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News

Nina Ogot on forging her identity and the role of music in society

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This article was written by Peter Choge and originally published by Music In Africa. The article is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial CC BY-NC licence.

Poised is the word you want to employ when describing Nina Ogot’s stage bearing. Perhaps the reason the Kenyan songstress eschews over-the-top displays and the fiery militancy of some of her contemporaries is that she has a more powerful tool at her disposal; a special gift she can deploy the instant she steps on stage.

Nina Ogot.

For many, it is the voice that soars effortlessly over auditoriums, gently caressing both body and soul. It could also be the lively arrangement, the delicate blend of strings and percussion, or the quiet activism of her work – all a product of solid musicianship built in a career spanning over a decade and distilled into three masterfully crafted albums.

Give her music a listen and you will soon discover an artist in control. There is a deliberate attempt to create a sound that is truly representative of her traditional Kenyan roots and urban upbringing. An attempt, if you will, to bottle and preserve the cultural essence that is in danger of being lost.

Whether she was thrust into it by accident or design, Nina Ogot finds herself occupying the position of the high priestess of the Kenyan Afro-acoustic movement – entertaining, educating and even chastising the faithful around the world.

So it is not surprising that the age-old debate on the indivisibility of the artist and society came up in a recent one-one the celebrated singer had with Music In Africa.

MUSIC IN AFRICA: Describe your musical journey

NINA OGOT: I would say my musical journey has been as true as it can be. This is because when I was a child, I already knew that I wanted to make music. So I started with piano lessons at the age of 11 and then shortly after that, at the age of 16, I started to get more curious about the guitar and it became my instrument of choice in my mid-20s, when I chose to take music as a profession. My band started as a trio – two guitarists and a percussionist – but now it’s grown into an eight-piece band.

Who is Nino Ogot the artist and Nina Ogot the individual?

Nina Ogot the artist and Nina Ogot the individual are exactly the same person. I try to ensure that my art reflects my essence 100% and that the people who come to watch me on stage get to know me to some degree. They will know me on a platform that is not necessarily part of my everyday life but my stories are about my everyday life. I try to present that as honestly as I can so that the audience gets the true version of me on stage.

How would you describe your music?

My style is certainly a fusion of elements of tradition and urban sounds from Kenya. Initially, it was called Afro-acoustic and the title stuck. I like modern instrumentation and modern ways of singing injected with components of my urban upbringing in Nairobi and my tradition. So I use a lot of my native Dholuo language in my lyrics. I also use Kiswahili and references from other parts of Kenya.

What do you hope to achieve through music?

If you’re a priest, you use your pulpit to indoctrinate people in a certain way, and when you’re a musician, you have the stage. This stage enables me to connect with people that I would ordinarily never interact with – people of different backgrounds, origins or even generations. So my music is a bridge. It’s a generational bridge. It’s a cultural bridge, and yes, it’s a bridge of emotions and of universes.

What is the current state of Kenyan music?

Kenyan music has certainly grown over time. If you compare the trajectory it’s taken over the past 20 or 30 years, you can see some significant progress. You can also see the role that women are playing in the industry and the fact that they are now acknowledged as peers to their male counterparts. Additionally, artists are able to earn money from their craft.

I would, however, say Kenyan music still has a long way to go because if you look at how we’re represented internationally, we are not really there yet. The systems are also still largely flawed if you consider issues like royalties collections and privacy threats.

What would you consider to be your biggest accomplishment?

I think it is hard to tell because there are so many things that we take for granted yet there are big accomplishments. There are so many challenges we face as artists that make it difficult to sustain a career in the first place. So, to be able to have a career that spans at least 13 years and to still feel hopeful about the future is a great accomplishment to me.

Who do you look up to musically?

That’s a tricky one because I’ve had a lot of influences that are not necessarily Kenyan. And what I realised is that I have to be me to find my own way in order to be a participant and a contributor to the music scene.

I have to be unique and I have to stand up for something that’s authentic. The only way I’ve found to be able to forge my own identity is to sometimes silence other people’s voices and listen to my own voice. Listen to the music that comes from me so that then I can see Nina Ogot. Not Nina trying to be Miriam Makeba.

So I look at other musicians just as samples, however great or small they are. The contribution is still significant if it’s inspirational. And so I’ve had a lot of musicians who’ve not only inspired me but have also given me the desire to be authentically me.

What are some of the challenges facing a Kenyan female artist?

When you look at a lot of platforms you see very few female artists who are playing an instrument or contributing beyond the vocals. It is because people always believe that a man who plays an instrument plays it better than a woman. I’ve been lucky enough that I sing and play instruments, but I know a lot of women who struggle being just instrumentalists. There is also the issue of family. If you want to start a family as a female artist, how do you structure a career around children and a husband and still have a solid career that doesn’t get interrupted?

Do you consider yourself an activist and what is the role of activism in Kenya music?

I certainly consider myself an activist, just not a political activist. Maybe a social activist because I use my music to instigate change to some degree. It’s true that I do have audiences that don’t always understand my lyrics but the intention is that for those who eventually get to be curious enough to want to know, I use my songs to tell stories about society and to reflect the condition of the society. This allows people to really reflect if it’s something we want to change. That is activism.

How can Kenya grow its creative industry?

I think first it’s important to establish what a creative industry is. Does it exist? Absolutely yes! So how do we harness this creativity? That is the question because we have a lot of talent out there but not much is being done to harness it. We first need to develop hubs where artists can go – places where creative talent can be identified, developed and showcased. We also need mentorship programmes to show young people what to do and how to manage their artistic careers. Then we need systems that manage talent ethically and professionally to enable artists to benefit economically from their work – not the flawed and corrupt ones currently in place.

History, News

Bella Ciao: A travelling anthem of resistance

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This article was originally written by Ananya Wilson-Bhattacharya and published by The New Arab.

Ananya Wilson-Bhattacharya explains why the revolutionary protest song, ‘Bella Ciao’ continues to play a role in global struggles today, and how it has served anti-government Gota Go Gama protests in Sri Lanka which forced the president to resign.

Earlier this summer, a video from the Sri Lankan ‘Gota Go Gama’ protests circulated online: the president Gotabaya Rajapaksa had finally resigned, and protestors were singing a Singhala version of ‘Bella Ciao’, the popular Italian song which was used in the Partisan anti-fascist resistance movement of the 1930s and 1940s. While the military violence and attacks on protestors in Sri Lanka continue, this was a clear moment of victorious celebration in the ongoing movement against the authoritarian regime.

The song – which details the singer’s awareness of their imminent death at the hands of the ‘invader’ and desire to die as a ‘partisan’ or freedom fighter – has been adapted by various anti-fascist movements globally prior to its use in the Gota Go Gama protests. In fact, the protests are part of a wider trend of anti-authoritarian resistance movements across South Asia in recent years, several of which have been characterised by new versions of ‘Bella Ciao’ in different languages.

”This cyclical, continual reproduction of ‘Bella Ciao’ across starkly contrasting yet uncannily similar contexts of protest is ultimately testament to the unifying power of protest music, as reproduced across time and space, in illuminating connections between struggles across decades, centuries and continents against a backdrop of evolving forms of capitalism.”

Symbolic image of the people’s revolution based on the series “La casa de papel”. Image by AbarcaVasti, licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license.

Anthem of struggle

Certain features of the song have held throughout its reproduction across different contexts: its undeniable catchiness, and its clear theme of political resistance, despite drastic shifts in its lyrics. The song has even found its way beyond the realm of resistance movements into mainstream television, famously featuring in the hit Spanish crime drama Money Heist.

A Hindi adaptation of the song was released around the time of the mass protests against the fascistic Citizenship Amendment Act, or CAA, introduced in India in 2019. Broadly, the CAA aims to deny Indian citizenship to (Indian) Muslims; it is widely perceived as a step towards ethnic cleansing, indicating the current escalation of Modi’s Hindu supremacist regime into full-blown fascism.

Following the popularity of ‘Wapas Jao’, the songwriter, Poojan Sahil, subsequently penned a Punjabi version retaining the same melody with new lyrics, also entitled ‘Wapas Jao’ (‘Go Back’), for the large-scale Indian farmers’ movement protesting new anti-farmer legislation introduced by Modi’s government in 2020. These farm laws, which received global coverage and were largely retracted in Autumn 2021 following the year-long mass protests, were set to adversely affect poor farmers, and are widely seen to represent the ongoing corporate takeover of agriculture in India.

Both versions of ‘Wapas Jao’ have a similar theme lyrically to ‘Bella Ciao’ – although, as Sahil clarified, the songs are not translations. The Hindi version alludes to the fascism of the Indian government through the repeated line ‘go away, o you tyrant’, explicitly locating the singer within the resistance movement, and the song as an unmistakably anti-fascist anthem.

‘Wapas Jao’ (across both versions) also moves away from the somewhat personal lyrics of ‘Bella Ciao’, which uses the singular pronoun ‘I’ throughout (in contrast to ‘we’ in ‘Wapas Jao’) and captures the fear invoked by the rise of fascism through the line ‘I feel death approaching’. By contrast, the lyrics of the Punjabi ‘Wapas Jao’ discuss the movement against the Indian government and the major companies which are profiting from the farm laws. Both versions of ‘Wapas Jao’ are thus references to the context of the original song which take its anti-fascist commentary a step further, situating themselves within a specific anti-fascist protest movement.

By pairing the original melody with a sparse acoustic guitar, these versions both highlight the timeless catchiness of ‘Bella Ciao’ as well as showing its versatility in lending itself to diverse musical styles – and languages – of different eras and locations. The case of ‘Bella Ciao’/ ‘Wapas Jao’ illustrates Walter Benjamin’s suggestion that reproduction allows the work of art ‘to come closer to whatever situation the person apprehending it is in’, and thereby ‘actualises what is reproduced’.

Interestingly, the anti-fascist or partisan ‘Bella Ciao’ is not, in fact, the original version -despite being the best-known – but is adapted from the ‘mondine’ version, which originated as a folk song sung by mainly women paddy workers (mondine) in Northern Italy in the late 19th century in protest against harsh working conditions. This agrarian context is evoked – intentionally on Sahil’s part – by the Punjabi version of ‘Wapas Jao’ centred on the farmers’ movement, which includes the lyrics ‘each grain of soil sings in chorus’.

Taking on the tyrant

Whilst the anti-fascist version of ‘Bella Ciao’ focused on resistance against ‘the invader’ as opposed to ‘the boss’ of the original version, the Punjabi ‘Wapas Jao’ evokes a new kind of invader – or ‘tyrant’ – the Indian government and the companies taking over Indian agriculture, which are being urged to ‘go back’ by agricultural workers. This version recalls the voice and perspective of the original song, in a new political, geographical, and temporal context.

Indeed, this evoking of the original version also underlines the concentration of agricultural workers in the Global South and their relative decline in the Global North during the 20th century.

Having originally been centred on workers’ experiences, and subsequently been reproduced and adapted in various contexts of anti-fascism, ‘Bella Ciao’ is once again being used to shed light on (agricultural) workers’ struggles through the Punjabi ‘Wapas Jao’.

Through both versions, meanwhile, Sahil arguably utilises the fame of ‘Bella Ciao’ as an anthem of resistance against the widely-known rise of fascism in 1930s Europe, referencing the song through reproduction as a way to emphasise the gravity of the current situation in India through implicit comparison.

This cyclical, continual reproduction of ‘Bella Ciao’ across starkly contrasting yet uncannily similar contexts of protest is ultimately testament to the unifying power of protest music, as reproduced across time and space, in illuminating connections between struggles across decades, centuries and continents against a backdrop of evolving forms of capitalism.

The Gota Go Gama protestors singing ‘Bella Ciao’ sends an affirmingly hopeful message – that the movement recognises itself as situated within a history of people’s struggles all sharing the same determination for change, from the anti-fascists in Italy to the farmers in India and everything in between and beyond.

Ananya Wilson-Bhattacharya is a writer, activist and co-editor of Red Pepper magazine, interested in arts and culture and social movements.

Follow her on Twitter: @AnanyaWilson

Cover photo by AntanO. Image licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license.

News

Local Musician Shares Her Story Of Activism

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This article was originally published by Jersey Shore Online and written by Bob Vosseller.

JACKSON, USA – Kaleigh Brendle, 19, has headed back to Villanova University and either wants to be a disability rights attorney or a musician and with her energy, she could probably do both.

The teenager hasn’t let her visual limitations stop her love of performing music but it did inspire her to fight for proper accommodations for those who are visually impaired.

Brendle, a resident of Brick, and a high school graduate from Howell Township, worked to secure appropriate accommodations for those like herself from the College Board.

She also performed at the White House with a choir and also created a choir at the age of 14 for visually impaired singers. Brendle recently performed some of her own music as well as several cover songs during a Saturday afternoon program that was sponsored by the Jackson Friends of the Library.

Prior to her library appearance she spoke to Jersey Shore Online.com about how she responded to an unfair issue and beat the odds. During her presentation she would integrate music with an appropriate song related to the chronology of her story.


Kaleigh Brendle, 19, sits at the piano, left, as her mother Heather Brendle looks on prior to a performance the teen made at the Jackson branch of the Ocean County Library. (Photo by Bob Vosseller)

“The songs supplement the story,” she said. The two stories she shared included one from 2020 which was an issue with the College Board regarding AP (advanced placement) exams. “They refused to provide blind and deaf test takers braille and other critical accommodations during the COVID-19 pandemic and other test takers and I stood up against that and ultimately won that struggle and secured the braille that we needed.”

She said Jackson Librarian Christine Mecca asked her to talk about another advocacy project she undertook a year later as part of her senior thesis. “I went to a specialized program at a high school and so they required a capstone project where you can’t just write the presentation you actually have to start to institute change about whatever you are discussing.

“I want to be a disability rights attorney and what I ultimately chose was representation of disability in children’s media.” This included situation comedies, cartoons and some Disney programs.

“I was curious because growing up I’d never seen a disabled character on any of those outside of an episode. A blind character was on a Sesame Street episode, actually, a fraction of one. Is there something to that?” Brendle pondered.

Brendle made some sad discoveries. “The visual impairment representation that is awarded has a rate of one percent right now for children’s media for disability. It doesn’t give disabled kids someone to look up to when they are watching that. One in five Americans have some kind of disability now.”

“It is a pretty large group and to see it, they are either tokenizing or vilifying,” she added. She gave an example of tokenizing as the Sesame Street episode she referenced. “Where the character was only there for a fraction of an episode as if to check off a box.”

As for as vilifying, “a lot of villains in cartoons have some sort of defect or disability and that is a really bad angle to take and a consistency that is really troubling as it casts in a kid’s mind that being different are the bad ones and the ones to look out for,” she added.

Brendle released a video on social media that explained some of her research in a basic manner. “I started a campaign called ‘Out of Sight Out of Mind’ and it definitely got some attention. Unfortunately, I couldn’t advocate for it as much as I wanted to because I had to go to college right after that but any chance I get to talk about it and bring the issue to light, I definitely do that.”

She intends to contact Nickelodeon and Disney in the future “to see what is possible because that still is an existing issue.” She noted that Sheldon in the Big Bang Theory and Young Sheldon shows representation in having “autism or asperger’s and I believe there was a character on Modern Family who has something. There is more adult oriented programming that does have representation.”

She was joined by her mother Heather Brendle for the program who provided her some tips. Her mother said she was very proud of her daughter and her bright spirit even as she fought unsurmountable odds to make positive change.

The story selections she made to punctuate her saga included the songs “Rise Up,” “That’s What Friends Are For,” “Smile,” the theme song from the animated film “Pocahontas” and “At Last.”

She was diagnosed with a condition commonly known as LCA. “It feels like I am extremely near sided when I have my very strong prescription glasses on. I don’t have any peripheral vision. I don’t have any depth perception. I can’t read print for long periods of time without getting substantial headaches.

“I have had it since birth and my brother who is totally blind has the same condition,” she added.

Her musical interest began at an early age as well. “My first memory of singing was my dad holding me up and me singing Sesame Street songs to passersby on the porch. I watched people stop and listen to me. It was one of those things that was always there. I don’t know quite how it began.

“When I watched my cartoons in the morning, I was addicted to PBS Kids which I think also fostered my love of reading too,” she said.

She noted how difficult the conditions of the COVID-19 shut down were during her senior year in high school. “I was completely remote for it and had very little contact with my peers and was exclusively in my house for 17 months and that can be really isolating for somebody. Music is how I really coped with it.”

“I am very much split on my two career interests of being an attorney and singer,” she said. She recently released an album, performed at the Algonquin Art Theater and won the Diane Turton Talent Show in 2018 where she performed a song off her album in front of 500 people.

Her first of several White House appearances with the Princeton Westminster Children’s Choir was quite memorable. “I had the honor of being the featured soloist and performing there is incredible. It is one of those things where you can’t believe it is actually happening. It is magical and we went during the Christmas holidays.

“We were performing for not only the diplomats but for their families and there were a lot of little kids and it was so, so cute,” the performer said.

Photo by Bob Vosseller

She formed the Sing for Serenity Choir “which is my pride and joy. It is an international online choir for the blind and visually impaired which I started five years ago. We have our own YouTube channel. We have members from over a dozen countries.”

“I’m creating a type of activism major at my college as there is an option to design your own major and what I am looking to create is using the legal system and using the media to advocate for positive change,” she added.

For further details about Brendle’s activism and musical journey visit her Choir for the Blind’s YouTube Channel.

Her link to the Twitter Video about her challenge with the College Board issue.

The link to the Twitter video about her Capstone Project (Disability Representation in Children’s Media).