A couple of months ago I posted three tweets about Zahara's truly moving and memory-evoking song, Loliwe.
Click here to watch the Loliwe video
Certainly, the memories relived in Loliwe are not just of the South African 'condition', in the heyday and latter years of apartheid (which we others, far from Southern Africa, knew little if anything about), but also of our own distinct ontologies; we, particularly, who were Children of the Railways in East Africa -- Children of EAR -- many of whose fathers all too often took the train to elsewhere and lived like bachelors, plunging the children into deep longing. What the mothers felt was of course much beyond their children's innocent imaginations.
Let me share with you, in a partially rewritten form, the main point I wanted to make in the main tweet:
We can clearly see in Loliwe that Zahara is great as a guitarist and great as a vocalist. Loliwe is for me a silky, silky mix. It ranks Zahara among Africa's top balladeers of our time
Loliwe reignites a past that many will remember in different sorts of ways, a past interwoven with childhood itself, a childhood that's woefully incomplete without the railways -- and that's at the same time as varied as the terrains traversed by the Iron Snake for over a century now.
In some sense, it was simply, historically, our fate. Just as it was the fate across the Atlantic of those in America raised in the smoky and sentimental shadows of Chattanooga ChooChoo. It was our 'networked' fate to be the Children of the Railways.
As a mode of transport, the railways came into history only in 1825-30, in Britain. Just seventy years or so later, in 1896, the construction of Uganda Railways (later Kenya-Uganda Railways, and later still EAR) began in Mombasa, in a country 'named' Kenya, after its majestic and snow-caped mountain, which was not to become officially a British colony until 1920. The rail-head reached Nairobi in 1899-1900, and in 1901 Port Florence, now Kisumu City, farther to the west, on the shores of Nam Lolwe, the great Lake Victoria.
My own father, still a bachelor, joined the railways in Nairobi in the decade before WWII. How he got himself there is a story in itself. I think the railways did keep him from serving in the Carrier Corps in Abyssinia or places, such as Burma, far farther to the east.
Read this History of the Kenya Railways
Yes, Loliwe evokes deep memories, but it has its critics (read this piece, for example)
I conclude this piece by sharing with you another of Zahara's songs, which I like very much as well.
Here it is ~ Ndiza
