Who said the Ameru can’t sing?

Do you know any Kimeru song? I thought so. So, how come a community that was known for a rich pre-independence musical heritage has lagged so behind in the 21st century?

When the Kikuyu community started recording its music with modern instruments in the early 1960s, the Ameru were comfortable embracing and owning the tunes from their big brother from the west of Mt Kenya.

Media mogul Samuel Kamau (SK) Macharia recently brought this to the fore when he met local artistes in his Gatanga home.

Mr Macharia said when he founded Muuga FM in 2005 to exclusively air programmes in Kimeru, he did not have music from the community to entertain listeners.

“This was a big dilemma, since we wanted a 100 percent Meru station with full content being the community. We agonised on what to do and that is when I decided to stamp my foot on the issue…” he revealed.

He directed the new station employees that they had been hired to promote their community and despite lack of music to entertain their listeners, they had to engage stakeholders to understand why this was the case.

“I told them they were the authors of their community’s progress. I told them the onus was on them to ensure their new station had music from its own mother tongue target audience. And I left it at that,” Macharia said.

That is how Nairobi’s River Road-based producer Martin Mwenda was looped into the project of ensuring that talent was nurtured and embraced to produce music for the community.

Mwenda says the Ameru had remained stuck in a traditional outlook about music where their instruments of choice were mostly horns, shields, bells, rattle tubes and drums.

“These instruments were not material for the studios. While the Agikuyu took music as an income-generating venture, the Ameru retained it as a cultural practice,” he says.

Only sang during special occasions

In Daniel Nyaga’s book Customs and Traditions of the Meru, the author reveals that the Ameru only sang during special occasions.

The community is said to have reserved its musical vocals and dance moves for traditional weddings, welcoming newborns, circumcision, in praise of warriors, dirges and other events for individual or group amusement but not for business.

Mwenda opines that the Ameru for long remained content with whistling, clapping, screaming, thumping feet and swirling with total abandon in the sweetness of music as other communities embraced keyboards, guitars and modern drums as well as flutes.

“That is how we missed the train to match the Agikuyu and other communities like Abaluhya, Kisii, Akamba and Luo…But we are here now and we have arrived after a long and hard try,” Mwenda says.

Macharia says that by 2006, he wanted a report on how the station was faring on achieving his goal that at least 30 percent of the music played be from the Ameru community.

“I was told the presenters had started deliberately encouraging the community’s youths that there was money in music and they had a publicity platform to promote themselves that had its doors wide open,” he said.

“By 2008, all music that was being played on the station was exclusively from the community…it was only if a listener requested the station to play music from outside their community that the policy would change.”

Many chords went to waste

With time, the station embraced the dynamics of its audience and played varieties in wide-ranging programmes.

Kamande wa Kioi, a guitarist and composer, muses that he was approached by several Ameru artistes to record their music.

“Those who wanted live music of course had to procure the services of a guitarist. One of the major problems is that Kimeru has so many consonants that playing the solo guitar for their songs was very hard,” he says.

Guitarists, he says, were at pains to meet the solo guitar demand for the Kimeru songs and many chords went to waste.

“Until we devised a way of using the rhythm guitar to lead the soloists. That way we escaped the highs and the downs of their dialect. Today we are fine, especially with the improvement of the keyboard that camouflages the consonants and makes them sound like vowels,” he said.

Macharia noted that 15 years later, the Ameru community has managed to elevate its talent in the music industry to the limelight, a revolution that has even enabled them to be counted among equals on the arts scene.

Today, the community has names like Nassizu Murume, who specialises in bongo and RnB and is touted as its version of Ali Kiba and was first introduced to the music industry on the Churchill Show during its tour of Meru County.

Went viral on social media

Some of his hits are “Kamware”, “Siwezi”, “Mawazo”, “Basi”, “Kakara” and “Nikimuona”, on which he has collaborated with another rising star, Koffi Machette.

Machette is famed for his gengetone/hip hop bias with hits like “Ukathukia”, “Wooh”, “Keke”, “Machette” and “Woinano”, and has collaborated with DJ Kalonje and Dogodogo Village Boy.

He also recorded a clip, “Mbiginjii Imekulwa na Ndogi (the dog ate the Big G), which went viral on social media platforms in 2019.

Then there is KamaNu, a local artiste who says his dream is to take the Meru music industry to the next level and has started the journey through hits like “Ti Maruru”, “Kanyiri”, “Romba” and “Susana”.

For its part, the Ameru Crew formed in 2010 to rejuvenate the music industry in Meru after living a phase of history that denied it the liveliness and vibrancy of the digital world.

They came up with a project called Twendaneni, which means “let’s love one another”. Their other projects are Mwinere, Mazingira, Tiga Bauge and Baite.

It is in those projects that Surf Msanii emerged, and already premiered with hits like “Nendy”, “Tukurieni Kimiiru”, “Wanthukia” and “Tukombana”.

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