Source: iOne Digital Creative Services
Victor Muthama, a Kenyan immigrant, came to Pittsburgh as a toddler and later immersed himself in hip-hop culture as a teen. When he was chosen to give a 2021 TEDx Talk at Carnegie Mellon University, he immediately knew what his topic would be: “The Beef Between African Americans and American Blacks.”
Young Victor grew up in the Seminary Apartments in East Liberty during the 2010s. It was an impoverished Black neighborhood then marred by violence; today, it has undergone a profound gentrification. He lived with his mother, father, two sisters, and six members of his extended family—a grand total of 11 people—in a three-bedroom apartment.
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At home, he heard derogatory stereotypes about his friends. Likewise, among his friends, he heard equally harsh stereotypes about Africans.
“I had to exist in Pittsburgh and also exist as an African kid,” Muthama says, reflecting on the time in his life when he felt torn between the culture he practiced at home and his strong identification with his Black American childhood friends and hip-hop culture. “My parents didn’t know anything about the hood. They didn’t know anything about the nuances of being Black in America.”
Victor Muthama, THIRD FROM LEFT, with 1Hood Family. | Source: Emmai Alaquiva
This question of struggling to fit in between these identities has been a recurring theme for much of Muthama’s life.
“When I go back to my native tribe in Kenya, they ask me who I am,” Muthama explains. In Kenya, it’s a question about geographic area, clan, and family identification. But for Muthama it’s also a powerful metaphor for his struggle with identity in America.
“You know growing up with an African accent, eating African food and not really having many Africans in Pittsburgh at the time was so hard,” Muthama says. “People didn’t understand me. They clowned me. I was just trying to understand other kids.”
Now, at 27, Muthama is turning those memories and experiences into his latest project, DiasporUS, a multi-generational look at how the men in his family navigate white supremacy.
He expects to finish the album this year. Long term, Muthama envisions DiasporUS as a multimedia project that includes a documentary film as well as a podcast, all of which he has already begun.
As Muthama tells his own coming-of-age story in what he affectionately calls “East Lib,” he juxtaposes that with his father growing up in Kenya and going to a post-colonial British boarding school there. His father went on to become an educator and made his way to the U.S. with his family. Finally, Muthama tells the story of his grandfather who lived through the Mau Mau uprising that ended colonial British rule in Kenya.
During Easter 2024, Muthama and his father, Dr. Joshua Musembi Kivuva, traveled to Kenya to interview Muthama’s 102-year-old grandfather Peter Kivuva.
Victor Muthama’s uncles, grandfather (center) and father (on the right). | Source: Victor Muthama
Muthama’s grandfather spoke to them in Kamba, a language native to Kenya, about his life and experiences as a police officer for the British during the Mau Mau Revolution (1952-1960). In 1963, Kenya gained its independence from Britain.
“My father only had two months of education, and my mother just two days,” says Dr. Kivuva, who teaches Swahili at Imhotep Charter High School in Philadelphia. “The police position to him was formal employment. That formal job enabled him to provide for his family.”
Muthama feels differently about his grandfather’s role as a police officer. “I asked him if he felt he was a traitor,” Muthama says. “I asked him a lot of very tough questions that some of my elders wanted to stop because it was considered disrespectful. For me, it was a problem of intellectual honesty and complete truth because I wanted to know why he [grandfather]was on the other side.”
Topics like this point to the intergenerational sites of tension that are at the heart of the DiasporUS project.
For his part, Dr. Kivuva says he became disillusioned with Kenya 30 years after its independence. Seeking a better future for his family, he immigrated on a Fulbright Scholarship to study international relations at the University of Pittsburgh in 1998. Shortly after, Dr. Kivuva’s wife, Dr. Leonora Anyango-Kivuva, joined her husband with Muthama and his two sisters in tow.
Under the auspices of DisaporUS Media, Muthama has already produced several episodes of the DiasporUS podcast posted on YouTube where he and his father discuss political and social issues in contemporary Kenya, including the recent spring floods ravaging the country and last month’s riots protesting a government bill to raise taxes.
Victor Muthama. | Source: JM the Poet (Village Media)
While the podcast centers Muthama’s father and the documentary will focus on his grandfather, Muthama’s journey dominates the album.
“The music side of DiasporUS is a little more of my personal experience and how I dealt with the frustration of how I learned to live with African parents,” Muthama says. “The music is how I cope, so the music is such a central part of being myself,” he adds.
DiasporUS includes Muthama singing on “No Other Man.” In other tunes like, “Melvin,” and “Mind Off It” Muthama raps to cool and catchy orchestrated beats. On “Bali,” Muthama raps in Swahili and English in fast and staccato rhythms, and for “Mbali,” he goes bilingual again.
He also addresses a very difficult period of his life—when his father left the U.S. to return to Kenya, leaving the family in the States as he navigated visa requirements.
In our interview, Muthama highlights three Black-American men in Pittsburgh who mentored him when he was a teenager: Dr. Jamil Bey, the founder of Urban Kind Institute (the father of Muthama’s childhood friend and one of his producers, Quaadir Bey) and the rapper/activists Jasiri X and Paradise Gray. As a teen, Muthama participated in 1Hood Media Academy’s youth program, co-founded by Jasiri X and Paradise, a member of the 1990s rap group X Clan.
Clearly, hip-hop culture and rap music represented a survival mechanism for Muthama while growing up in East Lib. He also liked R&B music. While riding the school bus to grade school in the morning, Muthama recalls listening to Keisha Cole, Mary J. Blige, 50 Cent and Lil Wayne –his absolute favorite rapper – on WAMO 107.3, Pittsburgh’s only hip-hop and R&B radio station. Muthama also enjoyed gospel music.
The school bus was Muthama’s respite from the drama he encountered on the street. He remembers learning English, Black colloquial English and slang while listening to music on the bus. Muthama was forbidden to speak slang at home, but familiarity with the language of urban America, pop music and hip-hop allowed him to blend in socially.
“I had been singing my whole life and I had been rapping my whole life, but it was kind of secretly because my parents would take my rap notebooks,” recalls Muthama, nicknamed early on “Soulja Vic” and “Singing Vic” by one of his friends.
Victor Muthama, center, with Paradise Gray and Rakim. | Source: Victor Muthama
Muthama laughs when he reflects on this. The front pages of his notebooks were notes for his schoolwork. In the back of the notebooks were rap lyrics, which his parents discovered, and thought were vulgar.
Between 2018 and 2019 Muthama posted songs on SoundCloud. “I recorded them when I was 18, 19, and 20. There were different songs at different times,” Muthama says, explaining they were kinda like a “mixed tape EP thing I dropped.”
“Address Me Proper” is Muthama’s favorite rap song from that period. It is an anthem for his life. The song grappled with questions concerning his identity.
“‘Address Me Proper’ was that time where I started to really accept myself and the nuances of my life,” Muthama says. “I would never be accepted by anyone fully. And so, I realized that I had to accept myself and really be okay with being different. I’ll never be fully Kenyan. I’ll never be fully American.”
As much as Muthama expects DiasporUS to advance his career as an artist, his larger concerns for the project are firmly rooted in familial healing.
“My grandfather, my father, and myself are not only separated by time and space, but we also have had vastly different experiences with white supremacy and [we]look at our futures differently,” Muthama says.
“The goal of DiasporUS is to express what our challenges, obstacles, and opportunities were in various times and locations compared to where we are now.”
Hakim Hasan’s writings have appeared in Black Renaissance Noire, The New York Times Magazine, The Washington Post, and the San Francisco Chronicle.
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