Kenyan DJs in diaspora keep the party going amid curfews. PHOTO | COURTESY
Summary
- One month since it was formed, the online platform has lured over 800 deejays, playing from rumba to Christian music to 80s soul songs.
- A majority are in the US, scattered in North Carolina, San Francisco, and Washington DC to Oklahoma.
- Others are based in Kenya, South Korea, Australia, United Arab Emirates, Belgium, South Africa, among other countries.
- Music heals the soul and Philly knows this too well.
At 10pm on a Friday,
DeejayAisher, a stage name for Philly Ojallah, hangs headphones around
her neck, her fingers tuning buttons and knobs on her turntable. She
dances a bit and introduces herself to her audience just as she does in
nightclubs. Only that she is streaming the disco music live from her
living room in Berlin, Germany to thousands of people watching from
around the world.
As she scratches and spins the
turntable, her crowd of about 14,000 viewers immediately starts sending
in comments on the 254 DiasporaDJs Live Facebook page.
This
is an online platform with a following of 90,000 people and counting,
where Kenyan disc jockeys (deejays) living in different parts of the
world stream music live from their homes.
Some of
Philly’s 3,000 viewers type out song requests but most praise her,
(“Wow! you have mad talent…Yours is on another Covid level. Your mix can
cleanse our lungs from corona. That song is for those who haven't sent a
tip”)
In-between, she speaks over the music about the
coronavirus pandemic, corrupt African leaders, and about God’s
unrelenting mercy during these tough times; messages that blend in
perfectly to the tunes of her pre-recorded music.
One month since it was formed, the online platform has lured
over 800 deejays, playing from rumba to Christian music to 80s soul
songs.
A majority are in the US, scattered in North
Carolina, San Francisco, and Washington DC to Oklahoma. Others are based
in Kenya, South Korea, Australia, United Arab Emirates, Belgium, South
Africa, among other countries.
Music heals the soul and
Philly knows this too well. She learnt how to deejay to fight the
loneliness that comes with being in a foreign country.
“I
started deejaying as a distraction to draw me out of depressive
thoughts. As I struggled to learn the machine, with the help of YouTube
tutorials, my passion grew. I offered to play at a Kenyan pub in Germany
during weekends for free to build confidence and fan base,” says Philly
who has been a deejay since 2016.
In the silence of
the lockdowns and curfews, another deejay who is entertaining online
crowds to the wee hours, depending on the time zones, is Nairobi-based
Kaydee, who prefers to use his stage name. His mastery of the turntable
is enviable and is reminisce of the glorious days of Ogopa Deejays in
the late 1990s. One of his fans termed hm as the “godfather of deejays”
when the virtual fans enquired.
“I think I
underestimated my skills, in five minutes I had about 800 views,” says
Kaydee, who has been a deejay for 16 years now.
His
first two-hour show had over 9,300 comments and about 215 people had
shared it, meaning that the numbers keep growing as more viewers replay
it.
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