Waka Waka rhythm and vuvuzelas give Cup African flavour

In rhythm, song and dance, Kenya is represented at World Cup. How?

Listen again to the guitar riffs in that incredibly infectious song “Waka Waka”: unadulterated Benga, a popular Kenyan tune.

Music has been at the heart of virtually every major world sporting competition over the last three decades.

From America’s annual Superbowl to the Olympics and the World Cup, many national and global sporting events privilege song as the centre-piece of the opening ceremony.

Sometimes organisers commission the writing of an official anthem performed on the opening day by an artiste of international repute.

Music lovers the world over remember Janet Jackson’s famous gaffe at the 2004 Super Bowl when she “accidentally” exposed her breast while on stage with Justin Timberlake.

The incident was infamously dubbed the “wardrobe malfunction”.

At the closing ceremony of the 1984 Olympics, Lionel Richie gave a rousing performance of his big hit “All Night Long”.

That show became one of the epochal moments in the celebration of the potential for creativity and human achievement that lies in both music and sport. 

In 1990, Cameroon’s Roger Milla brought something new to this relationship between music and sport.

Milla pioneered the tradition of players celebrating each goal with a vigorous dance. 

And this dance was no mean feat from the then 38-year-old Milla who went down in history as the oldest man to score a World Cup goal. 

Milla’s exploits at that World Cup inspired a musical salute by the late Pepe Kalle.

“Roger Milla” is truly a great soccer song in which Pepe Kalle used referee whistles and crowd noise to dramatise Milla’s fame.

Kalle supplemented his sweet vocals in praise of Milla by taking on the role of the Congolese atalaku who normally excites audiences with spoken commentaries praising important figures in the society. 

From the noise-making vuvuzelas to a slippery ball named “Jabulani” (happiness) the organisers of the 2010 World Cup have tried hard to give the festival an “authentic” air of African culture.

The whole grammar surrounding this World Cup draws its origins from African languages and Africanised experience.

DStv features a World Cup review programme called “Harambee”. 

“Harambee” was the rallying call of Kenya’s founding president, Jomo Kenyatta, and became the name of the national practice of fund-raising for urgent and worthwhile causes.

Harambee signifies a collective sense of ownership over something.

But the term Harambee has its roots in India and the labour experiences of the 18th century “coolies” who built the railway from Mombasa to Uganda.

So our African culture has been built from trans-continental borrowing and blending.

“Waka Waka” is no different. It is an interesting remix of a song called “Zangalewa” (Zaminamina) by a makossa band called Golden Sounds who were members of the Cameroonian Army.

In the 1980s these three clownish figures in costumes of protruding bellies and big behinds were made famous through repeated broadcasts of the URTNA television exchange programmes.

The popularity of the original “Zangalewa”, sung in the Fang language of Southern Cameroon, spread all the way to Colombia, thanks to West African DJs playing in the clubs of Cartagena.

At the time, a certain Isabel Mebarak Ripoll was just 10 years old.

Fast forward to June 10, 2010 and a grown up Isabel, now known simply as Shakira, is the show-stopper at the World Cup 2010 kick off concert at the Orlando Stadium in Johannesburg.

And the song that the crowd has braved the wintry South African night for? “Waka Waka” (This time for Africa).

But who are the unsung heroes of this gem of a World Cup song ?

Back in February 2010 the members of Freshly Ground, a South African group, were putting the finishing touches to their new album Radio Africa in New York. 

They met Shakira’s manager who mentioned that the Colombian singer was working on a song for the 2010 World Cup and needed an African flavour to it. 

But it is no accident that Freshly Ground was picked for this collaboration.

The band from Cape Town comprises seven members from South Africa, Mozambique and Zimbabwe and is often held up as an example of the Rainbow Nation for the racial diversity it represents.

Their most successful song, the catchy feel -good “Doo be Doo” was the biggest hit in South Africa in 2005 and established the band’s credentials as a musical force throughout Africa.

And in December 2009 Freshly Ground came to Nairobi but performed in a virtually empty Uhuru Gardens.

The result of their February meeting in New York was the “Waka Waka” collaboration with Zolani Mahola’s distinctive voice alongside Shakira’s. 

But the highlight of  “Waka Waka” is not from the makosa beat of the original or the new lyrics urging fair play and heroism.

Nor does the songs power derive entirely from the rhythmic energy of the zangalewa dance.

The energy of “Waka Waka” is actually driven by the powerful guitar work from Freshly Ground’s Mozambican Julio Sigauque.

His riffs echo the plucking style of Kenya’s finest Benga players.

The groove is lively, melodic and enchanting; the bass bubbly and pulsating in a way that would have made the great D.O Misiani sit up and take notice.

The adoption of the Benga rhythm by a South African group and its acceptance by a high profile global enterprise that was consciously searching for a distinctively African flavour should shame all those lazy commentators on Kenyan popular music who keep saying that Kenya has never evolved a national sound where Jamaica has reggae and the Congolese owned rumba and created ndombolo.

Freshly Ground’s involvement in the official World Cup anthem has carried Benga into the global arena in a way no other effort has ever done.

True, Benga’s rhythms had long diffused to southern Africa through the work of Jean Bosco Mwenda and other itinerant Southern African musicians but what Freshly Ground has achieved is a global statement that Benga is a unique and magically expressive rhythm that distinguishes African music.

No doubt when they visited Nairobi last year Freshly Ground consolidated their sense of the musical sound that is typically Kenyan.

And it is time Kenyans owned Benga as their biggest contribution to the global field of popular music.

Only blight

“Waka Waka” has hit No 1 across the world, from Argentina to Chile, France to Germany, Holland to Mexico.

Any coincidence that all these countries had teams playing at the 2010 World Cup?

Since the June 10 opening concert the “Waka Waka” video has been viewed 2.5 million times a day on YouTube with total hits at 40 million.

The only blight on this impressive record is the allegation that the song was recorded without permission from the copyright holders, a sticky situation that was saved by a legal intervention involving an undisclosed deal with Sony Music.

If Shakira and Freshly Ground have the seal of the official 2010 World Cup song, then another artiste with links to Kenya has the backing of the corporate might of Coca-Cola’s World Cup campaign with his song “Wavin’ Flag”.

Keinan Abdi Warsame (K’Naan) has lived up to his first name, which is Somali for ‘traveller’.

K’Naan fled Somalia with his family at the height of the civil war moving first to Harlem, then to Toronto, Canada. 

Thanks to the deal with Coca-Cola K’Naan travelled through no less than 86 countries in a tour of the World Cup trophy before the start of the tournament.

There is much to be said about the events leading up to the adoption of “Wavin’ Flag” as the Coca-Cola promotional anthem.

According to Billboard magazine the lyrics of the original song were thought of as ‘too dark’ and references to ‘people struggling, fighting to eat’ and ‘a violence prone, poor people zone’ had to be dropped from the song after objections from Coca-Cola.

But those original lyrics are powerful poetic renditions of the pain, the nostalgia, the lost opportunities and immense potential that make up post-1990s Somalia or, in fact, post-independence Africa.

We grow and celebrate the “waving flag”. “And then it goes back” into the depths of dictatorship, corruption and the mismanagement from global cartels - “look how they treat us… we fight their battles, then they deceive us; try to control us they couldn’t hold us…”

For K’Naan to have given up his poetic description of what ails his homeland for the sake of a soccer tournament might seem like a huge sacrifice.

Especially when we know that K’Naan’s music has always revolved around these themes of conflict and social justice. 

The “Wavin’ Flag” album Troubadour was recorded in Jamaica and the Bob Marley family allowed K’Naan to stay at the home of the reggae legend where he was “handed the keys to the house.”

The lyrical spirit of Marley flows through the album with songs of redemption and resistance.

And when he needed to make a video for his single, “Soobax”, a protest song to the warlords in Somalia, K’Naan came to Eastleigh in Nairobi, “where my people have made home.” 

Full of energy

In an interview when the World Cup trophy was in Nairobi, K’Naan defended himself from accusations that he was exploiting his Somali upbringing to enhance his career, saying, “I still think in Somali and I am very much about African issues.”

And K’Naan has succeeded in bringing these African issues to the heart of a global event that is dispersing in so many directions and conversations. At the last count there were no less than 15 different versions of “Wavin’ Flag”.

FIFA president Sepp Blatter says nothing represents the joy of football better than music, especially when the song is so full of energy and dynamism, like “Waka Waka”. 

It is safe to conclude that Africa’s first World Cup will be remembered not so much for the cacophony of the ubiquitous Made-in-China Vuvuzela but for sounds that carry delightful rhythm and meaning.

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