Chemirocha

The story

During World War II English Christian missionaries visited the Kipsigis people of the Great Rift Valley of Kenya, bringing a wind-up gramophone and records of the American country singer Jimmie Rodgers. The Kipsigis took his music into their own musical culture. "Chemirocha" was their way of saying his name, and they imagined him as a being half man and half antelope; the word also came to mean, among other things, something strange and new.

In 1950 the ethnomusicologist Hugh Tracey came to the region, where he was helping his brother on a tobacco farm, and travelled with a reel-to-reel recorder to make field recordings of African songs. In the town of Kapkatet the district chief, Arapsang, gathered singers for him, and Tracey recorded three songs that he titled "Chemirocha I", "Chemirocha II" and "Chemirocha III". The third was sung by girls with high voices as they danced, to a stringed instrument called the kibugandet, and was credited to "Chemutoi Ketienya with Kipsigis girls"; it tells of the joy Chemirocha's music brought the village. The first two, sung by men, express the Kipsigis' love for their land and their grief that colonization had taken it. Tracey misread the place of Rodgers' music among the Kipsigis as a kind of cargo cult.

In 1954 Tracey founded the International Library of African Music to keep the 40,000 recordings he made among many peoples, and he released "Chemirocha III" on his 1972 album The Music of Africa: Musical Instruments 1: Strings. After his death in 1977 his son Andrew Tracey led the library until 2005. The curator who followed, Diane Thram, began digitising the collection and worked with the label Ketebul Music to take the recordings back to the villages where they were made.

In 2014 the library returned to Kapkatet with the digitised songs. In 2015 the team found Cheriyot Arap Kuri, one of the singers of "Chemirocha I", who said that at the time he had not known what Tracey was doing and that they sang to entertain him. Villagers explained the word as "slow, nice music", and the name Jimmie as a term for a tough man. Josiah, son of chief Arapsang, explained the picture of Rodgers as part animal by the colonial government's mistreatment of the Kipsigis, who came to see its people as "man-eaters".

What it says

"Chemirocha III" is a playful dance song in praise of the music of a strange, half-human figure from abroad; "Chemirocha I" and "II" are men's songs of love for the Kipsigis homeland and sorrow at its loss under colonial rule.

The words

The words of this song are still in copyright, so they are not printed here. “What it says” above gives their theme in our own words, and the performance below lets you hear them.