Book Launch: Benga, a Kenyan Kaleidoscope (by the Flee Project), Sept. 4 2019 @ BIEA

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Date: September 4, 2019
Venue: BIEA
Time: 2-4 pm

As the process of globalization and digitalization intensifies, previously confidential music genres are now experiencing a heightened level of visibility. Access to new audiences, however, can also present challenges for these often peripheral cultures, related to their re-interpretation and the ethical, economic and cultural difficulties associated with their diffusion. As a genre often looked down on by elites in Kenya, Benga does not escape this logic.

With new practices aimed at hybridizing and pushing the genre beyond its national borders, benga is facing multiple dilemmas. Digital music production tools have rendered the composition and recording of music open to a growing number of artists. Using traditional music and other local sounds, emerging artists are re-inventing traditional music and disrupting conventional definitions of national heritage.

On 4 September 2019, the British Institute in Eastern Africa in collaboration with the Rift Valley Institute, will launch the book, Benga, a Kenyan Kaleidoscope, by the Flee Project.

Presentation: The Politics of Neoliberal Moral Restructuring in East Africa, Jul. 19 2018 @ BIEA

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Date: July 19, 2018
Venue: British Institute in Eastern Africa
Time: From 5.00 pm to 7.00 pm

Over the past three decades, neoliberal reforms have not just restructured the economies and polities but also the moral-economic orders of African countries. While there is a scholarly debate about aspects of moral economy on the continent, issues such as;
(i) the link between the reforms and moral change, and
(ii) the interaction between political economy and moral economy (and respective change dynamics) have received little analytical attention to-date.

This paper addresses this lacuna via an analysis of the politics of neoliberal moral restructuring. It is structured as follows: First, it makes some general points concerning the comparative analysis of this phenomenon across countries in Africa and beyond. It then uses a major exemplar of neoliberal transformation on the continent, Uganda, to advance and illustrate the analysis of the making of a neoliberal moral-economic order in a given country.
Finally, it calls for enhanced efforts to gather empirical data concerning matters of (the politics/political economy of) moral change in capitalist Africa.