Publications

ABSTRACTIn this article politics is argued to be an important driver of the practice of codeswitching in the kinds of texts — like popular music texts — that are produced for extensive circulation within the African post-colony. The argument is anchored in a discourse analysis of the Kenyan hip-hop track ‘Otongolo Tyme’ by Poxi Presha. There is heavy code-switching both in the verbal and the musical components of ‘Otongolo Tyme’. By closely examining the code-switching in the track and reading it in context the article demonstrates that the code-switching in ‘Otongolo Tyme’ was imbricated in the politics of tribe that dominated public life in Kenya at the close of the twentieth century. This article ultimately demonstrates that the extension of cultures and of the identities tied to them that results from the interaction of different languages in a sustained manner over extended periods of time does not automatically translate into a modification in the relationship among the cultures in contact. Indeed, the case proved by the code-switching in ‘Otongolo Tyme’ is that in the tribalised Kenya of the 1990s new ideas were deliberately deployed to uphold the notions of difference that defined the relationship among the country’s different ethnic groups.