Living off the Stony Farm: Address and Diasporic Consciousness in “Shamba la Mawe” by Awilo Mike

Abstract

This article reads diasporic consciousness in the song “Shamba la Mawe” by the Kenyan artiste, Awilo Mike. It takes as its entry point for the reading the fact that Peter, the speaker in the song's lyrics, a Kenyan migrant in Europe, addresses two groups of Kenyans separately and together. The first of the two groups lives in Kenya, the second lives in Europe. The notion that forms of address may reveal information about the person of the addressor is relied on to shepherd the scrutiny of Peter's linguistic reference to his collocutors and the languages he uses in addressing the collocutors into a decoding of his diasporic consciousness. The focus of the analysis is thus on the addressing individual, the speaker, who presents himself as belonging to the two groups that he addresses. Information relating to the career of Awilo Mike is mobilized to conflate the character Peter's utterance and the song “Shamba la Mawe”, which it is part of.