Benga and Taarab: Kenya’s Living Music Archives

AFRICAN HISTORY & CULTURE · ANCESTRAL SOUND & HEALING

Two Sounds, Two Landscapes

Kenya is often introduced through its savannas and highlands, yet some of its most important historical record is sung. Benga and taarab music sit in different places on the map. Taarab began in Zanzibar and circulates along the Swahili coast, through port towns such as Mombasa and Lamu. Benga grew inland, in Nyanza, the Lake Victoria region of western Kenya where the Luo live. The two rarely share a stage, and that distance is part of why each deserves its own hearing.

Taarab is not one sound. Hilda Kiel describes it as a distinct musical form that blends Arabic and African as well as Indian, Latin, Indonesian and European influences, with variations found all along the Swahili Coast in Tanzania and Kenya. Mombasa carries a stronger Indian imprint, while Lamu has stayed closer to its Yemeni origins. The regional differences matter, because they show how the music answered to each port’s own history.

Benga’s cradle is the Luo area around Lake Victoria. The Music In Africa account credits the nyatiti, an eight-stringed lyre, as the most enduring Luo instrument behind benga’s rhythm and picking style, and links the mournful sound of the orutu to the benga lead guitar. Benga did not begin with the electric guitar. It began with inherited patterns of phrasing that moved from one instrument to another.

Taarab: A Sultan’s Court Music Becomes a Public Voice

Taarab’s history runs through the sultanate. Sultan Barghash ruled Zanzibar from 1870 to 1888, and he was a music lover who brought musicians from Egypt to play at his court. He also sent local musicians to Egypt, and they came home with instruments such as the qanun and oud. The British proclaimed a protectorate over Zanzibar in 1890. Egyptian influence is still most audible in Zanzibar taarab, as Kiel’s study of the music’s roots makes clear.

Early taarab was intimate. Groups were small, with four or five musicians, and they mimicked the Egyptian takht ensembles that had shaped their sound. Over time the music became indigenized. Its lyrics moved into Swahili, and its orchestras came to reflect the coast’s mixed population. The Ikhwani-Safaa orchestra, founded in 1902, included Arabs, Africans and Indians together. That mixed membership is an archive in its own right. It records who made music together in a society where trade and empire were sorting people into categories.

The Culture Musical Club, officially founded in 1958, became one of the more active veteran orchestras. Smaller street ensembles known as kidumbak groups trained many future taarab musicians. That detail matters. Archives are kept in workshops and streets as well as in court ceremonies, and the people who taught in those small rooms are part of the record.

Siti binti Saad and the Women Who Sang the Coast

No account of taarab can skip Siti binti Saad. Her biographical entry places her birth around 1880 in Kisuani, near Zanzibar Town, and her death in 1950. She never learned to read. She sang at home and at work, sold pottery in villages, and in 1911 moved to Zanzibar Town to learn string-accompanied music from the musician Musa Bulushi. By the 1920s she was, in the entry’s words, the first true professional in Swahili taarab, a singer who acted out her songs in performance.

Her recording career reached across the Indian Ocean. In 1928 she signed a contract with an agent for His Master’s Voice in Bombay, and her recordings were in Swahili, Arabic and Hindustani. Her group toured India, and she later performed in Tanganyika, Kenya and Uganda. Her songs took up love, temptation, parenthood and government corruption, and the entry notes that she challenged the view of East African women as shy and dependent in public. Banning Eyre adds that she sang in Swahili about laws she considered unfair to women.

Women remain central to the form. The modern orchestra’s chorus is made up mostly of female singers, and female performers who use poetic allegory to tease one another are a major draw for audiences. When we call taarab an archive, we mean that women’s authorship is written into it.

Benga: From Nyatiti Strings to the Guitar Band

The history of Kenyan benga music is written in the shops and studios of Nairobi. Music In Africa, drawing on research by Ketebul Music, reports that demobilized Luo soldiers reportedly brought the Spanish guitar home after the Second World War, and that by the late 1940s guitarists were playing it in nyatiti-influenced styles. In the early 1950s, pioneers including Obuondo Atwanga and John Odula were already recording.

Those 1940s and early-1950s players were precursors. The established benga genre took shape through the 1960s. John Ogara founded the Ogara Boys Band in 1960, and the trio recorded “Selestina Juma” in 1963 at African Gramophone Stores in Nairobi. That same year Mzee Daudia opened Bonanza Music Store on Luthuli Avenue, which became a hub for benga musicians before it moved and was renamed Melodica. Shops like these were more than retail. They were rehearsal rooms, meeting points and marketplaces for a new kind of urban memory.

Scholar Ian Eagleson describes benga as a guitar-band dance genre that emerged in Kenya’s Luo community in the late 1960s. As it spread to other ethnic groups and languages, it became a flexible format that linked new styles with older ethnic traditions in rural and urban settings. Each regional variant reflects its roots in language, rhythm, melody, tempo, form and vocal timbre, and individual leading musicians shaped its development.

The name itself is contested. The Music In Africa account lists several explanations for where “benga” comes from, including Congo, a Dholuo word and a fashion called the Ogara Skirt. Eagleson observes that scholars and journalists have often treated benga either as an expression of ethnic identity or as a local offshoot of Congolese music, and that those readings rarely examine the differences within the genre. Benga’s archive lives in those differences.

Listening as Archive: Memory, Courtship, Protest and Trade

The functions these traditions served show up concretely in the sources. For memory, benga keeps nyatiti phrasing alive inside the guitar band, and taarab keeps Egyptian and Omani court sounds inside Swahili lyrics. For courtship, taarab was performed at weddings, parties and public events, and its songs took up love and desire alongside parenthood. For protest, Saad’s songs turned on laws and government corruption. For trade, Indian Ocean recording deals and Nairobi music stores show how commerce carried these sounds across borders.

A song archive is different from a shelf. It survives because people keep singing it. Its authority comes from repetition, from musicians who learned it from elders, and from listeners who recognize the place names, the jokes and the grief folded into a verse.

Why the Musicians Are the Historians

The archive in these traditions is not held by a single institution. It is held by musicians who tune strings, by women who write verses that can be sung at celebrations, and by audiences who recognize a story when they hear it. Treating these artists as authors, rather than as a backdrop for someone else’s history, is the first step in listening well.

Ubuntu teaches that a person is a person through other people, and these sounds work that way. They gather people, name shared experience and leave room for an audience to answer. We do not romanticize the hardship that shaped some of these songs. We name the musicians, credit their teachers and elders, and treat their work as scholarship carried in sound.

How to Listen Well

Start with names. When you find a recording, look for the musician, the year and the place. Read the sources listed below and the notes that accompany recordings. Ask people from these communities what a song means to them before you decide what it means for you. Benga and taarab reward patience. The meaning often sits in a repeated line, a changed rhythm or a joke that lands only in Swahili or Dholuo.

Our earlier writing on the nyatiti’s low string explores how Luo sound healing moves through the body, and our piece on young artists in Kenya looks at what it takes to build a music life today. Read them alongside this one to see how the sounds carry from history into present community work.

Know someone who still hums the songs their grandmothers sang? Send them this, and ask them what those songs remember.

Sources & Research

1. Kiel, Hilda (2012). African Music: Journal of the International Library of African Music, 9(2), 77–93. “Travel on a Song: The Roots of Zanzibar Taarab.” DOI 10.21504/amj.v9i2.1805.
2. Eagleson, Ian (2014). African Music: Journal of the International Library of African Music, 9(4), 92–122. “Continuities and Innovation in Luo Song Style: Creating the Benga Beat in Kenya 1960 to 1995.” DOI 10.21504/amj.v9i4.1888.
3. Gazemba, Stanley (2014). Music In Africa. “Retracing the Benga Rhythm.” Compiled from research by Ketebul Music.
4. Eyre, Banning (2025). AramcoWorld. “Taarab: The Soul of Zanzibar’s Musical Landscape.” January 2, 2025.
5. Haag, Karin Loewen. Women in World History: A Biographical Encyclopedia. “Saad, Siti binti (c. 1880–1950).”
6. Encyclopaedia Britannica. Sultanate of Zanzibar. Accessed for the dates of Sultan Barghash’s reign and the 1890 British protectorate.
7. Great Britain, Foreign Office, Historical Section. Kenya, Uganda and Zanzibar. Handbooks Prepared under the Direction of the Historical Section of the Foreign Office, No. 96. Edited by G. W. Prothero. London: H.M. Stationery Office, 1920.