Guitar music and cultural identity in Kenya: Benga and Luo identity, c. 1955 to c.1980

Abstract

In this paper I discuss the relationship between popular music and cultural identity through a reading of the story of the early career of the Kenyan guitar–based dance music called benga. Genre theory guides the reading. Bringing into interplay basic elements of the early story of benga (on which there is a general consensus) and historical facts of the context in which it emerged, I show that the genre was at the moment of its origination a musical articulation of the cultural identity of a generation of Kenyan Africans of the Luo ethnic group who lived through the late colonial Kenya and into the early years of the country’s Uhuru, Independence. At the heart of the reading is an exploration of the origins and deployments of the practices and technologies that came together at a particular time and place and in specific social and political conditions to constitute benga.