Kipchamba Arap Tapotuk’s Music: Oral Narratives, (Hi)story and Culture of the Kalenjin People

Abstract

Focusing on the Koilong’eet Band, this paper is an interrogation of how the selected songs by Kipchamba Arap Tapotuk incorporate Kalenjin oral techniques to create a space for narrating the past and the culture of the Kalenjin people. By conducting its analysis from the songs that sing the story through the folkloric songs to those that either present history as a story or story as history, this paper concludes by examining Kipchamba’s presentation of the dialectics of relations between the European way of life and the Kalenjin’s indigenous lifestyle. The choice of songs is informed by how they serve as a case study in demonstrating the paper’s arguments that they use orality to narrate the story, history and the culture of the Kalenjin ethnic group. Drawing on Vernon K. Robbins’s concept of socio-rhetorical criticism that argues for how the cultural and social framework of the original author affects the meaning of words, this paper examines the distinctiveness of this folkloric music in order to determine how these collections have proven to be the only Kalenjin classical music that has surmounted time, age, religion and even gender.