MUSIC AND POLITICAL ENGAGEMENT IN KENYA

A number of Kenyan scholars have recently linked popular music and other media forms with an expressive political activism as citizens of this East African country, many of them economically deprived and frustrated by the hardships of everyday life, anticipate changes in the way they are governed (Gecau Reference Gecau1995; Joseph Odhiambo Reference Odhiambo Joseph, Kimani and Oluoch-Olunya2007; Mwangi Reference Mwangi, Drewett and Cloonan2006; Njogu and Oluoch-Olunya Reference Njogu and Oluoch-Olunya2007; Ntarangwi Reference Ntarangwi, Njogu and Maupea2007; Nyairo and Ogude Reference Nyairo and Ogude2005; Ogola Reference Ogola2005; Parsitau Reference Parsitau2008; wa Mungai Reference wa Mungai, Njogu and Oluoch-Olunya2007; wa Mutonya Reference wa Mutonya, Njogu and Oluoch-Olunya2007). This is welcomed research, coming at a time when Kenyan citizens are grappling with questions about the future of national identity, unhinged by the elite-sponsored and ethnically mobilized, but deeply gendered post-electoral violence of 2007. Emerging from many decades of censorship, Kenyan musicians have tactically exploited the fine lines between entertainment and protest, working within an industry the Kenyan state has at times treated with antipathy (Njogu and Maupeu 2007).

In the past decade, however, the consumption of popular music has undergone a remarkable shift towards Christian ‘gospel music’, with numbers of musicians re-inventing themselves as the recording industry's market has turned to the lucrative wave of commercial, Pentecostal-Charismatic Christianity. Kenyan scholars have written quite extensively on the growth of the political content of gospel music, in some cases distinguishing it from devotional music and analysing it within the realm of public culture (Kidula Reference Kidula2000; Nyairo Reference Nyairo2008; Parsitau Reference Parsitau2006, 2008). These authors have emphasized the commercial opportunities for Christian musicians, but their most insightful contribution highlights the manner in which gospel music has eluded state censorship. Popular music became a focal target of censorship under the directorship of the Government Censorship Board (GCB) in the politically turbulent 1990s. Popular songs were banned from state radio, while the state's security forces exercised powers to confiscate suspect records and cassettes from music shops (Haugerud Reference Haugerud1997: 35). State censorship of popular musicians in the 1990s led to a number of Kenyan performers going over to gospel music; among them was Joseph Kamaru, who like many other artists critical of the ruling government had been targeted by the state authorities for sedition (see Drewett and Cloonan 2006).

While building upon recent Kenyan scholars’ writings about gospel music and politics, this article questions how to ‘understand’ the politics of Christian music when its audience is limited to a small speech community, in this case the Meru. This is a population of just over a million who historically have occupied the eastern flanks of Mount Kenya and the Nyambene Hills to its north. I have conducted fieldwork among three sub-groupings of the larger Meru: the Imenti who live in the vicinity of the region's main town, Meru Town (Mutindwa); and the Tigania and Igembe, who live in the Nyambene Hills. Engaging in commercial agriculture since the 1940s and 1950s, Meru is one of the most agriculturally productive regions of Eastern Province, growing coffee and tea as do other highland zones of Kenya, but unique in its arboriculture of miraa (Catha edulis), a stimulant with a world market. Its mainline churches were Methodist and Catholic, established in the wake of colonial conquest, but in recent decades there has been something of a decanting effect, with many Meru, especially youth, attending the Pentecostal-Charismatic churches that have mushroomed in urban parts of the region. The Christian music explored in this article reflects some of the tensions between the various forms of Christianity, on the one hand, but on the other provokes questions of belonging with respect to Imenti, Tigania and Igembe identities.

The cases presented in the article demonstrate some of the problems of elucidation when – to follow Mbugua wa Mungai (2008) – the localized ethnopoetics of gospel music are largely ‘invisible’ at the level of the nation state. Yet local idiom need not be confused with the unique. Many of the themes to be illuminated through Meru gospel music are of wide concern all across Africa, themes that have been present in African popular culture since colonial times and speak in many different ways about the vicissitudes of the past and the uncertainties of the future (see Weiss 2004). I use ‘invisibility’ as a metaphor for the ways each community calls up its own idioms for speaking about matters that are frequently concealed in the public sphere of the national state, but also remain very much in its shadow. One intention here is to show that Meru gospel singers, while prompting their audiences to think about issues of high priority in the national public sphere, like citizenship and human rights, may also simultaneously reinforce other forms of oppressive sociality institutionalized by sexism, generational conflicts and the wider politics of belonging and identity.

I examine how Meru gospel musicians articulate moral debates not readily aired in church gatherings. In my fieldwork of 1998 and 2001–3, I began to purchase and listen to music cassettes, most of it gospel music, as an aid in learning Kîmerû. Whenever I was listening to this music with Meru friends the songs invited a range of commentary. Most often these conversations pivoted around helping me to unravel the rich semiotics of Kîmerû, but at other times the songs led to serious discussions about the strained relationships between ageing parents and their adult children, about the frustrated aspirations of young people, or even about corruption and hypocrisy within the churches. One striking quality of this music was the vilification, even demonization of certain categories of people, particularly young women, but also those labelled as prostitutes and drunkards. The lyrics of this gospel music took issue with very painful subjects, such as incest and improper sexual relations, the inevitability of death, material poverty and greed, the loss of respect for the old, domestic violence and child abuse. Couched as idioms of social crisis and questioned morality, these troublesome subjects offer ‘ontological insight’ not only into the specificities of the Meru life-world, but into the power of ‘signifying practice’ to shape subjectivity in contemporary Africa more broadly (see Makhulu 2004: 237).

These were public issues that I did not often hear openly deliberated in sermons within the various mainline and Pentecostal-Charismatic churches that I regularly visited. The cassettes offered an alternative to what was preached about in the churches, a discourse that while pietistic in outlook and roughly consistent with the aspirations of the Christians I knew, called for an ethical self-fashioning that differed significantly from the cosmopolitanism of popular Pentecostal-Charismatic doctrines in urban areas, such as the gospel of prosperity that has recently taken Nairobi by storm (see Gifford Reference Gifford2009; Mwaura 2005). While not gainsaying the great scholarly contributions that recent ethnographers of African-initiated Christianity have achieved, particularly with respect to their delicate work on local to transnational scale, my ethnographic materials suggest an altogether more parochial, but no less interesting politics voiced in an ethnopoetics of identity that is largely invisible outside the Meru as a speech community.

LIP-SYNCH GOSPEL

Throughout 2001, I began to observe street performances by gospel singers in Meru Town, Mikinduri and Maua, some of the largest towns in the region. These towns swell with people on market days, particularly Saturdays, the day that draws crowds of Meru for the most competitive prices of the week. The performances give the title to this article, ‘Lip-Synch Gospel’, because of the ways the performers simulated their own previously recorded voices without actually singing. There was a highly mimetic quality to these events as the performers danced and lip-synched their way through the routine. Requiring electricity, Meru gospel singers usually set up their stages in spaces next to music and stationery shops, with whose operators they collaborated to market their cassettes. In all cases, the members of gospel singer groups were young people and dressed in suits and skirts, some carrying pocket Bibles and others shoeboxes of tape cassettes. Assisted by non-performing attendants, they wired up cumbersome public address systems, an effort that sometimes took as long as half-an-hour, and placed portable stereos on tables, or sometimes a stack of wooden cartons. Members of their ministry, some of them owners of music kiosks, readied themselves for the performance, clutching cartons of tapes. After the PA system was tested and microphones okayed, one or two of the main performers – the lead singers, so to speak – would address the passers-by with opening prayers, inviting all to the spectacle.

Like church events, the seven performances I witnessed in 2001–3 blended music, dance, preaching and prayer according to an entertainment formula that the audience knew and expected. There was something incongruous, however, about the way performers mimed their own pre-recorded voices, synchronizing gestures of mouth, limbs and head with the tempo of the music's finger-picking riffs and staccato percussion. It was not absurd only to me. The choreography often made those in the audience laugh, especially at the climax of the dance sequence, where the fast-paced guitar changed tempo and the performers missed their cue. It takes skill to lip-synch to pre-recorded music, particularly so when one is intent on bringing out a kind of serious fun from an otherwise distracted and itinerant crowd. What surprised me most about these events, however, was not the synaesthetics of the performance itself, the disjuncture between live choreography and canned music, or between air-quaking decibels and voiceless song, but the large numbers of cassettes that these groups actually sold during their performances. As a marketing venue, where religiosity and commerce meet, these ‘lip-synch’ gospel performances were highly successful. I wondered why.

The popularity of these events seemed to decline towards the end of my fieldwork in 2003, particularly when more and more people acquired VCD and CD players, but when I observed them, they were crowd raisers. Over ten such ‘gospel singer’ groups were active in Meru when this fieldwork was being conducted. Music kiosk operators I spoke to at Meru Town's municipal bus terminal recounted first seeing such performances in the late 1990s, following the rapid popularity of Joseph Kamaru's controversial Message to the Youth, a cassette that marked his highly publicized and sometimes criticized transition from ‘one-man guitar’ to gospel music.Footnote ¹ Kamaru's success partially lay in his combination of sermons and songs (wa Mungai 2008), a convention later picked up by Meru gospel singers. Kikuyu popular music is listened to by large numbers of Meru, a speech community that can understand Kikuyu with little difficulty. Although the Kikuyu living in Meru that I knew gradually acquired Kîmerû, they told me that it was ‘not an easy language’ for them despite the morphophonemic similarities of these two languages. According to those in the business, the largest proportion of music sold in Meru Town and Maua is Kikuyu rather than Kîmerû, a view explained by the very few recording artists in Meru's colonial and post-colonial history. It might also be claimed that Kikuyu musicians inspired the recent Meru surge in gospel music, particularly figures like Kamaru. The dearth of Kîmerû music is remarkable considering other central Kenyan communities’ rather impressive music-making history. As one university student told me, ‘Besides singers like Gitonga Kathuma and George Kinoti, we Meru aren't very musical, but we are getting there slowly’ (Notes: 12 March 2001). These two singers recorded their music in the late 1970s and while popular among the Imenti, the largest sub-grouping of the Meru, their music is almost unheard of among the Tigania and Igembe. Music sellers still order copies of George Kinoti's Christianized circumcision songs, which are purchased by young boys every December school holiday – to learn traditional songs, ironically enough, while awaiting their own initiations.

The appearance of Meru gospel singers in the 1990s can be explained, in part, by the general rise of gospel music in Kenya during this time, but it is also a fact that the best-known Meru gospel singers come from the Nyambene Hills, a part of Meru populated by the Tigania and Igembe sub-groups. This is significant considering some of the lyrics to be examined below, in which questions of belonging and identity are raised in the context of far-reaching social change in the Nyambene Hills since the 1990s. The 1990s were also a strenuous period for the mainline churches in Meru, organizations that saw large numbers of young people withdraw and join what may be called ‘parachurches’ (see Mwaura 2005), many of which were the rhizome-like offshoots of larger Pentecostal-Charismatic ‘ministries’ set up in Nairobi. Such secession within the Methodist and (more surprisingly) Catholic churches has led many young people to reject the denominational divisions within Meru and embrace a loosely defined, even inchoate ‘born-again’ cosmology. Betty Koome, a one-time member of Muthaara Gospel Singers, described for me how most of the group led peripatetic congregational lives before briefly joining the gospel singers, represented in her words as ‘a church’ (Notes: 17 March 2002). Perhaps the most important consideration in the rise of Meru gospel singer groups is their capacity to be recognized locally as parachurches in their own right, an acknowledgement they are keen to encourage.

The gospel singer groups under discussion exhibit some characteristics of ‘born again’ cosmology, yet also do not fit the mould as described in much of the ethnography of African-initiated Pentecostal-charismatic churches (see Engelke Reference Engelke2007; Kirsch Reference Kirsch2008; Maxwell Reference Maxwell2006; Meyer Reference Meyer1999). While their music exhorts its listeners to repent and seek salvation, acts consistent with deliverance theology, their evangelism relies heavily on indigenous idioms and a kind of cultural reflexivity that stands at odds with Pentecostal-Charismatic doctrines (see Meyer Reference Meyer1998). In seeking to capture the radical nature of conversion to Pentecostal-charismatic Christianity, John Lonsdale asserts: ‘Pentecostalism cuts its converts off from their ethnic pasts and culture, calls them works of the Devil; it appeals to individuals in the multi-ethnic urban crowd, not to cultural communitas’ (Lonsdale Reference Lonsdale2004: 3). In stark contrast with this description, the Meru gospel singer groups are largely rural, exclusively Meru and creatively plumb ‘culture’ and ‘tradition’ as a medium for local evangelism. Although it may be inconsistent with scholarly descriptions and theorization of Pentecostal-Charismatic Christianity in Africa, one way of locating the Meru gospel singer groups is to position them in the liminal space between the Pentecostal-Charismatic and mainline churches as parachurch associations in their own right, with adherents, but not congregations, and a flexible inter-personal organization that makes them effective cultural critics of other churches.

Audiences look upon lip-synch performances as a new way of preaching. Gakûla Akwalû, whose lyrics are encountered in the following section, has produced five cassettes for Nyambene Gospel Singers. He is very popular in his home area – Tigania, where I lived for a year (2002) – and his songs are most appreciated by local fans for his melding of traditional Meru moral knowledge with Christian evangelization. Meru Town's main group, Glory Gospel Singers, are a young couple whose songs explore, rather darkly, local understandings of sin through themes of adultery, witchcraft, HIV/AIDS and road accidents, among other perceived evils. The main performer for Maua Gospel Singers, Kaûra, has created a style more akin to stand-up comedy, but with a form of moving between sermon and song modelled on Kamaru's formula. Kaûra's impersonation of a range of caricatures, from young girls to ‘sugar daddies’, makes use of a very consciously crafted play on Igembe self-stereotypes. Taken together, Meru gospel singers deliver their Christian message in carefully studied local idioms.

Such groups have all invested quite heavily in the production of their cassette tapes, as each has had to hire a band and recording studio in Nairobi, sometimes for weeks, in order to have a few hundred tapes for sale back in Meru. Most of the musicians employed as recording artists are Congolese and nowhere do their names appear on the cassette credits. The studios are located in downtown Nairobi, along River Road, whose newest business ventures are organized around the burgeoning VCD music-video market, earning it the sobriquet ‘Riverwood’ (wa Mungai 2008). A member of the Mûthaara Gospel Singers explained to me that studio rents were more expensive than musicians and that the most costly outlay was accommodation and food. One pastor from Mikinduri estimated that the overhead costs for a single cassette volume, of about twelve to fifteen tracks, would amount to KSh40,000 (about US$500 in the early 2000s). This popular medium for evangelical work, although potentially profitable, requires an established ‘ministry’ and regular credit flows. The tapes themselves sell for roughly KSh80–100, yielding no more than a modest profit. Although the people I spoke with about the production of cassettes acknowledged that gospel singer groups could make some money from their performances, these events were not principally profit-oriented.

The minor commercial possibilities notwithstanding, Meru gospel music is about evangelizing and the songs are peppered with semiotic forms that are recognizably Pentecostal-Charismatic in their emphasis on personal salvation and the threat of sin in human life. Focusing on the idea of personal redemption, this music tends to be interpreted in pietistic terms. ‘It's music that makes you closer to the Holy Spirit,’ said Daramis Kagwiria while listening to a cassette at my home in Mikinduri, adding further that ‘these songs preach the gospel to keep us from backsliding’ (Notes: 7 January 2003). Besides discouraging ‘backsliding’, gospel musicians also engage in social and cultural critique.

For instance, Kîbara, a gospel singer from Ntonyiri in the Nyambene Hills, questions whether ‘development’ has led people towards a better life. Ntonyiri is the source point for a large quantity of the world market's miraa (catha edulis), the fresh supple sprigs chewed as a stimulant by many people in East Africa and the Horn.Footnote ² In Ntonyiri, where most families are engaged in miraa farming, there is moral ambivalence about the influence of miraa money, particularly when associated with the heavy drinking culture witnessed in some Nyambene Hills bars. Drawing upon the Bible and parsing the idea of development with the Swahili term, maendeleo, Kîbara sings:

This song fragment demonstrates the place of immorality in much Meru reasoning about modernity, particularly in the Nyambene Hills where profits from miraa are said to have produced a ‘money-loving generation’ (nthukî rwendi mbeca) in the past few decades. In a society that stresses specific kinds of conduct prescribed by one's gender and age, there is heated debate about the loosening of moral conduct among the Meru. While evidence might be drawn upon to demonstrate the roots of this sense of waning morality in earlier crises of the colonial period, as Anne-Marie Peatrik (1999) has done with effect, the urgency of moral debates found in the Meru gospel music examined here is not only evangelical, but also ties in with highly localized arguments about belonging and identity. To contextualize these debates in greater depth and their elision with Meru gospel music, the following sections examine songs that address significant aspects of Meru sociality and identity: their age-sets and its generational idioms, and their miraa.

THIS MANNERLESS GENERATION

In a light November drizzle, Gerevasio Gakûla Akwalû arrived at the small town of Mikinduri with a carload of PA equipment. Within minutes, his small company of five young men and women set to work seeking a source of electricity from the row of small shops which lined Mikinduri's main dirt thoroughfare. Stretching out long power cables over the muddy roadside slope, taking care to avoid puddles, his entourage attracted a small number of curious onlookers. A pair of heavy speakers were dragged into position and wired up to the cables.

Such scenes are not uncommon in highland Kenya where the setting up of PA systems is often the start of a ‘crusade’, evangelical performances that mix song and dance with multilingual preaching. In Kenya today, hardly any outdoors religious gathering is without electrical amplification, where electricity is available. The Lord's message has become louder and louder, with some Kenyans joking that worshippers must yell for God to hear their prayers, as heaven is very far away (see Englund 2004: 301). Electricity provides new possibilities for preaching the gospel, not only through PA systems, but also through television, radio and VCRs which have been primary conduits for broadcasting religious media. Mikinduri entered Kenya's power grid in 1998, following a visit to this populous market town by George Saitoti and then-president Daniel arap Moi. Yet, on this particular day in November 2002, it was evident that those setting up the PA system and its entanglement of cables were not preparing a crusade, which usually demands the construction of a temporary stage, but rather organizing a popular new form of preaching by local gospel singers from nearby communities.

Akwalû’s performance began with calling the casual onlookers and passers-by together as one would in a church: asking the congregation to prepare for the Lord's Prayer. Dressed in the uniform of Kenyan preachers, a suit and tie, Akwalû took a large microphone into his right hand, swept the cable behind him with his left and delivered an impassioned prayer, soliciting the normal interjections of ‘Amen’, ‘Hallelujah’ and ‘Bwana Asifiwe’ (Praise the Lord) from the gathering crowd. After this prayer, Akwalû took the opportunity to speak with his growing audience, explaining that he had recorded his latest tape cassette, ‘This Mannerless Generation’ (Nthukî Îria Ncabûka), out of personal suffering. Incensed by seeing people he knew and loved die of HIV/AIDS, get lost in drink, disrespect their parents and elders and ‘backslide’ in their faith, Akwalû appealed to his audience to buy his cassette. This cassette, he argued, had a message of salvation in it, if one cared to listen carefully to the songs he had composed. Before instructing his associate preachers to press ‘Play’ on the portable cassette player they had set up, he also suggested that the crowd purchase the cassettes of other gospel musicians he had for sale. Once the first cassette began, rolling out energetic finger-picking guitar riffs, Akwalû donned a pair of sunglasses, struck poses, made faces and danced to the cadence and beat of the music, lip-synching his own previously recorded voice. With this dramatic first song, the crowd grew larger and thicker around the performance, drawn in by the deafening anthem blaring out from the crackling PA system.

The following text is that first song. It draws on a community-wide argument about immorality that, in Meru at least, is often framed as the irreverence shown to tradition by current generations. In particular, the song creatively draws its disdain for modern sociality from generational and gendered idioms derived from Meru's age-set system.Footnote ³ The lexicon used to describe age-sets (nthukî) and generations (also nthukî) is also the vocabulary for discussing morality and personal conduct, hence the frequently heard epithet, nthukî ncabûka (a mannerless generation).Footnote ⁴

The idea of a mannerless generation, nthukî ncabûka, is associated with themes of money and greed, disrespect between children and parents, inappropriate ways of dressing, interpersonal violence, theft, sexual licence, foul language and loudness. My first encounters with this idiom, nthukî ncabûka, came early on in my fieldwork among the Imenti in 1998, when I overheard older men at a coffee factory describe a theft of coffee cherry the preceding night. Blame was immediately cast on several young men who made ‘fast money’ as coffee brokers in the vicinity. Later into my fieldwork, from 2001–3 and in the Nyambene Hills, I was struck by the moral panic about inter-generational conflicts and the consequent vilification of today's youth, not only by elders, but by young people as well.

In this gospel song, the nthukî ncabûka are identified with the unfolding of a social and moral crisis, where inter-generational reciprocities have been subverted by ‘love of money’ (nthukî îrîa rwendi mbeca) and where the former avoidance relations between parents and circumcised children are no longer observed. All of the interpersonal relations are distorted and people's conduct becomes highly individualized. The crises of familial authority and the waning power of elders to control the life-course transitions of their sons and daughters, by opening and closing successive age-sets, are represented as a moral failure. Age-based incest is perceived to be on the rise: elders sleep with girls young enough to be their daughters; and grandmums, trying to be girls, appear ridiculous in sunglasses and hair-curlers. Accusations of age-based incest and other inter-personal transgressions, such as speaking face-to-face with one's father or mother, are flung at the undisciplined people of today. Young people are represented as refractory and morally adrift under the influence of the Devil; their elders depicted as irresponsible disowners of tradition and greedy hoarders of property.

What is striking in Akwalû’s lyrics in the song above is his capacity to meld indigenous eschatology with biblical scripture about the ‘coming of a last generation’. The creative entanglements of ideas drawn from local stories about the coming of a last generation and the prophecies in the biblical scriptures about the End of Days lend the artist a powerful public workshop in which to underscore his social criticism with a vision of redemption. Meru audiences are able to interpret Akwalû’s words because he draws upon pre-colonial prophecy that reinforces the meanings of the Gospel. Kîmerû eschatological narratives do not contradict popular understandings of the Bible, particularly those which profess (ûroria) a second coming, because they are allegorical. Allegories of a ‘last generation’ (nthukî cîa mûthia, literally the ‘tailing’ generation) have been an integral part of indigenous eschatology, at least since the nineteenth century when this narrative was first offered as a prophecy of the social, epidemiological, demographic and ecological crises to come with imperial conquest.Footnote ⁶ A brief mention of the ‘age-set with bells on their ears’ (îrwa nthukî îrîa ncabûka rwîîna ntuara matû) is an idiomatic reference to narratives that foretold (kûrorua, to prophesy) of a generation being born with eight ears (îkirwe nthukî na matû yanaana). In a narrative common in the Nyambene Hills even today, the end of the world is brought on by members of a generation who have eight ears, dress in outlandish fashions, commit age-based incest and kill their parents. Other versions associate the generation with eight ears with the affliction, maria, a wasting disease that stands today as a euphemism for HIV/AIDS. Used as allegory to speak about the conduct of young people and their elders today, the story is about the end of community and an emergent crisis of belonging and identity.

The sense of social and moral disarray captured in the notion of nthukî ncabûka is not always accepted as true. As a derogatory term, not all youth accept it as a self-stereotype (see Herzfeld 2005: 3) and many subject it to thoughtful critique. Edward Mutethia, a forty-year-old single parent, told me that men and women of his generation had to ‘defend’ themselves:

Another young man, an unemployed mason, suggested to me that nthukî ncabûka was a way of discussing social problems in a way that effectively denied the future:

This comment echoes another of Akwalû’s songs, Kwîna Thîîna (‘There are Problems’), when the evangelist prays to God to call him away from life, singing:

The pain of despair in this Akwalû song is an emotive force I would encounter time and again during my fieldwork. I often heard such renunciations of the world from young people whose lives were under the most intimate scrutiny from parents, and for whom the future really did seem to be the End.

Despite hearing reference to the nthukî ncabûka regularly during fieldwork, it was never evoked in any of the church gatherings and services I attended, despite the large numbers of elderly people in the congregation. The ethnopoetics of the gospel song described above and even the unbearable strain of life upon the young mason whose words I quoted above, are not matters discussed in mainline or Pentecostal-Charismatic churches. Even in casual conversations, invoking the notion of nthukî ncabûka implies a kind of anger and frustration barely recognized in church services, whose leaders avoid the major controversies voiced elsewhere in the community. A possible reason for this is the requirement that in church, if not in other social spaces like schools, one conforms to the ideal of being nthoni (shy, or displaying respect) in a setting where conflicts between the generations are concealed and managed. In the public space of the marketplace, or the domestic spaces of my interlocutors’ homes where these conversations took place, being nthoni is emphasized less and opportunities to voice dissent are not missed.

So far, I have been dealing with gospel music's moralizing force, its call for a blended indigenous and Christian piety and its condemnation of the breakdown of respectful conduct across the generations. The place of belonging and identity in much of the Kîmerû gospel music I listened to during fieldwork also positions the Meru within the wider world, where this larger scale of relationship is seen as the invisible source of much of the social suffering and moral quandary explored through this style of music and performance.

The ethnopoetics of Meru gospel musicians strikes at questions of identity and belonging that resonate with broader regional connections to the global economy. In the late 1970s, Imenti folk-singer Gitonga Kathuma celebrated Meru's 1977 coffee boom with a song entitled ‘Meru Farming’ (Ûrimi bwa Meru). This particular song commemorated an exceptionally lucrative year for members of Meru's coffee cooperatives owing to devastating frosts in Brazil. By singing about the building of stone houses made from coffee profits and the winning of the Kenyan Coffee Planters Union (KCPU) medal for the most productive coffee-growing region in Kenya, Kathuma celebrates wealth acquired through agricultural production, but also manages to link this with Imenti aspirations for development and modernity. Although coffee profits have all but collapsed since the liberalization of this market in the mid-1990s and coffee is now symbolic of failed economic development, the crop is still significant in the formation of local identity, particularly among older farmers who educated their children through agricultural cooperative society membership. ‘Coffee educated us,’ was how one middle-aged nurse put it.

My point in raising the linkages between song lyrics, the history of coffee farming and a sense of nostalgia for the 1970s among the Imenti is to further explore questions of identity and belonging in Meru gospel music with reference to miraa production among the Tigania and Igembe of the Nyambene Hills. In this next section, I present a different kind of gospel song that mixes Christian evangelization with the local ethnopoetics of identity.

NYAMBENE OIL

On 28 March 2001 Wallace Gichunge wrote an opinion-editorial letter to the Daily Nation newspaper entitled, ‘Why must you eschew miraa?’ As a resident of the Nyambene Hills, Gichunge argued that the Postal Corporation of Kenya's omission of miraa from a Definitive Stamp issue of major crops smacked of prejudice and oversight. Reasoning that 300,000 people living in Ntonyiri and Igembe divisions of the Nyambene Hills earned their livelihood from miraa, that it had become in the 1990s a ‘multi-million shilling business’ earning ‘revenue for the Government’, and that the tree-crop was an ‘export commodity to various destinations in Europe’, Gichunge concluded that the crop should have been represented as a major cash crop on Kenyan stamps. When discussing this letter with Kiboore, a high-school teacher from the miraa-producing centre of Nkinyang'a, I was told that this was a ‘never-ending controversy’ and that ‘as long as we Igembe grow miraa, we'll always be discriminated against’ (Notes: 15 April 2001).

Miraa seems to attract controversy, not only within Kenya, but also in many other countries where it is imported and consumed, like the United Kingdom where there is a sizeable Somali market (see Beckerleg 2006). In Meru itself, however, miraa is bound up with male sociality and livelihood to the extent that the social identities of the Nyambene Hills are now synonymous with the crop (see Carrier 2005, 2006, 2007; Goldsmith 1994). As Neil Carrier has stressed (2005: 202), miraa's cultural significance in the Nyambene Hills is associated with a modern ‘youth ethos’, but the social life of miraa also extends to practices Meru themselves would describe as traditional: for instance, negotiating marriages and initiating bridewealth exchanges (gûkwingua rûracio na ncoolo). In the Nyambene Hills, fewer topics invite more conversation and controversy than Christianity, age-sets and miraa. On reflection, it is noteworthy that of the last two major ethnographies on the Meru written by anthropologists in the past decades, one dwelt at length on the Meru age-set system (Peatrik Reference Peatrik1999) and the other focused on the sociality and economics of miraa (Carrier Reference Carrier2005).

As a pivotal marker of Meru sociality and identity, miraa is subject to a range of negotiations, debates and outright critique. The social organization of the miraa trade, for example, results in profits that are highly uneven in their distribution and places extreme pressures on labour, land and water. From frequent newspaper stories highlighting inter-personal violence in the Nyambene Hills, usually machete attacks, the Igembe inhabitants of the most productive miraa zones, like Laare and Ntonyiri, are stereotyped as being exceptionally quick to anger with a proclivity to violence. This essentialization of the Igembe has overshadowed the specific property relations of miraa-farming families, many of whom have entered disadvantageous leasehold contracts with Somali businessmen and have found themselves caught up in recurrent litigation and conflict as a result. Law firms are the fastest-growing businesses in Maua's miraa boom (see Ishida 2007). Stereotypes abound in discussions about the residents of the Nyambene Hills, at a national level equating their ethnicity with a ‘drug crop’ and ‘easy money’, where too much of the latter is seen to have ‘spoiled’ the Igembe, who are said not to know how to ‘invest’. Even within Meru and, especially, among many wealthier Imenti, there is an unfavourable caricature of the Nyambene farmer as a kind of ‘backward hillbilly’, as one hardware dealer put it to me (Notes: 14 December 2002). This is a stereotype that is associated with miraa and, in the eyes of some Imenti, the cultural conservatism of the Nyambene Hills.

Other observers point to the real potential for conflict over control of the trade, which has led to violence between Meru and Somali with the latter community being temporarily expelled from the region in 1999 and 2002 (Grignon Reference Grignon1999). The leaseholds between Meru farmers and Somali businessmen and miraa transporters pose a serious dilemma for local leaders. Sensing potential profit in the wake of the Somali diaspora in the late 1990s, many Igembe farmers entered into contractual relations to provision the Somali with miraa, agreements that – when the returns eventually fell – were legally binding for the life of the contract, in some extreme cases up to ninety-nine years. Government has on occasion also commissioned reports claiming that Nyambene's miraa farming complex – which draws upon child labour in processing miraa into measurable units or bundles – has been a barrier to the development of education in the region (Ishida Reference Ishida, Gichere and Ishida2007: 62; Ministry of Finance and Planning 2001). Such official declarations have fuelled stereotypes among other ethnic groups that the Igembe do not value education, a view that has become in some circumstances something of a self-stereotype. Although not condemned by Meru converts to Islam, the chewing of miraa is particularly odious to many ‘born-again’ Christians, who consider the habit to be anti-social, dirty and addictive, as well as being a kind of ‘gateway drug’ to other vices, such as alcoholism and sexual licentiousness. As I will demonstrate below, however, these are not views that go uncontested. The following song shows how miraa is also celebrated and defended in spite of its detractors’ efforts.

In Maua, the largest town in the Nyambene Hills, two groups of gospel singers regularly performed on Saturday market days, Ntonyiri Gospel Singers and Maua Gospel Singers. Fronted by Kaûra, a young pastor from Maili Tatu, Maua Gospel Singers differed from all the other groups, as he preached verbatim from his cassette Ûtuara Maunti Kenya (‘Mount Kenya's Rain’), but inspired a kind of hilarity among his audiences through the ways he impersonated voices, playing on some of the self-stereotypes hinted at above. Kaûra's sermons were broken up by bouts of singing and dancing, but his performance mainly centred upon descriptions of hypocrisy in the churches. He clearly had a talent for capturing stereotypes, such as the pastor who drinks and sleeps with married women, or the church adherent who steals from the collection plate, but his imaginative purpose was to tap into the moral ambivalences of his audience and make them reflect on being a Christian ‘the Meru way’. Miraa was referred to throughout his sermon, particularly with respect to the mother who, used to feeding her children in restaurants from miraa proceeds, admits to not knowing how to cook, a rather shameful admission for a Meru woman. The young school drop-out working in a miraa processing and bundling depot is another of Kaûra's characters, a dull fellow who has no other ambitions, spiritual or otherwise, than the small shed he lives and works in. This young boy, recently circumcised and released from parental care, is a figure of double exploitation: he is never to return to school; and his only wages are paid out in miraa. In Kaûra's performances and cassettes, reference to miraa is not dwelt upon, but the subject is made to look as if it were associated with a continuum of social and moral problems. In focusing on miraa as a symbol, Kaûra is exploring, following Michael Herzfeld, what is best described as a kind of ‘cultural intimacy’ where self-stereotypes are a ‘source of external embarrassment … that nevertheless provide insiders with their assurance of common sociality’ (Herzfeld Reference Herzfeld2005: 3).

Locally, much of the controversy over miraa can be traced back to Christian sermons delivered in churches, preachers making no distinction between the culturally important twigs and other substances such as alcohol and cannabis. I have heard members of a church I used to visit, Kirwiro market's Full Gospel, speak of this crop as the ‘Devil's tree’ (Notes: 17 February 1998). The plant's mildly amphetamine-like effects are wildly exaggerated by the most vociferous of its critics, as are its far-from-proven health risks. As a young pastor from Mikinduri put it to me: ‘When you chew that stuff, Mark, you're damaging your liver and your soul. That tree is like that in the Fall’ (Notes: 11 August 2002). The symbolism of the tree in Christianity, its relation to original sin, provides a theological pathway to further denigrate the consumption of miraa as un-Christian.

On a visit to Maua at about the time the above comment was made, however, I witnessed another lip-synch performance that took issue with such criticisms of miraa and actually celebrated the crop and its consumption as a morally viable part of Igembe identity. The Ntonyiri-based gospel musician known by the moniker Kîbara (literally, ‘Baldie’) performed in Maua with his group, Ntonyiri Gospel Singers, on an extremely hot August afternoon. One of his songs, Miraa Yetû Nyambene (‘Our Nyambene Miraa’) was hugely popular with a number of my interlocutors, especially young men who chew miraa themselves.

This is a song that challenges the frequent condemnation of the crop made by pastors to their congregations. By doing so, Kîbara is also touching upon a theme common to Meru gospel music or, more precisely, its lip-synch performances. That theme is hypocrisy within the leadership and congregations of Christian churches. Although Nyambene identity has been transformed by the region's reliance on miraa since the 1990s and new forms of Christian Pentecostal-charismatic identity are part of that change, Kîbara emphasizes what a lot of other Igembe actually say:

This association between drinking alcohol and women is, of course, deeply sexist in its assumptions about gender and sexuality. Although chewed by some women, miraa is mainly categorized as a masculine part of Meru sociality. Consuming alcohol at one time was similar, but in the past two decades, this is rapidly changing as men and women socialize together increasingly in bars and hotels where alcohol is served. The historicity of the HIV/AIDS pandemic is critical in this conjuncture, a fact Kîbara's rather celebratory song about miraa underscores when he criticizes hypocrite preachers and their ‘escapist sermons’ for failing to address ‘real’ social problems in Nyambene communities.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The author wishes to acknowledge the Wenner-Gren Foundation and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada for supporting fieldwork in Kenya, 2001–3. Without Robert Muriuki's help in transcribing Meru songs, this particular article would not have been possible. I am also grateful for extended conversations with Neil Carrier and Paul Goldsmith, whose encouragements to revisit my doctoral research have spurred me on.