“The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; and that which is done is that which shall be done: and there is no new thing under the sun”
KING SOLOMON
A QUAGMIRE
The saying is that there is nothing new under the sun; and that therefore in one way or another, similar things are rebirthed and return to time later after times past. Musical and artistic influence is no exception to this and is a very good example of this in fact.
As time passes, societies often experience a period of nostalgia for past eras. These periods of nostalgia are often driven by generational shifts, where younger generations, disconnected from past trends, rediscover older styles as fresh, innovative, or authentic. Music, being deeply intertwined with personal and collective memories, tends to resurface during moments when people long for simpler or more meaningful times.
However, somewhere within it all is a quagmire to understand. That quagmire is the complexity of the history of us, the makers of music, finding and affecting us in the times we find ourselves alive, and ultimately how our individuality is expressed through the tiered identities of those realities and of us.
Let me give you an example:
I am a Ugandan. This is because I was born in Uganda to parents of Ugandan descent as they, their parents and their parents’ parents were born in Uganda. My father is a Mukiga from Kigezi in southwest Uganda. My mother is a Muganda from central Uganda. This isn’t culturally typical as tribes usually married within their tribes for all sorts of reasons. My grandparents on both sides were from the same tribes. But the thing is, because Uganda was colonised once upon a time, by the time my parents were born, systems socio-economically perpetuated favoured “the educated” and by that time, there was one path to the education that was recognised and promoted as beneficial. As such all these Ugandan tribes and cultures found themselves in the burgeoning of a cosmopoly at that time, because life wasn’t just about being to till the land that belonged to your father and his father anymore or necessarily, but to study and skill yourself to get a job and earn a living in the capitalistic era that had arrived in Uganda. The educated typically ended up in University in the capital, Kampala where I was raised after my parents met and have lived ever since.
Now, if my father’s father were a musician, in the times he lived, I imagine his art would have expressed something closer to the homogeny of cultural expression he was surrounded by. There weren’t many extrinsic influences to suggest otherwise to me that I know of. With no necessity to speak English in his time, he probably would have spoken and sang in his own language, lived and remained in Kigezi, played a bow harp and sung about things typical to his culture.
My father however, who speaks both his language as well as English because he grew up hearing his own language from living with his family in Kigezi and then eventually studied in English, presents differently. My father sings songs in his language, has a very good semblance of his culture, is also well versed with art in English (he loves hymns and Boney M), has a semblance of world history that he gained from school and from moving to Kampala, and get this, proficiently plays the guitar, an instrument originally from Spain but made popular in the 60s in the west? Yeah.
Therefore, within that quandary, how do you think I then, his daughter express? My first language is English. I can speak more German than I can speak my own language. I play the guitar and piano and my favourite artist is a band of five (now four) middle-aged American men from San Diego?
In those facts is a whole thing, yo.
I am a Ugandan. My father is a Ugandan. My grandfather was a Ugandan. However, in all those Ugandan lives, is each a very different Ugandan story being told.
To appreciate it all, is to understand the origin of that story.
Within the dilemma of globalization and post colonial hybridity today is my own regurgitation of “old refrains” in the here and now; a journey that begun expressing in an audio fixated form in 2016. When I look back on this journey of recording music and expressing to the world almost ten years later, I feel there so much to unpack, beginning with my cultural identity, the context I have always existed in from the very beginning, as is the same for us all because no one has ever been born into a vacuum of culture.
The songs I make, and sing are indeed old; whether because of the universality of their message or the progression of the chords within them. Whether Ugandan or not, humans have always metacognised and used music to express it all. What I sing is not new as there is no new thing under the sun.
By revisiting these old refrains and ask a bunch of questions, I want to continue to understand who I am and where I come from more and more, because in every way, it helps me know where I am going.
Reflecting on my artistic journey over the past decade, I’ve come to realize how deeply entangled it is with broader themes of post-colonialism, globalization, and western artistic hegemony. My work exists at the intersection of these forces, shaping my identity as an alternative artist in Uganda. Unlike the traditional path where art emerges organically from within a culture, my influences have been significantly shaped by external forces, often in subtle yet profound ways.
A LOOK IN THE MIRROR
I didn’t even notice this until about 2017. This is where this journey of understanding began.
I had just graduated from law school, and instead of doing my post graduate degree in legal practice, had decided to chase music, my primary and everlasting passion. I had the opportunity to learn and explore music in California with other musicians. In my mind, I would be right at home because music is after all, the language of my very soul, or so I thought.
While I had travelled around the world before and since I was a child, for some strange reason, this was the first time I realised I was black. Like of course I know and have always known that there are Caucasians and negroes and that yes, I was “black”; but this is the first time I felt it. Bambi, not prejudicially as is the way usually that difference is usually felt, but in a whole way entirely.
In Uganda we are all black and the same; but to be where I was at the time, was to notice that because I come from some place else, I have a culture to express and share within another through my ethnicity and origin.
I had never in my life been curious enough to explore and take pride in my own cultural story and as such, I didn’t know it. At school growing up, we all learned and spoke English and were chastised if we spoke our local languages because that apparently affected our learning of the English language. In history classes was Ugandan rebellion after rebellion being suppressed by the mighty British. The literature we were taught was European and that of the Ugandan was always weird- about corruption and colonialism and getting the white man out of the country- things from another time. The general message to me at the time that I took was that, to be typically Ugandan, was a thing of the past. The more “white” and “Western” you were, the better. This was the now and I would do just that.
While my education had a lot to do with it, that is not to say that I was bound to the conclusions it sometimes erroneously made such as this. I had enough exposure to decide and act differently but didn’t.
That expressed so much that I didn’t listen to music in Luganda. It was “local”, and you know what we Ugandans mean we say something is local, we aren’t taking about the literal definition of that in reference to an area or whatever, but that it was a bit ignoble and not “as refined” in taste. In some way, I had already been conditioned to accept and love something else, than that which was closer to my history- and I hadn’t even noticed until that trip to California.
It was salient. It was loud. It was pronounced. With everyone I met from the time I got off the plane were the questions of “Where are you from?” because I looked as I did, and “Why do you sound like that?” because I sounded as I did.
I realised, now as a young adult that, where I came from needed to be explained- it wasn’t as known and understandably not much is known about Uganda (I mean apart from Idi Amin and how anti-homosexual we apparently are), the way knowing very little about Ecuador would be typical for a Ugandan. There is no reason in particular many Ugandans have been to Ecuador, and I know that Ugandans haven’t been typically educated about it. Other questions would regard why and how I speak such “good” English and why I know about the Grammys. Don’t ask me what language the people in Ecuador speak or what their Grammy equivalent would be.
At the same time, (and this actually happened during a quiz I played during that trip), I (and many Ugandans) could name all the boroughs of New York city because guess what- O’level geography included the study of New York and the Canadian Prairies and what not, (but not Kigezi, somehow meanwhile).
When all that was finally done and it was time to get to music, I didn’t expect any of the questions to continue, but this trip, they continued in ways this time I could not answer, and almost always, especially after they had heard my music.
“I thought you said you were from Africa?”
“You have guitars in Africa?”
“Is this what Ugandan music sound like?”
“What Ugandan artists would you recommend?”
“What are they singing about?”
“Why don’t you sing in your native language?”
I kid you not, I didn’t know the answers to most of those questions. Music always sounded like the way I expressed it and that sound came from America, I guess. All my favourite musicians were from America. Wasn’t everyone’s?
Okay.
If I were to answer, what was I going to say? We all have guitars now because they are cooler than Adungus? Or that Ugandan music typically sounds loud and repetitive and that only the people who “didn’t study” have to sing in their native languages, because you see, this is what I actually believed.
No please.
I listened to “cool” artists only like Ed Sheran and the Chainsmokers.
Was I to sincerely recommend “Ice Cream” one of the biggest Ugandan songs at the time? One I could translate in its entirety anyway? I didn’t speak Luganda. Singing in Luganda was “local.” What was probably, the most unfortunate thing in all of this, was that the prejudice against the existent interpretations of my culture, and at least music at that time, extended to the bias that, because this music was not in English, it was even more embarrassingly uncouth because “ Baby ntwala nune ku Ice cream” wasn’t even about ice cream.
What was disconcerting to those that had asked these questions, and what became superlatively mortifying to me with every realisation was that I was not only disconnected from expressions that came from Ugandans and in some essence, expressions that came from “my culture”, but that a prejudice colonially and systemically assimilated into the legacy of Uganda was not only one I was embodied but was also consciously perpetuating. In which world was I living except one where my culture was hypocrisy itself?
Am I saying that I must have loved the song because it was Ugandan? No.
Am I saying that I am a sort of sell out for singing in English or liking American music? No.
I am saying that it is hypocritical to judge others for an alleged lack of understanding of themselves when I myself didn’t know who I was. In so many ways then and now, Sheebah is more deserving and empowered to call herself a Ugandan artist, than I ever was to introduce myself as one. At the very least, there was something to think about and pay attention to regarding the fact that I rejected expressions closer to home and was in no way curious or informed about them.
Think about how off I was when you realise that “Ice Cream” by Sheebah and “Watermelon Sugar” by Harry Styles are metaphors about probably the same thing. So, in that skewed mindset, what made Harry Styles’ song about the same thing “more refined” that Sheebah’s song regarding a universal sexual human experience?
Take a moment therefore to also ask yourself why you might be more eager to buy a ticket to go see an international artist coming to Uganda, than a Ugandan artist performing in your neighbourhood. Maybe you need to be curious is all, and if you aren’t at least, maybe try to understand why.
THE COLONIAL PROJECT
Yes.
As was the case in the times of Jesus and in my great-great grandfather’s time and as shall be true for my children’s children, none of us is completely free from the “struggle over geography”, as Edward Said calls it.
The thing though is, that struggle is not only about soldiers and cannons, but also about ideas and imaginings that create the cultural expressions we know.
There is indeed a cultural disruption in our times because of the legacy of colonialism in Uganda that left behind a fragmented cultural identity, where traditional forms of expression were often suppressed or distorted through the lens of western narratives.
As such it would also be safe to imagine that maybe my grandfather’s generation also had some other metaphor for sexual experiences in music and song similar to what both a Ugandan and American are singing about; and not just Lord Byron’s poems as the standard of that type of thing, because then colonialism suddenly elevated a British education studied at Oxford.
Artistic expression, historically intertwined with rituals, storytelling, and community life, was reframed for sure during the colonial era to serve more commercial, performative purposes, and yes, this was a disruption to how or why, a message was presented or not presented in a song. (It is therefore in fact more likely that such a message wasn’t fit for public ears, whether through metaphor or not). The undeniable thing though is this cultural disruption not only altered the way art was perceived then but also how, all these years later, it is distorted now, whether or not, it was passed down across generations.
When I called myself a Ugandan, I needed to be able to explain it and justify that fact was more than just having a Ugandan passport or living in Kampala.
I had never thought about this. I didn’t know how to explain it.
The colonial project, by privileging western classical forms and suppressing indigenous sounds and languages, created a rupture in the continuity of authentic Ugandan artistry. This is why my music sounded the way it did. This is why I don’t know what kind of music my grandfather enjoyed, and this is also the context within which all Ugandan artists make music and art as a reflection and interpretation of culture- Ugandan culture; in whatever form that culture has been influenced.
But it most definitely meant that I had so much more of a greater responsibility to punch out of those corners to find and define me.
So, I spent my time in California, finally curious about my Ugandan story finding that the time I find myself in is filled with characteristic post-colonial realties that need to be reverse engineered for me to understand myself and my “Ugandaness”. I love that if I went back to California, I might not have all the answers, but for sure some better responses to the questions I was asked at the time and especially how, despite what my music sounds influenced by, I am still proudly a Ugandan artist.
WHAT I HAVE LEARNED SO FAR
As I reflect on this journey, I realize that the search for my identity through music has been much more than a mere artistic pursuit—it has been a process of reclamation, a quest to understand who I am in the context of where I come from and how the world sees me. The story of my journey is not just one of melodies and rhythms, but one of rediscovery—rediscovering the old refrain of identity sung in every language and tongue. Whether in English or Luganda, the songs that run through my veins, the words that have been long silenced, and the vibrant culture that was almost put out, cannot be erased by the weight of colonialism and global influence.
To be a Ugandan artist in a world so deeply shaped by colonial histories and the push of Western narratives is such a quagmire. It’s a complex tapestry of influences—each thread pulling in different directions, each moment calling me to reconcile the Uganda of my ancestors with the globalized world I inhabit today.
My music, my expression, is shaped by these forces, and yet it is also a testament to resilience. Through every chord I strum and every lyric I write, I am forging a new path, a path that is not bound by the limitations of the past, but one that seeks to reimagine it—to rewrite the narrative of what it means to be Ugandan in this ever-changing world.
It is a fusion—a beautiful, messy, intricate blend of all that I have inherited and all that I have chosen to create.
And that, in itself, is art.
Not just an expression of sound, style or language but of history, of culture, of identity. It is a conversation that spans generations, that moves beyond borders, that speaks the universal truth of the human experience.
The songs I sing shall sound again.
Just like those I sing now sounded before.
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