Photo: Bandcamp
Kampire Bahana was born in Kenya, grew up in Zambia, and is now based in Kampala, the capital city of Uganda. She’s better known as DJ Kampire, gaining an international reputation for sets of forward-thinking club music from East Africa.
But a new release on the British record label Strut finds her avoiding the present entirely, in favour of music from her childhood. Specifically music from the 80s and 90s that her parents used to play at family get-togethers.
She’s said at the time, as a child forced to dance, she disliked these tunes, but has since grown to love them.
The compilation is called A Dancefloor in Ndola, referencing the town Kampire grew up in.
In notes accompanying the release, she said “It is important for me to continually reference Africa’s own musical history,” saying she references it in her sets, and given the personal nature of this collection, and the scarcity of info on some of its artists, I assume the tracks have been taken directly from her records.
Liner notes to the album run through its genres, including “Congolese rumba and soukous, 1980s township bubblegum and Zambian kalindula”.
The deeper you dig into these, the more they point to other African genres, and the traditional modes they developed from. They also cover a huge part of the continent, with artists from the Congo like Zaire All Stars and Meta Beya, and South Africa represented by acts like The Gaza Sisters, who were popular enough in the 1980s to wind up on the Paul Simon album Graceland.
Kampire says, “There are styles of music on the compilation which are often considered unsophisticated from rural areas,” going on to highlight their importance to her and other contemporary African artists.
One track sporting a distinctly electronic gloss is ‘Naughty Boy’, by V-Mash. She’s better known as Vinolia Mashego, a South African actress, TV host, and MC most active in the 1990s. There’s a bit of novelty to the song that makes it a standout, persistent synth bass, male and female backing vocals, and occasional interjections from V-Mash herself.
Like releases on Soundway and Analog Africa, much of Strut’s catalogue is musical tourism and research project in one. The same applies to A Dancefloor in Ndola…if you care to delve deeper, that is. To most it’ll just be a really fun listen.
What distinguishes it is the personal touch of its creator, who has assembled it with the same care that goes into her DJ sets. The dancefloor Kampire is referencing is her childhood home in Ndola. The people dancing are a new generation of artists.
