Princess Julie: A symbol of official neglect of our artistes

Does the song Dunia Mbaya ring a bell? Recall Kenya of the late 1990s when a monster-disease called ‘ayaki’ was sorrowfully harvesting human beings on the shores of Lake Victoria. Aids was literally ‘looting’ the bodies of the victims it had conquered in the mid-1980s and storing them in graveyards. Which was what the name ‘ayaki’ was meant to capture: ‘I loot you’.

Dunia Mbaya became a call to national awareness, won the author Sh100,000 and a Mercedes Benz during the 1999 Kisima Awards, and effectively catapulted songbird Princess Julie to national fame. Julie says she later produced 41 other albums. And then she quit music. Do you have any idea where ‘Alili Nyar Jo-Gina’ (Alili Daughter of Gina People) is today? Mr Benson Wanjau Karira (Mzee Ojwang’) of KBC’s Vitimbi fame might be able to tell you:

A tiny, dusty, lonely centre called Bondo Nyironge is situated barely five kilometres south of Migori town. It takes you less than 20 minutes aboard a boda boda to reach the centre in Suna West Constituency.

Diva of The Nile

Do that one evening on March 7, 2015.

As you leave the road to Muhuru Bay and branch left, towards Corner Ka-Ababu, you see two people bending at the bottom of the steep slope, scooping something from the dusty road.The female passenger is visibly angry. The motorcycle has jumped on a bump and burst her sack of maize. Other travellers trample the seeds.

You spoke with Princess Julie on phone the day before, but now you cannot reach her. A passer-by in Bondo Nyironge tells you that Alili is at the shops. You search. You are about to turn when your eyes catch someone whose skin is lighter than the rest. The woman seated on a stool looks deeply bored with life. Her right arm swats a fly, which tries to perch on the familiar face.

The nearby posho mill belches smoke. The noise is deafening.

You introduce yourself. Julie suddenly remembers. She genuinely forgot. Indeed, she gives you a vulnerable smile, like a thrown wrestler rising from the dust where the competitor hurled him. In the case of Julie – and like Mzee Ojwang’ recently, even Fundi Konde, Daudi Kabaka, Hamisi Temo, and Jacob William Maunda – that competitor is cultural life in a country where culture counts for nothing.

The once famous songbird rises from her stool. Princess Julie is tall and strong. You reason that, if this is how she looks now, when all her fortunes have gone with the wind, then in her heyday Julie must have been a human frame – a ‘Diva of the Nile’ – no one could have blamed you for looking at her twice over.

She talks fast. A million things trouble her.

Collapsed and died

“It is my tobacco”, she says. “I harvested and delivered to the buyers under someone’s account. I am waiting here for that man to bring me the money. I do not know if he will come”.

You sympathise with Julie. She tells you why you could not reach her on her mobile phone, pleading sadly as she leads you home: “I have no phone. The thing I have dies all the time. I borrow from friends when I want to call.”

There is a small, lonely house beside the road. Two girls and a lone dog stand near it, the orphans she takes care of. The two small rooms is where Princess Julie lives – a Kenyan music star of national fame – on half an acre of land she acquired in 2011.

She bought the land in Bondo Nyironge because the centre is in Suna, and her late husband came from the Jo-Suna clan.

“Do not laugh at me”, she jokes. “I tried. Look there”. There is a pile of iron sheets up the roof. She stands at the door and points outside. “And those bricks also.”

In October 2014, the Music Copyright Society of Kenya (MCSK) invited veteran musicians to Mashujaa Day, and they were rewarded with Sh50,000 each. Alili used the money to buy bricks and iron sheets. But for a lonely woman who can hardly tell where her next meal will come from, the dream of building a proper house mocks Julie in the face.

When Nyatike Centre was still ‘Macalder Mines’ for very rich gold, tiny Lillian Auma walked to nursery school at that same place, then also known as ‘Majengo’, because of the government houses meant for civil servants. That was before 1978.

In 1979, they moved to Gina, in today’s Homa Bay County. She joined Gina Primary School. The family returned to Nyatike in 1980, and Julie went to Class Two at nearby God Kwach Primary School.The wind of fate then blew her south-west to Amoyo, near Othoch Rakuom, on your way to Muhuru Bay. That was where she sat her examinations in 1985.

Then followed the years of poverty and wandering.

She found herself in Mombasa with the late Prince Julie, the gifted guitarist who had played benga music with DO Misiani. Prince Julie had formed his own band in 1980, Julie Boys Band, and when he married Alili in 1988, the wife became a band member. In Nairobi, the band performed at Migosi Bar in Kayole.

The famous Dunia Mbaya came out in December, 1996. In October 1997, the band was performing at Kisumu’s Kenyatta Sports Centre one Sunday when things went wrong.

“My husband started sweating on the stage”, she recalls. “The following Friday he collapsed and died.”

The singer fears her two photo albums. They bring tears to her eyes.

“I stopped singing in 2011. I joined the church. The Government did not want to support us. The singers were also divided. After my husband’s death, I formed my own Princess Julie Production Studios in Nairobi. We ran from 1997 to 1998, and collapsed because of piracy. Producing an album cost between Sh100,000 and Sh150,000. We could not make even a quarter of that money.”

In 2000, former Prime Minister Raila Odinga arranged for her to tour Europe with support from Western Union.

“White people respect their copyright laws like God,” she ruefully observes. “They never pirate music. Their musicians have pin numbers, which you must log in to buy the music. I see drug traffickers being charged in court here. But a music pirate will never be taken to court in Kenya, even one hundred years after my death.”

Julie tells you that MCSK is innocent: “I get Sh3,000 from them every year. It is the Government that fails MCSK by not punishing pirates. Younger musicians despise us. Politicians exploit us because they know we are divided.”

Two orphans

You flee back to Migori town that evening. What rings in your mind is how long it will take Kenyan artistes to form an association – even a Sacco – to safeguard members’ interests; why singers like Julie did not have good managers; why Kenya’s younger singers still think they will never age – that their fate will not one day follow the same tragic path as Mzee Ojwang’ and Princess Julie.

It is darkening. You flee past the place where the maize sack had burst. You discover that the devil has licked with his tongue all the pictures you took. The following morning, on March 8, you rush to Bondo Nyironge at 7a.m. You see weaver birds feasting on yesterday’s dusty maize seeds. The two orphans tell you that Julie has gone to church in Migori (she must have left at 6a.m).

You turn, raise dust.The few birds on the maize flutter away. The seeds are nearly cleared. In front of the church in Migori Town, Princess Julie stands straight as you take the photo.

“Perhaps very soon I will be releasing gospel songs”, she hopelessly tells you, smiling...