to imagine a Kenyan nation by suppressing ethnicity. “Khandpaka” is thus read to make its argument by drawing attention to the “limitations” of the narrator’s attempt to exclude ethnicity from the imagination of the Kenyan nation. The examination of and reflection on this narrative in “Khandpaka” reiterates the value of narrative research and the role of popular music in Kenyan society and politics