ABSTRACT

This paper reads the popular song “Khandpaka” by the Kenyan music group Awillo Mike and Ja-Mnazi Afrika (2009) as a rhetorical act that argued for the inclusion of ethnicity, rather than its exclusion, in the imagination of the nation in the Kenya of the first decade of the twenty-first century. The paper’s focus is on the ironical presentation of a humorous story in “Khandpaka.” The amusing narrative in “Khandpaka” – the song title is the English word “handbag,” pronounced with a Kenyan African first language influenced accent – is told by a narrator who recounts the day he took his wife on a sightseeing tour of Nairobi on what was her first visit to the Kenyan capital city. The paper shows that the narrative is a conflicted attempt by an unreliable narrator to imagine a Kenyan nation by suppressing ethnicity. “Khandpaka” is thus read to make its argument by drawing attention to the “limitations” of the narrator’s attempt to exclude ethnicity from the imagination of the Kenyan nation. The examination of and reflection on this narrative in “Khandpaka” reiterates the value of narrative research and the role of popular music in Kenyan society and politics.

摘要

本文将肯尼亚音乐团体Awillo Mike和Ja-Mnazi Afrika（2009）的流行歌曲“ Khandpaka”读为一种夸夸其谈的行为，主张在肯尼亚国家的想象中包含种族，而不是排斥种族在二十一世纪的前十年。本文的重点是讽刺性地介绍“ Khandpaka”中的幽默故事。讲述人讲述了“ Khandpaka”中有趣的叙述-歌曲名称是英文单词“ handbag”，发音是肯尼亚非洲第一语言所影响的重音。叙述者讲述了他带他的妻子在内罗毕观光游的那天是她第一次访问肯尼亚首都。本文表明，这种叙述是一个不可靠的叙述者通过压制种族来想象肯尼亚国家的一种有冲突的尝试。因此，“ Khandpaka”被认为引起叙述者试图将种族从肯尼亚民族的想象中排除出去的尝试的“局限性”而引起争议。对“ Khandpaka”中这一叙事的审视和反思，重申了叙事研究的价值以及流行音乐在肯尼亚社会和政治中的作用。