Aidan Hartley Aidan Hartley

What’s behind Africa’s love affair with country music?

issue 23 July 2022

Kenya

Life in the poorest continent is so hard you get a lot of knowing laughs with the joke: ‘What happens when you play a country and western song backwards? Your wife comes home, your children suddenly respect you, you get sober and your dog wakes from the dead.’ In Kenya and other parts of Anglophone Africa, country and western music is a cultural obsession for both young and old.

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