Joseph Kanyi Thiong'o PhD Thesis 2025 - Stylistic Choices and Oral Nuances in Selected Bongo Flava Songs Case of Diamond Platnumz and Marlaw

Stylistic use of language remains a rich area that feeds literary research and studies with both explicit and implicit meaning encompassed in text. As a result, this research is set to investigate how Bongo Flava artists use language artistically to conflate meaning. The objectives of the research were to interrogate the influences on the style and meaning of Bongo Flava music, drawn from the earlier literary traditions such as Tenzi and hip-hop, and to examine the lexical choices and their construction in determining meaning in Bongo Flava songs. And to examine how the manner of voice appropriation through supra-segmental choices such as tone, intonation, and others contributes to the meaning decipherable in Bongo Flava performances. The research employed relevance theory, ethnopoetics, and stylistic criticism. The methodology of the research involved purposive sampling of two Bongo Flava artists, namely Diamond Platnumz and Marlaw. An in-depth analysis and transcription of over 145 songs, and in addition, interviewing Bongo Flava fans and music producers. The findings of this research reveal that meaning in Bongo Flava can be permeated at lexical and phonological levels. Cultural influences at lexical and phonological levels, as the study observed, determine plausible meaning in Bongo Flava songs. The artists use different stylistic techniques to address themes, for example, love, politics, gender, social identities, and power relations. Bongo flava music, as the researcher observed, borrows a lot from Swahili poetry and uses rich and expressive language, which is deeply rooted in Swahili culture and history. Swahili poetry has a strong tradition of storytelling, which is carried forward in Bongo flava music. These include the use of local languages to rap and traditional and musical instruments. Respondents brought in a lot of shared knowledge in how they inferred meaning from the voice of the musician. Culture, in this regard, influences two aspects of the voice. The information and interpretation that members of Swahili culture can infer from a piece of communication—based on the manner of utterance—are heavily influenced by shared knowledge. Consequently, this leads to the infusion of what the researcher termed as cultural ostensions, which form the oral nuances that define the shared beliefs and the meaning and relevance attached to them. In this context, the researcher observed, for instance, that the manner of singing a dirge, for instance, must bring out nuances of pain, loss, and tears that the mourner experiences as one reflects on the dead. An area that requires further research, as this research observed, is interrogation of how sonic features in songs influence the meaning listeners infer while listening to songs.