The Easter week-end is over with both excitement and disappointment. It was expected to be a memorable Easter packed with action engineered by three top African artists who were all scheduled to thrill fans on both Friday and Saturday but unfortunately, two artists never turned up.
At Gubängenskolan, Fally Ippupa aka “Liputa”, the top Congolese Soukous artist whose compositions are grounded in rumba, was billed as the top African artist who was expected in Stockholm over Easter. The Liputa show was exposed to high publicity in Sweden, having grabbed a whole page in the morning newspaper, Stockholm City, a feat that exposed the show to a wide range of Soukous fans especially in Stockholm just a day before the show.
When the big day came, fans who had been charging for the show for weeks trooped at the venue only to be told that the show had been cancelled. According to Mr. Mark Gaya, a Kenyan who was among the first to arrive at the scene, the organizers said that the show had been cancelled for “security reasons” although there was no further explanation, a situation which only deepened the mystery.
The cancellation ignited immediate speculation because some fans could not understand the kind of security threat that the Swedish authorities could not deal with, given that Stockholm has been hosting many dignitaries (including Presidents and Prime Ministers). Then, on Saturday, Ray C failed to turn up due to reasons that have not been disclosed by the organizers. That was after a huge publicity that mainly focused on Ray C as the key artist. There must be good reasons why the two musicians did not honor their Stockholm engagements although that is currently not a topic at KSB.
On that same Friday when Liputa went missing in town, Sound of Blackness, the main East African Entertainment force that has been behind a series of live performances in Stockholm especially by East African artists, had packaged Ali Kiba to be served to fans deep into the Friday Easter night. Sound of Blackness, headed by VJs Frank and Safi, collaborated with Network for Africans Unity headed by Samson Mande and Crew to ensure that Akli Kiba was in town. The show followed a series of publicity that paid off because hours before action, the main hall had already been packed to capacity.
Ali Kiba’s main fan base is East Africa. KSB arrived at the scene of action shortly before midnight to meet familiar faces from Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania. Festvåningen, the venue, is divided into four parts, the rest room, the dance floor (with an improvised platform), the kitchen and the bar where little cans of vinyuaji kept crossing over the counter as waiters struggled to keep pace with the never-ending orders from a streaming crowd of almost 200 revelers who were in attendance to dance away the Easter night with Ali Kiba.
Even before the action began, you could be forgiven if you thought you had suddenly gate-crashed into some “fashion show” event with models preparing to show-case the latest designs by Chrsitian Lacroix or Emporio Armani. Together with my cohorts, Marky and Otie Pappa, we settled for a strategic position where we could scan the hall neatly for every relevant activity as we simultaneously watched the video clips sent by VJ Safi on the screen.
It was very comfy because the dance floor was still empty with the birds lining up on seats along the walls as they sipped different brands of holy water – beer, whisky, wine, soda-water, to be exact. The lighting system wired by Sound of Blackness engineers had brought about a typical disco environment with dark shades of light spread across the room as music boomed from the huge speakers. Because of the noise factor, you could not engage in story telling although one organ was kept extremely bizzi – the eyes.
Weird Imagination
The hall had two exits and, naturally, the eyes kept following the birds as they zig-zagged across the dance floor in different but never-ending motions as if they were constantly on secret errands known only to themselves. The exciting aspect of this observation was not the number of movements across the hall but the model of clothes that wrapped up the bundles of human flesh that was on display and the unique swinging styles that came along with every breed that breezed along.
A combination of a red mgongo wazi that did not go beyond the waist could, for example, combine with a black “tight cover” all the way down the legs with just a high-heeled T-strap holding the entire body weight from below. When one of the models swung by, creating an opportunity to perform an “eye scan” from the posterior, you could think that the hindquarters were fastened together in the Lab by Sir God with some kind of specially designed springs that made them vibrate at different centimeters per second square. Researchers need to invent an instrument for KSB for measuring these kinds of vibrations because for earthquakes, we can rely on seismographs.
The situation became even more breath-taking “during practice” when the quarters in question were intentionally being gyrated “at high speed” on the dance floor to make the “shake-up” frequencies fit with a specific kind of rhythm, time when the typical male creature could literally be arrested by “Morality Police” and charged with “weird imagination upon observation of a female subject performing a simple dancing act in a legally convened disco” during Easter on 2nd April at Blackeberg in Stockholm.
If you were in meditation stimulated by the holy water and watching the action on the floor at the same time, you could wonder what the waist line of a woman is capable of doing or whether the upper and lower torsos are connected at the waist by a thick elastic tissue and not some vertebral bones.
This could get out of hand but look at it this way. How do you re-tell the story at KSB when, in the middle of a “model dance” (in a black tight that gives you all the necessary configurations), the hindquarters are systematically brought down so low that a rough calculation between the “main goods” and the hard floor is just about two centimeters? It could be an awkward way of reporting the news but a guy who was apparently making a similar calculation cracked me up when he wished that his equipment “was pointing somewhere in the vicinity” on the floor as stuff came down! Jokes aside, you just had to watch this to appreciate the talent!
With the snow having melted, marking the end of winter, there was a general movement away from thigh boots to give room for pumps and other non heavy duty sling backs. The men were rather more casual and less sophisticated with jeans trousers emerging as the in-thing. As usual, bling was never left behind and the individual dressing code clearly demarcated the different age groups. But that was just at the fashion level.
As time slipped away slowly, the dance floor began to experience more activity and you just had to take a position as to whether you wanted to be a quiet observer or whether you wanted to throw yourself into action and burn energy in some kind of punguza uzee session.
For Wazee wa kazi, there was no room for competition after the hot-blooded girls took over the floor in a kind of warm-up. It did not matter the kind of music that was buzzing because the styles on show kept adapting to the change in rhythm in an almost seamless transition. The reason as to why Wazee had no chance was because of the speed and the calories that was required to sustain the action, leave alone the “going down part”. At one point, a Mzee wa Kazi tried to break the ice with a girl who could pass for a professional and the result was disastrous.
He has a pot for a belly (Kitambi) and instead of taking it izzi as the young girl began to go down, shaking stuff near his “nuclear power station”, he got encouraged and took a risk. He did succeed in making a short bend downwards but then, the whole belly-weight rested on his thighs and before he could gain balance, he tilted over and landed on the floor with his Azz-abaijan, prompting an emergency rescue operation that brought him back on his feet. He was then rested on a chair and advised to relax and keep his eyes bizzi instead.
When Ali Kiba Jumped on Stage…
Then, Ali Kiba surfaced on stage from nowhere, creating a surge towards the stage and setting security on alert to ensure that the crowd did not crash the Star. Within the first five to ten minutes, the girls were already jumping on stage to try a “surface to surface” with the artist. Ali Kiba sings with a lot of emotion that is clearly visible and the impact on the audience is that they got glued on him, demanding more and more popular numbers.
In a typical session, he began a song and let the audience sing-a-long before taking it up again, occasionally assuring the crowd that the Party “had just began” amid ululations.
It was interesting, meeting Kenyans who have come into contact with KSB in other countries but who have never met me. One KSB fan based in Finland told me that he has been waiting for Ali Kiba since day one and that he learnt about it from KSB. Mr. Daniel Mwaura also introduced me to a fan based in Norway who had very nice words to say about the blog site. Running KSB could be challenging when you have to balance a lot of stuff and it’s good that Kenyans and fans alike view the blog site as a major source of information they can rely on.
Generally, people were very happy and the environment made it possible to engage Kenyans on different subjects. The harambee debate article appears to have made a lot of impact in the consciousness of many Kenyans who congratulated me for a “work well done”. Once Ali Kiba left the stage, it was a free for all.
I got myself linked up to a dance circle then jumped in to do a “complicated move” and you should have been there to witness as the crowd shouted “Go Osewe…go Osewe… yeah!!!” after which I retreated tactically to give other dancers an opportunity. I hope Clay will send me some of the pix he took “when I was doing a head-spin oki doki…”. However, the Kenyan who stole the show was Man Nzoro before he threw his Kenyan cap into the crowd “in a Michael Jacksson stylee” at the end of the show.
I understand that Sound of Blackness is plotting the Nyama Choma beat and the question that will be on the lips of many Kenyans is what lies in store after the big Ali Kiba success. The group is moving from strength to strength and what they need from the entire East African community and fans from other countries alike is solidarity. They are helping to bring Africa much closer to the Stockholm entertainment arena, a positive vibe that ought to be encouraged by fans, patriots and Pan-Africanists alike.
Okoth Osewe
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