DJ Turkana: it’s personal; it’s political
DJ Turkana: ‘It's personal; It's political’
Anita Kevin is a South Sudanese and Ugandan model. I first met her in 2016 as a curator bringing female visual artists and performers together at exhibitions hosted by her platform Okuki.
The platform, which also hosted panel discussions for these artists, has grown to include a website to host similar content that reaches a wider audience through the site and social media. As someone who is open to the continual expansion of her knowledge, it's no surprise that she took up an offer to learn how to DJ.
In October 2018, Berlin-based DJ Sarah Farina hosted a two-day workshop in collaboration with Femme Electronic through their partnership with Goethe Zentrum Kampala. Femme Electronic was started by Ugandan veteran DJ Rachael to equip women with DJing and production skills through workshops and residencies, as well as providing platforms through events. Femme Electronic invited Anita to join one of their workshops and, despite her extensive work curating and creating alongside her college degree studies, Anita accepted.
It was a move that sparked an interest in DJing for Anita and from there she bought a small controller from friend and fellow DJ Catu Diosis to practice on. One night, after she had played an event following DJ Decay, Derek Debru, the co-founder of Nyege Nyege, invited her to The Villa, a studio space set up by festival organizers which offered residencies to musicians. From her experience at the workshop and The Villa, Anita found a medium that suited her and DJ Turkana was born. As she explains it, “You see people play the piano and it's their medium. So, this is it for me”, she said “I'm going to express myself through this. It just felt really comfortable.”
September 2019 marked her first appearance as an artist at the Nyege Nyege Festival. At 22 years old, DJ Turkana is one of newest and youngest woman DJs on the scene in Uganda.
Anita describes her style as “hard dance”, and though she doesn’t believe she's formed a definitive sound yet, this is the closest description to the sound and experience she wants to create: dance music with an edge. This is evident in some of her selections, like M.I.A's ‘Bad Girls’, which got the crowd pumped up about 15 minutes into her set on the Eternal Disco stage at Nyege Nyege. She's drawn to musicians whose messages resonate with her own experiences, which is where it gets personal.
East Africans know Turkana as a region in Kenya, it's where Anita Kevin grew up in a refugee camp in Kakuma, a town in the Turkana county, in north western Kenya. As a child she grew up happy and unaware that Kakuma was a refugee camp. To her, it was just home. But as she got older she became more aware of where she was and what it meant.
Anita explains why she chose the name Turkana: “I thought I should really use something that is connected to me,” she said, “It's reclaiming that whole experience of being in a refugee camp and overcoming it and being powerful, not being limited by what you've experienced.”
Her chosen DJ name holds political tones that resonate in East Africa because it speaks to a region that is rarely considered. The music Turkana selects is her way of highlighting this area and her experiences.
She brings consciousness into her work through “music that addresses political issues because of my experiences,” she explains. “I feel like I want to fuse that with sound and create a vibe that is like a war.”
But beyond that, she said, “I want to tell my story. I feel like my mom didn't get to tell [hers]. I want to be vocal about things through music as a medium.”
DJ Turkana's sets and her other art forms draw a lot from her experiences and how they affected her. She explores her need to return to those experiences in an effort to answer questions such as: What is belonging? What is home? Is home an experience?
If home is an experience, then Anita has found one as DJ Turkana in Kampala and within the Nyege Nyege community, which she describes as very generous with their time and knowledge. She notes how DJs Decay, Catu Diosis, and Authentically Plastic showed her “love, genuine support, and care”, reminding her that she can be anything.
“I kept thinking about how I got to play Nyege. Who pushed me? Who supported me? I keep going back to those faces”, she said.
What's personal is political and DJ Turkana's music reflects that. Wherever her work as a DJ, producer and her other art forms take her, she hopes it all remains grounded in her experiences; that it stays personal; that it stays political.
By Gloria Kiconco
Photos by Martin Kharumwa