Two years ago I picked up the new record with Eric Wanaina in Sarit Centre, Nairobi. He released another great album after that called “Love plus Revolution”, inviting still provocative, testing. Went home to Addis, put it in the car stereo. I think we were going to Adama or Nazareth nearby Addis. Not important. In this lead song, that came across, he sings about Africa, in the sense like move on, educate yourself. “Twende twende”, go, go. “Twende schule”, go to school. This kind of “amkeni” or wake up message is not unusual, but he sings it with such conviction that every bad politician should fear it and shiver down to the bone. As he sang at last year’s Selam festival in Addis (arranged by a Swedish-Ethiopian NGO by the same name, meaning “peace” in Amharic, Tigrinia, Arabic and Kiswahili), I forgot to ask him what “bongo thinas” means, the leitmotif of the song. I forgot to do that when he and other leading African and Ethiopian singers did an unplugged in my garden the night before the festival. Including Swedish act and his band Timbuktu. The festival, an annual occurrence sponsored by Sweden, is part of a bigger project to promote entertainment industry in Africa and freedom of speech that goes along with it, reaching out to young people. My feeling from this song and Eric’s albums came from hours and hours we listened to the beat me and my driver and friend Tewodros Tesfaye trekking Ethiopia, Kenya and Djibouti in our beloved Landcruiser. Mind you, the man doing husky masculine fills in this song is legend Oliver “Tuku” Mtukunudzi from troubled Zimbabwe. https://youtube/watch?v=Xz0yImPiCXY Kenya yetu. Afrika yetu.
Posted on: Tue, 16 Jul 2013 23:15:00 +0000
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