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.
