Don’t twist our Kabaka’s EAC dream to death

To many of my generation, Daudi Kabaka was “king”. This was not only because that is what his name means in Uganda, where he spent his early years, even acquiring a striking fluency in Luganda.

Kabaka was also the king of African “twist”, the beat of the sensuously wriggling dance that characterised our teenage years.

But most of all, Kabaka’s songs in the early 1960s were, for most of us, the voice of the optimism and hope that marked the early years of uhuru in East Africa.

“Kenya, Uganda and Tanganyika,” crooned the king to the twist beat, “we’re all fired up (sote tumechangamka).”

This was in his composition, Shirikisho la Afrika (African Union), which actually referred to the East African Community, which had just been formalised by our three countries.

We were, indeed, fired up, and not in some abstract ideological sense, but in the concrete experience of the freedom of movement, services and kinship (udugu, not “undugu”) that being an East African meant.

The currency, the education, the posts and telephones, the railways and harbours, even the airways in the sky were all one, and East African.

The borders were there, but they only mattered to outsiders. No one asked you any questions when you crossed from Uganda into Kenya or Tanzania, and vice versa.

ERODED EARNINGS

The free movement of people and goods was a reality, not idle diplomatic jargon that seems to take forever to implement these days.

For a few years in the 1990s, I was privileged to work with Daudi Kabaka at the Kenyatta University Performing and Creative Arts Centre, where I was director.

Our vice-chancellor, Prof George Eshiwani, had had the brilliant idea of tracing Kenya’s eminent popular artists and engaging them as performers and mentors to our young artists.

Thus we were able to recruit performers like Peter Akwabi, of Ndoto ya Kanga and Kifo cha George Mukabi fame, and the then-aging Daudi Kabaka.

Kabaka was pleasantly surprised to find a Mganda at the Centre, and we spent many hours sharing memories of Uganda, and discussing the music scene, both in the past and in the 1990s.

Kabaka could quite easily light up and shine with his guitar on stage. But offstage, he was considerably subdued, and that was not surprising. The rampant and growing piracy in the music industry had eroded his earnings, and the usual callousness with which we treat our artists had sidelined him and most of his agemates.

But I suspect that some of Kabaka’s sadness also resulted from his disillusionment with the way things had gone in his beloved East Africa. The unity about which he had so sanguinely sung in the 1960s was no more.

What was probably ringing in his ears was the name-calling, like “communists” and “man-eat-man society”, that besmirched the relationships among our countries in the years following the collapse of the Community in 1977.

These were even accompanied by prolonged border closures.

For a person like Kabaka, and the rest of us, brought up in the glory of Community citizenship, the loss of the facilities and also of a significant part of our identity was profoundly painful.

I left Kabaka at Kenyatta University when I returned to Makerere, and he passed away in November 2001.

MISSED OPPORTUNITY

He had, happily, lived to see the revival of the East African Community in 1999, but it was a bit too late for him to changamka, get fired up, again at the event.

But for us who were blessed to witness the steady growth of the new Jumuiya, our joy and pride at it made us rock and twist again, like the teenagers for whom Kabaka had crooned in the 1960s.

East Africa was redeeming itself, rediscovering its undeniable unity and boldly embracing it with all the 300 million arms of its citizens.

Those of us who thought we could contribute to the enterprise couldn’t wait to get going.

That’s how I found myself frequently, in the early years of this century, at the Community headquarters in Arusha, privileged with an invitation to contribute to the formation of the East African Kiswahili Commission.

Soon after I got to Arusha, Ugandan Amanya Mushega, a fellow Dar es Salaam alumnus, though of a much later date, was replaced as Community secretary general by my very contemporary and hallmate in Dar, Ambassador Juma Mwapachu.

I didn’t get to meet him in Arusha, so I missed the opportunity to remind him of the lovely Kiswahili proverbs he had taught me.

Anyway, it was almost like the old days. The East African spirit was alive and well. Beatrice Kiraso, a family friend from Uganda, was deputy secretary general in charge of fast-tracking the formation of the East African Federation.

She asked me to recommend a tune that might help in promoting awareness of the federation and I recommended — you guessed it — Daudi Kabaka’s Shirikisho la Afrika.

I even traced it on a CD of the maestro’s songs, presumably copyrighted, in a store on one of those streets below Tom Mboya, and duly delivered it to Arusha.

TWISTED TO DEATH

My suggestion was that, since Kabaka was gone, it would probably be a good idea to do a remix of the song, after obtaining the necessary permissions. I hope Arusha is working on Hon Kiraso’s Shirikisho project.

My deep sorrow, however, is that the beast of disunity is rearing its hideous head, again, in some of the institutions of the Community.

The current tawdry, and apparently personalised, squabbles in the East African Legislative Assembly (EALA) forced me to stray beyond my usual writing and literary matters, to which we shall return next week.

Meanwhile, jameni, Mulamu Nantongo Zziwa, dear daughter Nusura Tiperu, Swahaba Abubakr Zein, and all of you Honourable Members of the EALA, please give us back our Community fire.

You are part of arguably the greatest achievement of your generation, the resurrection of the Jumuiya. No personal or other partisan interest can be greater than that.

Don’t twist our “King’s” Community dream to death, please!