Cheza Kama Wimbo Ni Wako
E-Sir was the artist who exemplified the meaning of the Swahili proverb: Mcheza kwao hutuzwa.
Translated, it means that those who play at home will be rewarded. Despite longing for the double-ticks from my Swahili teacher for using the proverb in my Swahili essay, it never made sense to me.
Play was a common thing when I was growing up. Nowadays, playing is infused with the idea of video games, distant from the physical contact and bruised kneecaps we had when light rainy evenings marked the start of a fun-filled soccer game in the estate. We would then go back home with mud stains on our mottled hair patterns if not on our rugged insoles.
We were never rewarded.
Sometimes, especially on the weekends or during the school holidays, we’d still go out and play after being slathered with Vaseline, smoothly reflecting every inch of the sun’s rays from our glistening skin. This was the visible outlook of anyone who had bathed but it would not match the person who would walk back home just before dusk. A dust-carpeted lad would make their way home and more often than not, get a beating for not appreciating the fact that they had taken a bath not so long ago.
We were never rewarded.
The saying never meant anything to me, until E-Sir sang the now-classic song:
Cheza kama wimbo ni wako
E-Sir played with words. Not just anywhere, but in Kenya. It started in South C and spread from Kona Mbuta in Kisumu to some path somewhere in Turkana. Evidence of the generation-spanning and timeless reward is all the more present when my mother recounts the songs of the late legend.
Clear but short-lived. Almost all rewards are. Today, we’ll know who won the elections. The winners would celebrate in under a week. The losing party could mourn the loss for years on end. But the one awarded would soon feel the weight of the responsibility as fast as the award came.
One day, we’ll be celebrating Dennis Oliech for playing like an internationally acclaimed football star, netting three goals against Burkina Faso in the Africa Cup Of Nations, but we would quickly forget after the team jetted back.
True, mcheza kwao hutuzwa, but to continue getting awarded would mean continuous attempts at crafting masterful plays. That was the only way to get rewarded consistently. So E-Sir gave us another reason to award him.
Nani Mwengine Wamjua Kenyan Nzima Kama Mimi?
Soon after his music started hitting our airwaves, his brother released a couple of songs. The best among them was the club banger, Fever.
Have you ever imagined anyone use a sneeze as a chorus? To date, I have never heard such a song.
This distinct style had never been introduced in the music scene. Even more, it acquired massive acceptance when his brother, E-Sir, showed how fluent Swahili could change the rap industry. I doubt it has ever hit anyone who might have mastered the lyrics that the kind of Swahili E-Sir used in his songs would have educated the masses.
During my final year in high school, many people failed Kiswahili. Nationwide. Had E-Sir been alive, continuing to rock our radio stations with his playful use of the seductive language, I doubt we would have had a huge number of students regretting ever doing the subject.
Nani mwengine wamjua Kenya nzima kama mimi
Mwenye kushika maiki na kuwapa Kiswahili
No one.
My brother often told me how easy it was to learn this native and official language through Swahili songs. For that reason, I made the church hymn my companion. It helped. However, not everyone knows the Catholic hymn songs.
But everyone, regardless of their religion, could sing:
Jasho yatiririka
Moyo wapiga
Kila mtu
Anawika
At this point, I would like to call a Swahili teacher to assess the set of words and prove to me that they are misused or wrongly structured. Despite him being an artist, and in spite of the freedom artists have in butchering languages for the sake of art, E-Sir showed us how he could play with them.
He continued to play and urged us once more to play like we owned the song:
Cheza kama wimbo ni wako
Sababu huu wimbo ni wako.
From the same style, his brother, Habib, picked up where he left off, giving his fans something similar.
But there are never two alike. E-Sir would always remind us of that every time the song played:
Nani mwengine wamjua Kenyan nzima kama mimi?
We knew of no one. Over time, we have not conceived another. Play would explain how someone could use words in Swahili, preserve its rules, and still make hits. Hit after hit, play would be rewarded.
But I’m not done. Let me slow it down for you.
Mos, Mos, Mos,Mos, Pole Pole
Even with the rise of different styles of music decades after the death of E-Sir, his songs continue to play in hotels, clubs, concerts and bathrooms.
Immortalized from generation to generation, his influence has been persistent. Rakim, arguably one of the greatest MCs to ever shake the game, gave the meaning of timeless:
Ask the teenagers, OG’s and nasty kids,
What their definition of “classic” is :
Timeless, so age don’t count in the booth
When your flow stay submerged in the fountain of youth— Rakim
His influence has stuck with us and found a way to stay indelibly with the rising generations of different youths. Having such a background, I stuck with the play he so effortlessly showcased in his songs.
Firstly, we have to admit that his voice had a role. If Nameless had sung the same lyrics, it would not come out as smoothly and effectively as E-Sir’s. The accent and the voice are just as essential as the message.
Secondly, I became excited to see how music can be used to teach. I knew gari was a Swahili word whose plural I could extract from the E-Sir’s verse. I didn’t know that he was slowly influencing how I would approach my teaching technique.
Instruction can be associated with pedagogy. If you have never had a pedantic friend who would like to argue using facts then you need to work on your daily acquaintances. Nobody likes a know-it-all. Occasions when someone even raises their voice or asserts — Si ni mimi nakushow — spice up arguments, doubtful stances, and moments of much-needed deep inquiry.
The origin of the word, however, is a portmanteau. The first bit, paidos means child. The second bit agogos means leader. Merged, we get a child leader.
Who is a child leader?
Prefects and monitors were chosen by our class teachers in primary school. They would select some of the brightest chaps and task them with various duties, chief among them being making a list of noise makers. However, before and after exams, these students would sometimes take the role of the teacher, and lead the class in revision sessions.
It is also easier to approach a classmate when one encounters a difficult problem than reaching out to a teacher who spends tireless rounds of repeating the same topic hoping an endless rant would somehow find its way into our thick skulls. Thus, a child leader had unique attributes that placed them in a better position than a teacher.
They could understand the lessons with less effort. They could also tutor classmates because they are better approachable. Today’s meaning of the term pedagogy casts an image of a high and mighty, unapproachable, and unliked authority figure who makes it known by others how intellectually superior they are to others.
It’s sad.
Pediatrics also has the same origins. A pediatrician treats children. Borrowing from the origins of the word, the best way of instructing is through child-like behaviour. The most distinctive feature of a child, besides crying, is playing.
As our wise sages told us:
Mcheza kwao hutuzwa.
Converting monotonous drones into play-like activities is no different from instilling lifelong lessons. It becomes a ‘classic’ so age doesn’t count. I can remember the elementary song to date:
A for apple B for boy C for cat…
Y for yacht.
That last bit was the toughest one. It depended on the school you went. It could be ya-ch-t, ya-k-t, or yat. It took years for me to know the right pronunciation, but it left me with something even better — a history of my wrongs. I would one time call it ya-ch-t, and later call it ya-k-t. But eventually, learned to call it a yat.
The much that anyone would have done was laugh. They would then correct you. And when everybody sang the rhymes once more, you would wait for the letter Y and shout the loudest so you could showcase your improved understanding.
Paidos.
In remembrance, it’s how I recall we used to practice what E-Sir had instructed us to do:
Cheza kama wimbo ni wako
Sababu uu huu wimbo ni wako
Leo ni leo, asemaye kesho ni muongo
As an adult, I began toying with the idea of evolution. Reading has always been a house-instilled habit, the kind that I would continue practicing even in the absence of pressures from my mother or teachers.
On campus, I transitioned from majoring in fictional books to non-fictional ones. Philosophers such as Bertrand Russell and Karl Popper would break down concepts like Lego blocks in one chapter and in the next, expand a concept like we did when playing three sticks, a local version of the triple jump.
When I felt my ideas were ripe, I took a whole month to write a book whose ideas I had struggled with for over 8 years. The pressure came from the videos I was watching, podcasts I was listening and the books and articles I was reading. I wanted my work to be out there before all my efforts proved pointless.
I acted.
I concentrated.
I wrote.
I couldn’t wait. As E-Sir would have said:
Leo no leo, asemaye kesho ni muongo
Tomorrow never comes. It was better to act today. I couldn’t bank on the possibility that someone else would not develop something as unique as mine. Plus, there are 8 billion people on the planet. Taking away the number of children or elderly people doesn’t help. Somebody could still have the same ideas as mine.
I had to write. Without a structure. It would form along the way. Just as we never planned those football tournaments we enrolled for back when we were younger. A sketchy version of a soccer ball, made of multiple wrappings of polythene bags and sisal ropes would consume our evenings and weekends enough to instill enough confidence in us that we could win any football tournament.
The future would take care of itself as long as we took care of the present.
Leo ni leo, asemaye kesho ni muongo.
But as I wrote word after word, the child in me bubbled. And I began to play with words. This was going to be my book. If nobody was going to read it, I might as well have fun writing it.
And I did.
I had so much fun drafting it that every time I continued making edits, I would ask myself if it was me who wrote the piece of work. It was a marvelous piece, at least according to me.
E-Sir wrote songs, I wrote a book. He urged us to play like the song belonged to us. We did.
I wrote a book and continue to write articles. I wrote them as if I owned them. I played with the words, toyed with the structure, and created my castle of ideas in my steady clouds.
The response from my editor was unexpected. In retrospect, however, it was understandable.
Hamnitishi
He insisted I remove the hip-hop lines that started every chapter of my book.
Yes, I played with my work so much that I included a line from verses of hip-hop greats. Didn’t E-Sir say we play as if we owned whatever it is we were creating?
But my editor thought otherwise.
The songs that brought me up were produced inside the rental apartments of California Estate and South C. Calif Records and Ogopa Deejays. My editor’s only contact with me was through the draft I had.
In the words of Trio Mio, the other young star just as talented as E-Sir, this song rang in my mind:
Cheza kama wewe.
There it was, once again. Play. Cheza.
I put my foot down, with a firm hand — I was not going to remove this aspect of my book. It was my book after all. His advice was still helpful, as we structured it to a final piece that ‘sold out’ among my friends and friends of friends. As far as friends go, and I have many friends, my work was a ‘best-seller’.
By sticking to my play with words, I was awarded.
It turns out that mcheza kwao hutuzwa.
More than that, the legacy of E-Sir reminds us that by enjoying what we do, we can easily sing:
Hamnitishitishi
Hamnibabaishi
Maisha nayoishi
Hayanikubalii
Play can inform instruction. Its effect can be immersed in the fountain of youth. It should not be forgotten when we become adults.
So why not play?
