International Journal of Art and Art History

The Sociolingual Disposition of the Emergent Deejay Afro Film Commentary in Kenya
Gabriel Kimani; John Mugubi, PhD

Abstract
The Kenyan film scene has experienced a descending trajectory characterized by dwindling fortunes in cinema theatres, leading to closure of famed theatres like Odeon cinema, Nairobi cinema, Fox drive-in cinemas, and Globe cinema, among others, in Nairobi and other major towns in Kenya. As the cinemas auditoriums were succumbing to the culture of indifference to theatre-going in the 1990s, estate and village video shows proliferated in the densely populated low-income urban and peri-urban areas in Kenya. Typified by screenings of popular Hollywood and Hong Kong action films, the video shows filled their benches by featuring commentators, popularly known as video-show deejays, the most renown being ‘Deejay Afro’. The popularity of ‘Deejay Afro’ cannot be overstated and to date his performances still endear a large section of the Kenyan audience in rural and peri-urban areas. So, what exactly about this modern film commentator endears him to his audience and what are the distinctive qualities of his art? These are the questions that this paper seeks to address, drawing parallels with the Japanese ‘Benshi’ as described by Don Kirihara and Donald Richie inter alia, and guided by the aesthetic theories of Theodor Adorno, and the Frankfurt school perspectives of spectatorship. The analysis is based on a ‘Deejay Afro’ commentary

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