Tongue twister:
Orao-orao- luor-oliel; Oliel- Oliel-luor-orao. But today we will deal with Adoyo's rhymes and reason poem:
An osekawa nimetoka soko/ Oloko nyinga mwasi kitoko.
Cultured and well brought up the Luo way, Adoyo was born Judith Adoyo in Sakwa Kapiyo. Sakwa Kapiyo is ten minutes drive from Bondo (Kenya) town on the way to Usenge on the Kisumu-Usenge Road. I like this drive from Kisumu. There is the relaxation you get especially driving in late afternoon looking at the sunset hanging over the lake.
I am not a geologist but you get the feeling this was the flat basement of the lake millions of years ago. It is an easy feeling on this drive. Maybe that is why Adoyo sings the easy drive songs. After 10 minutes from Bondo (Kenya) town you branch left towards the Kapiyo camp as if heading to the lake. After by passing the camp of the irrigation infrastructure funded by the INGO German Agro Action in mid 1980s you are now in Kapiyo. To get to the where the pumps meet the lake water, you must go through and skip across the hippo fence.
Don’t get confused. A hippo fence is not a physical structure sticking above the ground. These are just man-made shallow trenches that rao (hippos) with their tiny, short limbs fear to step over. Their sumo size belly will touch the ridges of the trench and render their limps useless like a vehicle stuck on a deep mud. Hippos fear such uneven ground. No, let us put it correctly. Hippos smell such uneven grounds and avoid them. Hence the term hippo fence. All this is poetically retold in the Luo tongue twister
Orao-orao- luor-oliel;
Oliel- Oliel-luor-orao.
Try repeating that 10 times and win a prize of ONE LUO jersey from me. The tongue twister was an ancient advice to any youngling confronted by a hippo to run to the nearest anthill or mound off the ground. The hippo will naturally sense and smell the uneven ascending or descending ground. It will immediately stop and retreat very fast. I told you Adoyo is a cultured freak. Don’t take my words for it. Just listen to her song of oloko nyinga mwasi kitoko. The way the words slither out of her body is the way she slithers in and out of Luo culture.
The theme of the song is based on market day. Anybody who is anybody in Luo ways of life knows the role of market day in a Luo life. It permeated a Luo life especially a young woman of her age in many ways. And when Adoyo scene locator picked the market as the theme she did it just right. Why so? Because the market trip used to mark the commencement of a prospective marriage meet and the end when the girl is “pulled” in the Luo 4-part wedding (these days compressed into one). You can get this clearly in the lyrics line:
An osekawa nimetoka soko/
Oloko nyinga mwasi kitoko.
Every word here is double edged and has double meaning. Osekawa (I have been taken) can also mean ose ywaya (I have been wedded). Nimetoka soko could mean coming from the market or coming off the market. Soko could mean market in Swahili (for available ladies) or soko the source of drinking water where clean untainted water springs from. Oloko nyinga could be simply additional nickname or change of marital status. The beautiful thing is that we end up in the same meaning where she wants all of us to end.
The name Adoyo is the equivalent of spring in dholuo. Some people confuse it with summer but summer born is Nyaoro. Not even Akeyo. This is the name given to a child born during the doyo (weeding) season. I have always favoured the name Adoyo. I always melt at the name Adoyo. Not for any sentimental reasons that you want to imagine. You see the other favoured seasons are Akeyo for children born during harvesting. Many people from the tropics to the Mediterranean and in fact all over the world prefer ceres or the period during harvest (Like Ceres the Greek God of harvest). The theme is roman red for cereals. The wine is red. This when food is plenty, wine and local brew is in plenty. The weather is warm and nice. In Luo land elaborate marital rituals like omo wer, duoko dhako etc are held. So is Nyombo and he rest. My favourite period is the spring or weeding. Hence the preference for Adoyo.
Why would I choose Adoyo instead of the plentiful Akeyo. During this period there is a lot of foodstuffs that come by as an act of God. It is like God is intervening to take us to harvest time. There are soft green shoots of vegetables like, boo, mtoo, nera mtoo, akeyo susa etc. Also there is natural mushrooms like megre, oruka, odielo etc. Purely an act of God. There is also ng’wen, of Agoro, Riwo, omonge, oyala. There is the quick ripening ng’or (chick peas). Don’t confuse it with ong’ora though they have the same derivative and one came from the other. Purely an act of God. To cap it all this is the spawning period for fish. All the fish on Lake Victoria head to the Gulf of Kisumu and its rivers of Nzoia, Kuja, Migori to spawn. Hence the claim by Uganda that Kenya can have that “shitty” rock of Migingo islands but the fish belongs to Uganda, (with or without passports and visas).
The white man was shrewd in dividing up the lake between Kenya, Uganda and Tanganyika, they gave Kenya a token that was smaller than some of the inland lakes. To the naked eye, Kenya where they wanted to stay holed got a small portion of the massive fresh water lake. However I am reliably told all the fish on the lake head to the gulf in Kenya to breed and there fore supply the densely populated Luos with nutritious protein leading to population explosion. And benefitting from this laden protein are lake side people like Adoyo the ONE LUO project star.
Adoyo’s fulsome frame is easy on the eye, like fish harvested in April rainy doyo days. If you are familiar with the anatomy of Lake Victoria fish, I would say she has the anatomy of lake salmon and ninge. Ninge resembles mackerel. Female beauty is associated with ninge and if a woman was extremely attractive body they would call her tong ningu. It’s a rare superlative these days. Adoyo denies tong ningu has nothing to do with “mwasi kitoko”. Well, if she says so.
Adoyo says that her “friend” in the song lyrics has changed her name to mwasi Kitoko in the lyrics. I am reliably told by a lingala speaker that mwasi kitoko means a voluptuous woman which has the cultured equivalent in ancient dholuo of tong ningu (the roe of ningu). What a stupendous nick name! But those are not my words. They are her words that I am writing about.
Adoyo denies that those are just lyrics. She even denies they are not from her association with Congolese bands. What she cannot deny is that in the eastern side of DRC there is a district called Bondo (DRC) and they are Luo speakers. What’s is more? The clans in this locality like Nyibinya, Magoslo, Nyasmwa, Okanga/Kanga, Matar are also ancestral names in Bondo of Kenya. There is even Uyoma now called Kisangani. So Adoyo has some fresh defending of the lyrics as purely a work of fiction. The case is not yet closed.
How did Adoyo end up in ONE LUO project. To get that we must find out who the real Adoyo is.
In the beginning
Judith Adoyo Afrique completed her KACE exams in 2019. From the outright she knew that she did not want to confine herself to the boundaries of Kenya. Her stage name says it all. In school she had no such boundaries by parents. She freely moved into music. Her upbringing in Sakwa, Bondo (K) county did not limit her. This has made her be very grounded in Luo way of life. She is a fluent dholuo speaker and does not mix dholuo when speaking serious stuff.
Adoyo’s career started in earnest in 2022 in Nairobi. She later moved to Kisumu accompanying Congolese bands to do cover songs of household songs of Mpongo Love, Mbilia Bel, Tshala Muana, Faya Tess.
In late 2022 she was in and out of the country doing all sorts of tours. She did a lot of Nyatiti while on tour. Her first stop was Nepal in Asia. Here Adoyo had a series of regular performances for 1 month. Nyatiti was fresher to the listeners more than the normal pop music in Kenya. Her visit to Nepal was at the invitation of friends made of fellow artists.
After coming back to Kenya and recharging her batteries, she visited Kampala, Uganda. Her visit to Kampala was at the invitation of popstar and Uganda household name Eddy Kenza.
When Adoyo came back to Kenya she kept on working the clubs and joints with bands.
2023 saw Adoyo produce her first EP of recorded music. It was a busy year professionally because she also participated in an event in Arusha Tanzania at the Festival of African Arts and Culture(FESTAC) as an actor and a solo musician ( Nyatiti). Doubling the roles was a daunting task. However Adoyo says the preparation is more energy sapping than the theatre performance especially in the acting.
Challenges
Adoyo concedes that there are challenges for male and female musicians equally. Being taken advantage and being abused financially, emotionally is the order of the day. However Adoyo thinks that there are things that as artists must put in place themselves.
“The music industry is like a farm. “Adoyo says in plain dholuo. To cultivate it must be cleared of bushes and shrubs. It is like verse 39 of John chapter 11 when Jesus was on hand to resurrect Lazarus. “But first remove the stone slab yourself”, Jesus told Lazarus relatives and mourners.
The artists themselves must be aware of the business environment. The bulk of the artists are still living the music industry like it was a hundred years ago, just a wasteful past time. For example they have no awareness that they are competing against musicians from all over the world. They risk being swallowed the way some sports like football have been swallowed by English premier league. Secondly most artists have no idea that like any business it is always not a matter of overnight success.
Of these challenges is the education of the artists so that they know their rights as artists and which part of the law is there for them as an enabler and protector. Lack of this awareness makes it very difficult to protect a young musician from signing away all their rights.
On pervasion that exists in the industry, artists must wake to the reality that nothing comes for free. Anytime they are offered something for free, they must know that it is a trap. Freebies and favours are a recipe to abuse.
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