EDMONTON, CANADA – World beat is a two-way street. So to speak. While countless North American musicians are busy copping the vibrant rhythms and joyful melodies of Africa while wearing natty fezzes in exotically decorated rec rooms, African teenagers are emulating 50 Cent and Kanye West. This is a good example of “coming full circle.”
Heading up the African Guitar Summit at the Winspear Centre tonight, Vancouver’s Alpha Yaya Diallo recently visited his former home in Guinea in West Africa. He reports, “There’s a new generation now that wants to do everything. Some of them are moving in different directions, showbiz, thinking what’s going to make them more popular, and over-producing or using a lot of electronic, computerized music. There’s a lot of things going on in Africa at this point. It’s the same with America. What you listen to today is quite different than what you used to listen to.”
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NAIROBI, KENYA — Sam Gonza Wainaina, who died of a heart attack on Sunday December 18 aged 53 and was buried at Kanyariri village in the Kikuyu division of Kiambu district on Friday December 24, 2005, had spent the past 30 years plying the precarious trade of a freelance journalist in Africa. He wrote for the Daily Nation as Sam Wainaina and as Sam Gonza for Executive (a business monthly where I worked from 1989-98) as well as various Western publications, including the Christian Science Monitor.
Many people have spent 30 and more years at their chosen trade and nobody has found anything remarkable in that; even in journalism, the better Western journalists end up more or less their own masters after a decade or two of writing, and tend to have at least one book in print selling reasonably well. This is true whether they work in London or Nairobi. I know of at least half a dozen journalists who, having spent time as Nairobi-based Africa stringers for international news agencies or big UK, US or European papers, have written well-received books - one or two of which, it must be said, are both accurate and readable.
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