Blog and website for William Rubel, author and cook specializing in traditional cuisines

Introduction by Augustine
Love Song
Complete Recording Session (27 minutes)

Augustine lived in Maralal, Kenya. He died in 2003. Maralal is the town that the great English explorer Alfred Thisinger retired to. A fair number of tourists visit Maralal to attend the annual Camel Derby, but otherwise, except for a few tourists passing through on their way to regions further North, like Lake Turkana, Maralal is a town that goes about the business of just being itself. At one point, in the early 1990s, it seemed as if the “plastic boys,” young men who hang on the street, drink too much, chew too much khat, and hustle tourists, might take over the town. But hard lives, and Aids has done its grim work, and Maralal is free of plastic boys.

When I first met Augustine he was already a retired school teacher. He was a gifted musician who sometimes played on the streets of Marlal to make money. Augustine was very poor. He lived in a small two room mud house. His bedroom, which was one of the two rooms, was furnished with a single item, the bed, which was a single white plastic sack used by the US to deliver food aid.

Augustine mostly writes his songs in Ma, the language of the Samburu. One song, however, is in English. What I find most heartbreaking about Africa are the talented people, like Augustine, who don’t seem to have a chance to thrive in the world at larte. Augustine would have been a wonderful addition to the international world of World Music.

The first time I met him, I gave him much more money than he had expected. It turned out that he had come down to Maralal to play because he was desperate for money to buy food for a young child. While he did use my gift to drink a bit too much that night, he used some for his child — an event recorded in one of the songs that he sings here.

On the visit documented with these recordings I found Augustine without a guitar. He had sold it. So we went to a lumber yard to buy wood for a new one — the one you see pictured here. It is always with tears in my eyes that I think of Augustine, a man who was, to me, always so kind and gentle and whose spirit and voice I loved so much.