What a poet musician he was!

 Joseph Kamaru

Musician Joseph Kamaru entertains guests during Madaraka celebrations in Nyeri on June 1, 2017. 

Photo credit: File | Nation Media Group

What you need to know:

  • He launches into a fascinating story about a preaching Kikuyu politician who is angling to get married to a certain Kikuyu outlaw.
  • He tells me that if I want to be wise, I must learn to watch people closely, quietly, unobserved, and learn to weave through the gossip in social places.
  • He played the traditional karing’aring’a and wandindi with the same dexterity that he played the accordion, the box and electric guitar, the keyboard.

Joseph Kamaru wrote more than 2,000 songs. Like his equally prolific contemporary Daniel Owino (D.O.) Misiani, Kamaru spoke for a community but transcended a generation. What a poet! I want to call him “Owner of Words”.

Cautionary words, guiding ones, words to build, words to tear down, words to soothe, words to amuse, words that heal, words that demand justice.

I am listening to his 1975 dirge, “JM Kariuki”. It evokes so many emotions — anger, fear, sorrow, frustration, admiration, and spiritual comfort. The idioms and proverbs are heavy, a library of ethnic traditions.

He sings of the beehive in which the ancient Kikuyu locked their criminals and rolled them downhill in the full glare of the public. Was it built from an oak tree? Is the oak muu or muringa?

The casket in which Jomo Kenyatta descended down State House Avenue, atop a horse-drawn gun carriage for a requiem mass in the city was reportedly made of oak wood. So, was Kamaru’s song a curse, or was it a prophecy?

I recall the first time I spoke to Kamaru on the phone — October 18, 2007. He sounded cagey; said my surname hesitantly, twice. I quickly shoved aside the lecture on identities and belonging that was rising in my throat and disarmed him by greeting him in Kikuyu.

MEETING KAMARU

Four days later when I met him at his River Road office, he robbed me of all words with the greeting: “Why is a beautiful girl like you, walking on crutches?” I swallowed my Feminist Manifesto, brushed aside my notes on Disability 101, and stuck to the agenda for the day.

We spoke about researchers, “a lot of white people who come here wanting to write my book”, and we found common ground in the idea that we needed to tell our own stories.

I had a book in mind, or at the very least a chapter on Adultery in the City, but I was also trying to get him to work with some local artistes to secure our musical legacies in a documentary project called Retracing the "Benga Rhythm."

4pm, Monday October 26, 2009: I walk up to Kamaru quietly. He is wearing his trademark “Godpapa” hat, sitting very still, reclining on a lounge chair on the veranda of Hotel Boulevard, staring into space. I want to talk about Retracing Kikuyu popular music and this time, I am ready for his off-the-wall questions. He does not disappoint me.

“Your voice is not the same on the telephone and you speak very fast; too fast, why?”

“Because I have so many questions for you and we don’t have time,” I say.

We laugh. He launches into a fascinating story about a preaching Kikuyu politician who is angling to get married to a certain Kikuyu outlaw. I ask him how, at 70 years of age, he manages to keep up with current affairs. He tells me that if I want to be wise, I must learn to watch people closely, quietly, unobserved, and learn to weave through the gossip in social places.

“And in churches?” I ask. He wags his finger at me.

Musician Joseph Kamaru at a recoding studio in April 2009. PHOTO | FILE | NATION MEDIA GROUP

PEOPLE-WATCHER

I realised then that Kamaru — a man whose voice dominated so many social spaces for well over four decades, a man who supplied his audiences with new idioms, a man who shaped public thought — saw himself first and foremost as a people-watcher, a student of society, and not its teacher.

That’s when we started talking about his 1969 song, “Ndari ya Mwarimu” (the teacher’s darling), a duet in which he was accompanied by his sister, Celina.

I know that the good literary critic separates views of the author from the meaning of the text, so I must now separate my thoughts on Kamaru the man from what his songs said and did.

I had smelt some ethnic chauvinism and I was thrown off by his sexist comments, but his songs had always struck me differently. They were (gender) sensitive; they were genuinely funny, and they embraced a variety of rhythms.

Mwomboko,Mucung´wa,Muthirigu, American Country, Calypso, Benga and Congolese Rumba were all in Kamaru’s repertoire. He played the traditional karing’aring’a and wandindi with the same dexterity that he played the accordion, the box and electric guitar, the keyboard. Kamaru was ahead of his time.

Who can deny that “Ndari ya Mwarimu” denounces predatory male teachers who shame the profession, exploit children and demean womanhood? Kamaru is on the side of the defenceless schoolgirl: “Slow down, Teacher, you have gone too far.”

THE TEACHER

Instantly, Kamaru acquired the title Mwarimu, teacher. He would later become a preacher, but I prefer to talk about Kamaru the teacher.

Three themes dominate Kamaru’s music in the early years: romantic love, city life and political power. All three are projected as treacherous minefields, sites of bondage where betrayal is common, where souls are regularly lost to greed. Kamaru negotiates the terms of emancipation.

Did he see traditional mores as an antidote for the vagaries of urban living that threatened social harmony and ethnic identities? In “Andu a madaraka” (The elite) and “Ndanuko cia mitahato” (Mashed bananas), he makes a scathing attack on “modern” parents and their alienated children.

Joseph Kamaru (centre) joins Jubilee Kiraitu Murungi in a dance at Laare grounds in Igembe North during a rally on July 19, 2017. PHOTO | FILE | NATION MEDIA GROUP

His derisive laughter mocks town-bred kids who embarrass their parents when, on a visit to the village, they mistake a goat for a strange dog that feeds on napier grass.

In the duet “Celina hingura murango” (Celina, open the door), a husband pounds on the front door becoming frantic when his wife, Celina, is slow to open.

He recalls a scandal in Makadara where a young man was pulled out from under a Vono bed when the man of the house returned unexpectedly. The singers exclaim in unison: in these houses of Nairobi where there are no nooks, how does one hide, how is one to sustain a marriage? The song decries the absence of traditional (resolution) structures in the city; it invokes the wisdom of thegi, the purpose-built alcove in the traditional Kikuyu home.

MODERN JUSTICE SYSTEM

But Kamaru does not condemn all modern ways. The songs written between 1970 and 1990, are dominated by words that legitimise the modern justice system. “Remand,” “bond,” “prison,” and “certificate,” join the Kikuyu grammar of justice. Kamaru uses the new judicial order to stalk cheating spouses and lying suitors and hold them to account.

In “Muhiki wa Mikosi” a man blames all his woes on a beguiling a woman. Sigh. I opt to listen to “Ke Ngwetekirie”, where Kamaru’s persona is a jilted wife whose photographs are removed from the walls, her clothes quickly hidden in a suitcase as her philandering husband discards his wedding band in a bid to corner a new catch.

Next up is “Nuu Ucio?” (Who is that?), the cry of an upstaged, outraged husband which is amplified in “Ni Ndarega” (I refuse — to share your love).

At every turn, Kamaru denounces lies, shuns hypocrisy and seeks justice for betrayed love. What kind of justice should I seek for Kamaru, this poet who demanded and sought fairness, honesty and integrity in love and in war?

He is owed more than the chapter in my Kenya@50 book, more than a biography, more than a documentary or two.

Dr Nyairo is a cultural analyst. She is the author of Kenya@50: Trends, Identities and the Politics of Belonging which includes a chapter on the poetry of Joseph Kamaru.