Grassroots project keeps Mijikenda music alive

By Immanuel Muasya and Bonface Orucho

The thatch throws a soft, familiar shadow. A woven fence creaks in the salty wind. Inside a cleared yard in Kilifi, twelve drummers set skins into place like clockmakers fitting gears, a pair of elders sits cross legged on the grass and sunlight angles through palm fronds onto a scattering of wooden shakers and carved flutes.

This is not a concert. It is a salvage operation for sound, careful, urgent and stubbornly human.

Baobab Studio’s LUTSAGA project, which Flavour Polle, Baobab Studio’s manager and cultural liaison, described simply as a granary, is acting like one by collecting the rhythms, grooves and voices of the Mijikenda before they vanish.

“I’m a Mijikenda from Kilifi. Our people have used music for generations, for worship, for storytelling, for life. That’s why it has survived until now,” Pole said.

“Lutsaga means a granary. We are documenting all the cultural music and putting them into one space… Those who sang those genres passed away, so we decided to collect all the cultural musicians and record so that we can preserve that music,” he explained.

The project records full ensembles, not isolated samples, and stores them in an accessible sound bank. The recordings hold the breath of singers, the exact thud of a particular drum and the way a chorus folds into silence.

Inside the control room the studio smells of dust and amplifier glue. Microphones dangle like listening birds. Musicians arrive with instruments wrapped in cloth. Elders bring histories. They do not come to modernise the songs so much as to let them be held long enough to be heard again and again.

According to Polle, the problem that prompted the project is part of the rhythm of life: people die. With them dies the memory of a rhythm or the story tied to a melody.

“Some of the singers we worked with have already passed away, and when they go, the genre goes with them. That’s why we record, so the music doesn’t die,” he said.

LUTSAGA’s response is simple: record the songs, record the instruments and record the players who know when to pause and when to let a voice waver toward a spiritual note.

Technically the archive is careful. Baobab captures full takes with the ensemble in place so later listeners can hear the call and response architecture, the cadence of teacher and student and the spatial way instruments answer each other.

Pole points to the percussion variety. “The Mijikenda cultural drums are about twelve different types,” he noted. “Each rhythm has its own meaning, its own moment.”

LUTSAGA is as much about ethics as it is about sound. The project pays communities to record, locks master ownership with the groups and promises royalties after digital distribution costs. That matters because much of the modern market for heritage sound has been extractive. Outside producers lift fragments and strip context, leaving custodians without rights or payments. LUTSAGA’s model turns that pattern on its head.

There is a creative logic too. Producers in the global Afro house and electronic scenes are looking for textures that feel alive, worn in and human. Pole believes those textures will travel fast.

“From the Lutsaga project we are going to get the cultural and spiritual energy, and from Afro house and electronic music they have the futuristic sounds. These two combined will come up with amazing music,” he said.

Early pickups from Europe, South Africa and East Africa suggest the appetite is already real.

What comes out is not always tidy. A raw ensemble take might begin with a spoken invocation, move into a long drum conversation and end in a single sustained vocal held like a suspended raincloud. They are not loopable eight-bar phrases but live performances. Baobab preserves that complexity so producers can choose to remix, rework or respect the take as a full cultural act.

On the ground the sessions are social and instructive. Young people come to watch as elders demonstrate how to hold a stick, how to shift weight to change a rhythm and where a particular melody is used and why.

“When young people want to learn, the songs will be there waiting,” Polle said. “We are creating a bridge for generations.”

The archive becomes more than a digital file. It becomes teaching material and a living reference that communities can consult when they want to revive a song in a ritual or school setting.

There are measurable results. The Sounds of Sasaab project, which documented Samburu vocal traditions, released a global remix album through Madorasindahouse Records. According to a feature on COVID HQ Africa, the project was driven by three Kenyan producers, Dylan, Suraj and Foozak, who travelled to the remote Samburu region, set up improvised studios on location and recorded entire vocal ensembles and ceremonies (their record label was even conceptualised and named with reference to the Ewaso Nera river). Organisers report that proceeds financed a classroom for the singers’ community, illustrating how creative equity can translate into infrastructure.

LUTSAGA aims for a similar dual impact: global reach and local returns. But reaching that balance demands careful contracts, clear metadata and transparent distribution splits.

Polle explains that the legal question is thorny. “Who owns a melody that has circulated among families for generations? How do you record collective rights that outlast single lives?” he asked.

He argues that LUTSAGA’s insistence on community masters and royalties is a promising start, but the work will require legal templates that can handle collective and overlapping claims across generations.

For Kilifi, however, the project reframes value. The coast stops being only postcards and becomes a source of raw cultural capital that is curated rather than taken. A debut release featuring an elder singer is due in early November and will test whether the world’s dancefloors can hold both ancestral cadence and modern production.

“A project like Lutsaga is important because for years we’ve listened to foreign music and forgotten our own,” Pole reflected. “It’s time to bring the African sound to the world.”

LUTSAGA is modest and audacious at once. It preserves the tiny details, the way a singer inhales before a line, the squeak of a drumhead and the accidental harmonies that emerge when voices overlap. Those details make the difference between a sound that is preserved and a sound that is kept alive.

“Our music carries teaching, education and wisdom,” Polle added. “If you listen closely, every song tells you how to live.”

If the project succeeds, elders will be paid for sessions, tracks will be credited properly, remixes will bring new audiences back to the original recordings and communities will be able to hear themselves in perpetuity.