Jua Cali and Enika in a Nostalgic Call, "Niimbie"

Play Niimbie {Video}

[Kenya + Tanzania]

There is a song I would like you to hear, and whose video I would like you to watch. It is Niimbie (meaning "Sing for me"). I didn't even know it existed until three or so weeks ago! And I'm surprised that it's been around as long as it has without my being "aware" -- despite the fact that Jua Cali is a household name in his country (Kenya), certainly among his age-mates (whom we, lots of us, live with). It is a lovely production, and the producer's intent was clearly to make it as genuinely as possible a period piece. Jua Cali proves himself a pretty good rapper here. He's really on a roll.

Niimbie is, at root, a nostalgic and truly moving story-telling, a remembrance of the singers' more formative years -- though with accent on Jua Cali's. The feelings expressed are not to be spied on the singers' faces, but rather in the words that they put forth -- with puzzling 'religious' conviction, even. They are in the tunes as well, which we hear. 

That the beat is suggestive of something that older folks more clearly remember from a past more distant than Jua Cali and Enika really can, is no matter here. It is really not so surprising when you dig into it that this is indeed a story of the difficulties.Niimbie is a truth-telling. The story starts, coincidentally, in Orwell's 1984 for these millennial types who, as a cohort, insist that even events recorded just one year before their birth are plainly too "too long ago". Perhaps all generations think the same way. Niimbie is, regardless, a her/history. First recorded as audio in 2009, it 'dropped' as music video only in 2010 or thereabouts.

Enika's voice in Niimbie is pure gold. It is nimble and deeply evocative. It carries us along with her in this return to a past life of millennial pain -- relived now only so, perhaps, it can be communally exorcised after all these years. As she sings in the song's more lyrical lines: 

"Tuli jikaza-a,
Mwishowe tukaweza.
Tuli sumbuka-a,
Mwishowe tukapenya."

[We hustled,
In the end we did it.
We suffered,
In the end we broke through.]

"Pote tunaenda,
Wote watupenda."

[Everywhere we go (now),
Everyone loves us.]

In 2009 and 2010, though, change (or material success) was not happening quite as expected, or as narrated, or as it could have. In many respects, that was pre-history, but one they remember without having it told to them by others. It is only in 2016 that serious progress appears to have begun in doing justice to Kenyan artistes, but the details and end-results are another story in themselves.

In "a word," then, Niimbie is delightful rap wrapped in melodic vibes of a kind. That's the form. The content is this living history told and retold by the very same masufferers (as one Ruto would say) who lived it -- under our very noses, and in our shadows, so to speak.

So, who's Enika! We've been hearing a fair amount about Jua Cali on various Kenyan media, but who, and where, is Enika? What ever happened to her? It so happens that she is in fact a Tanzanian songstress. I got to know that only yesterday. And I've also come to know that Niimbie was not her first shot at fame, nor her last. Still, from what one knows about the current scene in Tanzania, and despite references I have just seen about her subsequent performances, this once-rising star has ostensibly dimmed with time. Can she make a glorious come-back?

READ: A brief on Enika

READ: A bio of Jua Cali

UPDATE: New YouTube video link to Niimbie inserted on July 27, 2020