By GILBERT MWIJUKE

More by this Author

In 2014, Kenneth Nahabwe, a teacher-cum-singer, conceptualised the “Tales of Kigezi” show, which offers organic rhythms from southwestern Uganda.

He describes his music as Afroclassic — a fusion of folk and modern music such as Amapiano.

“The sound and rhythm are typically traditional music from Kigezi (southwestern Uganda), but I mainly apply modern instrumentation when I am recording in the studio. But when I am performing live on stage, I use both modern and traditional musical instruments,” he says.

Airplay on radio

But venturing into traditional music in Uganda comes with a lot of challenges, including low pay for performances and lack of airplay on radio stations.

Read: Ugandan sounds rock the show on World Music Day

“At first, I wanted to delve into the more popular genres that are played regularly on local radios, but I decided that it was better to do something unique. I was motivated to venture into folk music because of the rich culture of my land, which I wanted to share with the world,” says Nahabwe, who hails from Kabale in western Uganda.

“Most of the people who stream my music on Spotify are in countries such as Japan, Germany, Norway, and the United Kingdom. I think this is because people in those countries still appreciate their folk music,” he says.

Outside Kampala, Nahabwe has performed in Nairobi, Kigali, Bujumbura, and Kinshasa.

“I think Ugandans appreciate traditional music, but the problem is that it’s in short supply and we have also not promoted it enough,” he says.

According to Brian Obara, another traditional musician, this style of music has not caught on because local media channels look at it as unappealing to their audiences.

As an artiste, he says he chose to take the traditional music route because he was born into a family that was always performing traditional music.

“My father played the Adungu (a stringed musical instrument of the Alur people in Northern Uganda) and most of my family members performed traditional dances. So for me I just inherited traditional music,” he says.

Even though he is adept at playing the Adungu and other traditional music instruments, he also enlisted at the Africa Institute of Music where he honed his skills at playing the guitar – the only modern instrument he plays.

Like Nahabwe, Obara also says that his music is mainly streamed on Spotify by foreigners and his most memorable performance was also abroad.

Read: Uganda celebrates promoters of cultural heritage

He recalls a time when he was invited by the Uganda Tourism Board to perform at a tourism expo that was organized by the embassy in Russia where the Russians showed a lot of interest in his music because of its “uniqueness”.

Uganda’s traditional music lifespan seems to have been cut short by the introduction of western styles in Uganda in the 1990s when musicians like Steve Jean, Peter Ssematimba, Ragga Dee, Jose Chameleone, Emperor Orlando, and Menton Summer, among others, started doing music that borrowed heavily from western styles.

When the first FM radio stations (Capital FM and Radio Sanyu) opened in Uganda in the early 1990s, it’s this kind of music thay started playing mostly at the expense of the country’s traditional music that used to be played frequently by the state-owned Radio Uganda, then the only radio station in the country.