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

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. ‘We all relate to the problems they sing about,’ says Jeff Koinange, host of the wildly popular Smokin’ Country radio show on Kenya’s Hot 96 FM. ‘Four hungry children and a crop in the field – this is everyday life for us Africans.’

Every couple of months Koinange and star singer Sir Elvis (real name Elvis Otieno) perform country music shows in small provincial towns, pulling in thousand-strong audiences who line-dance in Stetsons, cowboy boots, denim and big buckled belts. ‘If six-shooters were legal they’d be waving those around too,’ Koinange laughs.

‘It sounds surreal, but Kenya is a rural country, much like the southern states of America – and our experiences are a carbon copy of what they sing about,’ Sir Elvis tells me in a Texas drawl. His biggest hit, ‘Loving Man’, is the story of a country boy seduced by the city lights who finally goes home to his family, God and paradise in the prairies, ‘’cos all he’s got is in the farm’.

It’s been like this since ‘Waiting for a Train’ by Jimmie Rodgers hit Africa in the 1920s. In Kenyan villages, they sang in tribute to ‘Chemirocha’ – a half man, half god whose trousers fell down when he yodelled. In South Africa, the folk singer Rian Malan tells me, ‘the Afrikaners were a struggling underclass like the characters in the songs and so those themes of overwhelming odds and praying to the Lord for salvation spoke to them deeply’.