You're listening to a podcast from the BBC World Service. This is Hard Talk with me, Stephen Sacker.

Thanks for downloading this edition of the program. I do hope you enjoy it.

Welcome to Hard Talk on the BBC World Service with me, Stephen Sacker. Today I'm in Nairobi,

a rapidly growing hub city in East Africa, which encapsulates

so many of the positives and negatives of the current African experience. There's growth,

youthful energy, a tech transformation, and there's also grinding poverty and deep frustration with a system which seems to entrench inequality and corruption.

My guest is Eric Wainaina, one of Kenya's most popular musicians whose songs over two decades have captured a spirit of Kenyanness,

which has combined dance rhythms with sometimes biting social

commentary. In neighbouring Uganda, another popular musician, Bobby Wine, has become the leader of an

opposition movement and has been locked up by the Museveni government. So, how delicate a line

has Eric Wainaina been treading here in Kenya?

Well, he joins me now. Eric Wynaner, welcome to Hard Talk. It's good to be here.

You have been making music for three decades or so. If you think about the music you made at the

beginning and the sort of music you're working on now, what's changed?

Well, the music I'm making now is a lot more personal. When I started off, I came from a gospel background, you know, and then there's a lot of pressure in the Kenyan music industry.

You're coming from a church background, you know, to tow a particular line. But I felt that, first of all,

I had been raised in a very despotic era in both the original Kenyatta and then President

Moy. You mean culturally and politically? Culturally and politically, you know. And I had come

of age at a time when Kenya was a single-party state. And so coming from a church background

and coming through this sort of political straight-jacketing, as it were,

I felt I needed to...

I wanted to have a message in my music

...