MUSIC (Kenya): Here's H_ART THE BAND's Ode to Beauty and Love ~ "Nikikutazama"

Nikikutazama, a Kiswahili phrase for "when I look at you", has an undeniable happiness-inducing beat about it. The artistes, likewise, have a happy, calm and collected, comedic mien. Truly infectious.

A few months ago I was at a Kenyan wedding in Nairobi where the chorus of this anthem of a song was cheerfully and naughtily 'misread' by the MC, a well-known comedian, as: "O Aoko O, O Aokoo..." 

Aoko, it so happens, is a girl's name. In DhoLuo it means, as I reckon, "Girl from the Outside". And on that fine (sunny, sunny) Saturday aft, when matrimony happily joined two ethnic identities, it was promptly added to the bride's name -- a Samburu beauty (with a name that seems to trace back to the era of the pyramids) getting married to a fine Luo groom. 


I don't think that Aoko features in the extant Samburu dictionary, or vocabulary. Perhaps it will in the distance. But no matter. Everyone was so much the happier for that union on that wonderful day. Me and mine certainly were.

Nikikutazama is an ode to beauty. And to Love.

Click here to watch the song's video clip