Congolese Music and the Kenyan Nation, 1963–1993

This paper is an intervention in the discussion on the making of the Kenyan nation. The interest is in the role of popular music, and the focus is on Congolese music. The notion, comprehensively explained and illustrated by Moorman (Citation2008), that music can (help) forge a nation is used as the theoretical illuminating torch in the exploration of information mainly mined from back copies of one of Kenya’s two main national newspapers, the Nation (founded 1958). Congolese music has been popularly embraced by Kenyans regardless of their ethnicity since the early 1960s. It was, for all intents and purposes, made a sound of the nation by both its country-wide success and its insertion into discourses of the nation in the country – and this despite the fact that the language it is mostly sung in, Lingala, is not spoken in Kenya, and the music’s makers are not Kenyan citizens. The appropriation of Congolese music in Kenya is read to point to a cosmopolitan understanding of the nation.