It is December 2003.
Uganda is crowning an eventful year, musically, marked by among other highlights the inaugural Pearl of Africa Music (PAM) Awards which seek to recognize musicians that have done outstanding work.
Soroti-born Pastor George Okudi has bagged two Kora Awards in South Africa for his hit song Wipolo making him the first Ugandan to win at the Koras. The same year, the song wins two PAM Awards. Among the year’s hits is also Jose Chameleone’s Bei Kali, Ragga Dee’s Empeta, Paul Kafeero’s Dipo Naziggala, Steve Jean’s Mwana Gwe and House Girl by Obsessions.
That’s not all the entertainment 2003 has offered. Gaetano Kaggwa had represented Uganda in the very first season of reality TV show Big Brother Africa and finished fifth. His stardom is compounded by the fact that he had sex with a fellow housemate on live TV. On return to Uganda, he is a hero of sorts and Bebe Cool has released a song titled Gae as a tribute.
Musically, the other names among the year’s hitmakers are Juliana Kanyomozi, Emperor Orlando and Peter Miles.
The year before that, Chameleone and Red Banton had flown to the UK and won accolades (Uganda Music Awards UK). Chameleone won Artiste of Year and Single of the Year for Mama Mia, and Red Banton scooped Best New Ugandan Artiste for his hit single Noonya Money.
North of Uganda, the Joseph Kony-led war has been raging on for 16 years and the rebel group continues to wreak havoc on innocent civilians. Ugandans need as much entertainment to distract them from the daily news cycle that leads with deaths, destruction and displacement occasioned by Kony’s attacks.
To wrap 2003 up, Jamaican reggae rapper, singer, and songwriter, Shaggy, headlined a New Year’s Eve concert in Kampala. And among the local artistes that opened for the Strength of a Woman singer was a little-known singer who had sprouted up that very year and blessed Uganda with a chart-topping hit. That singer was Ziggy Dee.
His song Eno Mic (which others referred to as Mic Ya Ziggy Dee) had spread like wildfire, never mind that this was his debut song. Its popularity was uncontainable, so much that the then Deputy Speaker of Parliament, Rebecca Kadaga, got lost in the groove when the song came on during Parliament’s end-of-year party.
But the odds had not always been in Ziggy Dee’s favor.
In 1998, 20-year-old Adam Mutyaba (before he adopted the moniker Ziggy Dee) left Uganda upon completing his S.6. He moved to South Africa with hopes of better opportunities.
“I noticed the things I wanted to do I couldn’t achieve them here. So, I needed to leave Uganda,” the singer told Plugged in an exclusive interview recently.
He lived on the street in Soweto, a township in the suburbs of Johannesburg. Soon, he would come to realize how much violence and crime Soweto was bedeviled with.
“People were so nationalistic and against those that were not South African nationals. There were still apartheid sentiments,” he adds.
All this while, he needed some capital to venture into art. He began to vend masking papers for décor. Amidst difficult conditions, Mutyaba tried to survive until he no longer could. It had become apparent that Soweto was a death trap, but at least he had learnt the craft – visited galleries, seen painters and learnt how things were done.
Three years later, he returned to Uganda. It wasn’t long before he decided to join his elder sister who lived in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania.
“I needed more books. So, I opted to pursue a Diploma in Software Engineering.”
He had grown up listening to Michael Jackson and watching him do his dances. At school, he had a penchant for partaking in dance-offs.
At the time, there is still a lot of American RnB and Pop influence on Ugandan radio and TV. But in Tanzania, Mutyaba realizes the culture is the opposite. It was the first country where he noticed giving cyclic airplay to Western music was not a trend. That’s because the Tanzanian audience possesses a strong bias towards their local music.
At the time, it’s Lady Jay Dee, Juma Nature, TID, Professor Jay, Dully Sykes that are ruling the airwaves. It is then that Mutyaba begins to itch to record his own music. “The little time I spent in Uganda, I realized there were few studios and you needed to know someone to connect you there.”
His time in Uganda helped him understand which sound was popular and what the market vibed to.
The music industries in Uganda and Tanzania couldn’t have been more distinctive, he noticed. Studios in Tanzania worked on a different level of professionalism. For example, if you booked a studio session, you had to show up or else you counted your loss.
Ziggy Dee is not about to take any chances. He has paid about $250 (the equivalent of about Ushs 1.5 million today) for studio.
He has spent sleepless nights writing the lyrics because coming off as an unserious chap in the eyes of the producer is not the kind of first impression he intends to leave. Even more importantly, once in studio, the clock is ticking so he has to make the most of his hard-earned money.
It’s d-day. He’s in studio. He is in the very safe hands of Miikka Mwamba, a Finnish sound engineer who had recently settled in Tanzania and had pioneered a fresh, contagious sound of Bongo Flavor. He had produced hits like Barua by Daz Nundaz, Salome (Dully Sykes), Baby Gal (Mad Ice) and Saida Karoli’s first album which had songs like the famous Maria Salome (Wankyekekya) among others. Matter of fact, on the day Ziggy Dee came to studio, Wankyekekya was being mixed.
“You’re thinking how is it going to be? Everyone is like ‘You’re next’. It’s like going to the doctor. There’s like a whole queue of guys waiting behind you. And you’re given minutes to record. You must know what you’re doing. There is no trial,” Ziggy Dee told Plugged.
“And trust me, if you didn’t know how to sing, he (Mwamba) had no time for you. He told you straight.. ‘You’re going to waste my time’. It wasn’t about the money, because his reputation is on the line,” he adds.
The studio session lasted about 25 minutes. And it was a wrap. Initially, he did an a cappella, to help the producer find a rhythm. Finally, Mwamba had a melody that would “work for Africa”.
If you have listened to Eno Mic, then you are familiar with how the track was laid out. It’s like a loop that is repetitive from start to finish. Ziggy Dee says this was Mwamba’s idea.
First, they recorded the chorus, then the verses. It sounded a little strange when I learnt that the famous intro is what was recorded last.
‘I live my life like a superstar, blessed are those who believe, but they need to see’ goes the intro that has over the last two decades become a cue that ushers many to the dance floor. But what was the thought process behind it?
“I’m a God-fearing man and I believe everything is from God. Whenever I’m doing something, God has to be there. Everything happens in the spirit before it manifests physically. I had to pour out all my dreams into that song. Before you build a house, it has to be there in your mind,” he explained.
Many things explain the allure the song had on Ugandans. Its tempo, Ziggy Dee’s strange yet magnetic voice, plus a groovy track. But there was one more thing that made the song a smash hit – the lyrics.
That was the other genius of Ziggy Dee. The story of Eno Mic wasn’t a story of luck. From the time he started penning down the song, he was meticulous about what he wanted to achieve. Again, thanks to the pressure of being in a foreign land, not being one that settled for mediocrity and the fact that he had only one shot at this project, he knew better than to be complacent.
“Your music has to have some bit of abstract. It’s good to be vulgar in a song. But if you incorporate a word that is not very direct, you score highly than putting it plainly. This is what sets apart artistes whose songs are written for them from those who are creative,” is how he describes the writing process.
To this day, the interpretation of the song depends on who you ask.
I asked him “What did you mean by eno mic?”
“Microphone,” he said.
“It’s more like… ‘I’ve come with a microphone. It’s a job, like any other job. So, if you give me the platform, I will give you your time’s worth. I’m ready to do this, I’m able, I have the skills.’ That was the message behind my chorus.”
In the bridge, he is trying to reaffirm he’s not the lazy type. But to fall for this would be to miss the ingenuity that he employed in writing the lyrics. And he knew for certain the connotations the message would evoke even before he set foot in the recording booth.
Kads Band’s Titie had similarly applied such symbolism in her song Makanika Wange a year before Eno Mic was released, and it blew up.
“Just like I told you. Abstracting. There are things you will sing again and again, and you’ll find yourself laughing. If it makes me laugh, then more people will laugh and they will like it,” says Ziggy Dee.
“Ugandans are not slow people. They have a way they interpret things. You have to bring something that falls in between”.
On the song’s chorus is a female voice that simply complements the brilliant storytelling. Ziggy Dee’s self-praises would not have had as much impact on the listener if it wasn’t qualified by a lady. It was a tactful way of earning credibility, let alone appealing to all genders.
Fatuma (who voiced the chorus) was a sister to Hardmad, a Tanzanian reggae artiste then who was friends with Ziggy Dee. He had recommended her considering they hailed from Mwanza and their language had similarities with some of the Bantu languages in Uganda.
Though, the idea of backing vocals wasn’t part of Ziggy Dee’s initial concept.
“It’s like how you make a good meal at home. The chicken is there, the rice is there, but then you feel it lacks an avocado. Then you add the avocado and it makes it better.”
“I asked the producer to save the song for tomorrow because I felt something was missing. Then I brought in the girl.”
For two weeks or so, the song was in studio for mixing and mastering. And it took him maybe another six months of listening to the song before he decided to release it. The singer recounts being “shocked” it was he who did the song.
His very first performance was a VIP show at a 5-star hotel. He also performed at the launch of Miss Tanzania, as well as at an athletics event in Kilimanjaro. The bookings were coming in hard and he recalls it wasn’t the ordinary gigs in low[1]class ‘bufunda’. They were the kind that rake in good money.
Life changed. He ceased to belong to his family and friends. Now, he was public property “and it was hard”. For the 25-year-old, the downside of this fame was that he could no longer tell who came into his life genuinely and who was there for the money. Everyone is a user, he says.
He had been going about his business in Dar es Salaam when he got a phone call from Uganda. Someone was telling him they saw the Eno Mic video on TV. Mwamba’s studio had offered to shoot a video for him at no cost. If he ever had doubts about the horizons the song would traverse, the phone call from back home quashed it all.
“I won’t lie to you that I sent the song to anyone. If you have talent, it paves its own way. But God did his work. These things also come as blessings”. Back home, the long reign of Ragga and Soukous was folding and Uganda was warming up to a new Afropop sound, a making of influences that Chameleone, Bebe Cool and Peter Miles picked from Ogopa DJs in Nairobi.
Locally, Steve Jean was the powerhouse producer whose sound accounted for the majority of the days’ hits. The sound that introduced Juliana Kanyomozi and the likes of Michael Ross and Benon & Vamposs and Kads Band’s Yvette, Akiiki Romeo and Titie.
Not that reggae and Kadongo Kamu weren’t still thriving. Because it’s around the same time that gave us hits like Namagembe (Madoxx), Gologosa (Lord Fred Sebatta), Kampala Mu Kooti & Dipo Nazigala (Paul Kafeero), and Eggali Ekozeko (Gerald Kiweewa).
In Uganda, his first performance was at a concert held at Hotel Africana.
DJ Bush Baby (Ugandan legendary DJ, TV, and radio host) was at the time based in Tanzania where he worked with IPP Media Limited, one of East Africa’s leading media conglomerates that owned East Africa Radio and East Africa TV (EATV). He was Head of Radio and Head of Programming at East Africa Radio, and at the same time, a presenter on EATV (Channel 5).
He largely attributes Eno Mic’s success to the production masterly of Miikka Mwamba.
“Miikka Mwamba was on the rise. At the time, there was Master P who was like the Dr. Dre, heavy bass lines and all that. Then there was Master J who was like Baby Face or Dallas Austin. But all of them lacked musicality. They were beat programmers. None of them could play keys,” DJ Bush Baby told Plugged in an interview.
“So, Mwamba was a blessing to Bongo Flavor at the time. He introduced musicality and good arrangement.”
Bush Baby confesses he wasn’t won over by Eno Mic from the onset. The “shallow lyrics” for one. But is quick to cite the mixing and engineering that went into its production, akin to the texture on Madoxx Sematimba, Swahili Nation, Sammy Kasule, Charlie King, Philly Bongoley Lutaaya and Frank Mbalire songs. The common denominator for all these artistes is that their work was produced in Europe.
“The song (Eno Mic) stood out because of that catchy rhythm. The first thing that made Eno Mic successful was – it was easy on the ear. The person who did the percussions and the programming knew what they were doing. It wasn’t someone who just put together beats and went and did autotune.”
In his opinion, had Ziggy Dee and Mwamba’s paths not crossed, the story of Eno Mic would have been different.
Suffice it to say, Ziggy Dee released this song at a time when Tanzania suffered a deficiency of club bangers. The market was saturated with conscious, informative, and educative music. The club bangers came from Uganda and Kenya.
Other factors considered, the story of Ziggy Dee’s exploits and the staggering fame it culminated into is incomplete without mention of the ecosystem through which East Africa consumed music at the time. Though each of the three East African countries had their respective media infrastructure, EATV had an unparalleled monopoly. If your song was playing on EATV, there wasn’t any level of marketing that beat that.
Yes, there was Channel O but its playlists were often dominated by Kwaito and other sounds from South Africa. Plus, unlike EATV which was a free-to-air channel that was accessible to anyone who had a TV set and antenna, Channel O catered only to the affluent who could afford DStv subscription.
Promoting a song in the brick-and-mortar era was tedious. Bush Baby still recalls a message sent to his Yahoo mail by Benon informing him that he had sent a CD on a bus (from Kampala) to be expected in Dar in a couple of days. That song came to be Nsazewo (featuring Vamposs).
“I was among the very first few people to put Eno Mic on rotation. I had a show (Uganda Central) that aired Saturdays on East Africa Radio. And that show is what really introduced Ugandan music to the region (East Africa). Soon, Ziggy Dee became a problem.”
When Ziggy Dee physically delivered a CD with the song to East African Radio in Dar es Salaam, it wasn’t the first time Bush Baby was seeing him. The two had inevitably met initially, thanks to Bush’s prominence and the many hats he wore at the time. One of them was – the DJ served as the de facto ambassador of Uganda to Tanzania. Not that he was officially appointed.
Whenever Ugandans came from Zambia, South Africa, Malawi or even Uganda itself, and for one reason or the other the Ugandan High Commission in Tanzania couldn’t help them or they were simply stranded, Bush Baby was who everybody turned to. To many, he gave a place to crash and facilitated them.
Ziggy Dee had heard of this Ugandan who worked at IPP Media Limited and he had sought him. On meeting him, he would introduce himself as an artiste and also give him a rundown of his earlier hustle in South Africa which had had a dead end.
Bush Baby depended on DJ Shiru from whose shop he regularly shopped for all the new music released in Uganda. And Bush never sieved these collections. Good and junk, he took it all. Ironically, many Ugandan songs deemed rejects in the Ugandan market only blew up upon Bush Baby putting them on rotation on EATV and East Africa Radio.
“The song was a success due to the powerplay. For every second on EATV and the radio, there was an eyeball or an ear. I still meet people and they tell me ‘Man, you did this. Remember when this happened?’ Guys tell me ‘We were in school but we would smuggle in radios.’ EATV at the time wasn’t just a media house. It was an institution, it was a movement, a culture, it shaped the narrative,” is what he says of the influence Channel 5 and East Africa Radio wielded across the region.
Adding that Ziggy Dee “was lucky that we got to showcase him on a massive platform like that”.
As a side gig, Bush Baby hosted UTAKE Night, a theme night strictly for music from Uganda, Kenya and Tanzania, at Steak Out (popular hangout in Kampala).
“I come and sample Eno Mic there. I remember I was with DJ Pinye (Kenyan legendary DJ). I told him the song was bubbling in Tanzania. I think it was Pinye who took it to Kenya,” says Bush Baby who is now a media consultant and TV producer.
On return to Tz, Bush Baby has news for Ziggy Dee. The news is – the song is spreading fast and he (Ziggy Dee) needs to prepare for what’s coming. Part of the preparation will be branding himself well because his phone will soon explode with bookings.
“I told him the first thing you need to do is work on your image. I told him ‘The song is so big. It’s bigger than you’. I told him ‘The day you decide to go to Kampala, you need to enter as a King’.”
Not that this success didn’t come with setbacks. The controversy surrounding the message in the song being one. At some point, Eno Mic was banned by Buganda Kingdom-owned CBS Radio for the obscene undertones in the song’s lyrics. The radio held that the song was not educative and that several parents had complained about it.
Eno Mic has taken Ziggy Dee places. Literally. From traveling different countries for gigs, to even the remotest of places like an island in Lake Victoria where he had only one small speaker linked to a wack amplifier to perform before an open field filled with people.
The aftermath of the song paved way for him to collaborate with Bobi Wine on Sunda which was equally a success.
Though, Bush Baby opines that had Ziggy Dee grasped the business of music, he would have been far richer from Eno Mic. Needless to say, the majority of the emerging crop of musicians in the early 2000s including the more popular ones ran their careers in a haphazard manner. Streamlining their management and business transactions wasn’t something that kept them up at night.
Just like other iconic singers like Philly Bongoley Lutaaya, Paul Kafeero and Mowzey Radio, Ziggy Dee mirrors the pains of a dysfunctional copyright law. Despite churning out several hits that still enjoy rotational play years later, Ugandan musicians earn no royalties for their works. Instead, they depend entirely on stage performances.
Musicians of the era were also victims of distribution cartels which thrived on dangling enticing offers to singers in exchange for signing away all their rights to their music. By implication, these artistes could not earn royalties from their works. For some, even a functional copyright law would be useless if they have no claim to their classics.
Resigned and demoralized. This is what you pick from the psyche of the Eno Mic singer, who has since resorted to painting, regarding the fruits (financially) of his work. The pessimism with which he views the economics of the entertainment industry in Africa is unmissable.
“I’m a member (of the collecting society) but there is a way they operate, but you know Uganda. This is Africa. Even when laws are there, they are always broken.”
He is also disappointed by the fact that in Uganda, artistes don’t earn respect out of merit. Instead, they have resorted to bribing their way to airplay.
Bush Baby isn’t quick to empathize with the creatives. The onus is on them to enlighten themselves about issues pertaining to protecting their intellectual property, he argues.
“It just comes down to the fact that artistes don’t want to be knowledgeable and inform themselves. They don’t want to read. This whole hullaballoo I hear about copyright is nonsense. These things are provided for in our laws. One only needs to consult intellectual property lawyers,” Bush Baby told Plugged.
He adds; “You need to be intentional. If you can afford to surround yourself with 7 people (entourages that often accompany artistes), why can’t you put a lawyer on retainer or an accountant? These are basic things. When you have your first single, imagine your next ten singles and plan for your next 10 years. Some of us have learnt the hard way.”
