Don uses Juliani music to study Christianity in current Kenya

Hip hop icon Juliani is the subject of a new book explaining emerging modes of practising Christianity in the 21st Century Kenya. The book, by the anthropologist Mwenda Ntarangwi of Calvin College in the US, also seeks to disrupt the way ethnographic research is done, as it incorporates social media conversations instead of confining itself to traditional face-to-face interviews.

The book, titled The Street is My Pulpit, is published by the University of Illinois Press in their series “Interpretation of Culture in the New Millennium.” In the book, Prof Ntarangwi offers a model for how we should study Kenyan art using new methods of analysis.

Since Prof Wanjiku Mukabi Kabira’s stellar The Oral Artist (1983), there hasn’t been a book about Kenyan culture that uses a single artist as Prof Ntarangwi does in this new monograph to examine such a rich panoply of themes, techniques, and cultural dynamics. The Street is My Pulpit is the kind of book I wish I will be able to write some day in my life.

Born Julius Owino in Dandora on April 22, 1984, Juliani launched his music career at Dandora High School in 2002 before joining Ukoo Flani Mau Mau. In February 2005, he got saved (around the same time I also accepted the Lord as my personal saviour) and converted from secular music to gospel hip hop.

Some of Juliani’s songs analysed in minute detail in The Street is My Pulpit include his 2011 hit Friend Request, the popular Church on Monday, Voters vs Vultures, and One Day. Prof Ntarangwi reads these songs as showing that gospel music has evolved in the 21st-century to focus more intensely than before on the socio-economic anxieties facing young people in Kenya.

Innovatively interdisciplinary in its methodology, the book has garnered praise from scholars of different persuasions. University of London religion professor and author of Christianity, Politics, and Public Life in Kenya, Paul Gifford, describes Prof Ntarangwi’s book as “a remarkably imaginative and personalised approach to popular music and youth culture, which sheds fascinating light on Kenya’s changing culture, history, politics, and especially Christianity.”

Prof Kimani Njogu, Kenya’s foremost cultural theorist, describes the book as “a journey into ethnographic research in the digital age” because Prof Ntarangwi has positioned the study of Juliani at “the intersection between creativity and social media in Africa, a continent that is reaping the benefits of information technologies in fundamental ways.”

SECULAR VALUES

It is not the first time that Prof Ntarangwi is offering an incisive analysis of Kenyan popular music. Among other works, he is the author of Gender, Performance, and Identity (2003), a seminal study of taarab music, and, more recently, East African Hip Hop: Youth Culture and Globalisation (2009).

This time round, Prof Ntarangwi articulately demonstrates that hip hop and Christianity are not as diametrically opposed as it might appear on the surface. Through a detailed analysis of Juliani’s music, he convincingly argues that “hip hop has been reimagined and articulated in order to align (it) with youth aspirations and sensibilities.”

The genre of music is usually associated with secular values. Indeed, the first thing to come to mind when we think about youth popular expressions, (e.g., hip hop) is an amalgam of raunchy lyrics, unnecessary working of the groin in stage performances, and general lack of good manners, such as melodramatic grabbing of elders’ seats in public and suggestively serenading their wives — a transgression worse than loudly breaking wind, long and loud, in front of your patrons, political godfathers, and financial sponsors, dirty as they might be.  

It is clear from Prof Ntarangwi’s discussion that Juliani is an ideologically mature artist who also takes his faith seriously. The musician uses his talent to fight for social justice, not to entertain the murderers, thieves, and land-grabbers in power.

Although he’s polite enough not to say it in so many words, I understand from Ntarangwi’s portrait of Juliani as an artist that, at a time when Kenyan youths have been reduced to beggars and artists degraded to clowns in political party launches because that is the only way they can pay bills in an economy hobbling under massive theft, Juliani has remained true to his pro-democracy ideals.

When I was a little younger, I was a great fan of the Frankfurt School of literary criticism. Prof. Ntarangwi doesn’t seem to like its arguments much, as he doesn’t feature them anywhere in the book. Emerging from the experiences of World War II, critics in this school tended to be a little bit too pessimistic about everything.

But the Frankfurt School was not entirely wrong about the misuse of popular culture by state organs to manipulate the masses into passivity. In a 1944 essay titled ‘Cultural Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception,’ Max Horkheimer and Theodore Adorno particularly expose pop culture as dangerous tool for producing mass docility. 

In Kenya, the script is standardised. A childish artiste misbehaves in front of his patron in public, disregarding basic protocol and threatening the honcho’s security and even his masculinity. The host forgives the imp in a way that foregrounds the magnanimity of the powerful towards the youth.

A revolutionary per excellence, Juliani hasn’t betrayed the suffering majority of Kenyan youths. 

LARGER CONTEXT

I quite enjoyed the section in which Prof Ntarangwi discusses the treatment of sexual themes in Juliani’s music, especially the artist’s awareness that young women bear the brunt of premarital sex. Using studies that show 46 percent of Kenyan women give birth at the age of 20, he observes that “high sexual activity among youth is a real issue, and Juliani’s songs capture this prevalent social phenomenon.”

Juliani’s music is aware that while it “takes two to tango”, the girl involved in premarital sex faces more psycho-social and economic problems than her male partner. 

Prof Ntarangwi places Juliani’s music in the larger context of developments in Kenya since the 1980s. The result is a work that is both entertaining and deep in its analysis of the many problems young people suffer.

Unlike in Prof Ntarangwi’s previous book on hip hip, the voice of the artist is given more prominence in the current monograph. The author provides substantive quotations from the music in its original language (Sheng) before the English translation is offered.

Juliani’s songs are about the common mwananchi and they are communal in nature.

Prof Ntarangwi’s book borrows from Juliani’s collaborative spirit by incorporating a variety of voices in his assessment of Juliani, from media celebrities like Larry Madowo to ordinary Kenyans on Twitter. Still one wishes Prof Ntarangwi included the voices of some of Juliani’s “haters”, so that the book does not read like a hagiography of the artist.

I would have liked my friend, brother in Christ, and my all-time idol, Kevin Bahati, to feature somewhere in a book about Kenya’s modern gospel music.

However, in spite of the absence of my role model from the book, Prof Ntarangwi’s monograph is well written, entertaining, and eye-opening. I highly recommend it.