“It began when I was a young girl, a teenage girl, when I was interested in music, but I didn't have the capability of that.”
Damackline had come off the stage a few minutes earlier. It was April 2025, at a Sanara event in Nairobi with the Art of Music Foundation, and we'd just watched her sing. Before the first question we told her she could answer in whichever language she liked. This wasn't one of those interviews, we said, where you have to speak perfect English. She took the offer, and kept moving between the two. The language-switching in her speech offers a music of its own.
She grew up in a village, and came to Nairobi with her family as a young woman. They started over in Kibera. There she joined the Chemchemi choir at Springs of Life church, and began, in her word, “muscling” her way towards the singer we'd just heard.
The uniform
The choir was where the training happened. It was also where she learned the rule that decides who gets seen.
“When I was a teenager, I really loved to join choirs. But in those choirs, wanasema we have a certain uniform and I could not afford it.”
“It is a rule, it is a condition, that you have to be in the attire. But I would try my best, practise with them, but I couldn't attend any event with them.”
She'd rehearse, but she couldn't appear. When the choir went out to sing in public, she stayed behind, and there was a second cost under the first. “I didn’t have the uniform and I could not afford the fare to get to where the choir would go.” A set of clothes and a matatu fare stood between practising music and being heard making it.
What she wanted, watching them leave, wasn't a place in their event.
“But at some point, when they had gone, I’d be left disappointed but hoping that one day I’d manage to have those things so that I too can do the singing and do everything forever. Just... forever.”
Nobody else
She had no help with it. “I didn't have any support from both the family and friends.” Her family didn't see where it could go; they “would not see it as something that would one day become what it is right now.” She was discouraged, often.
“Nilikuwa navunjwa moyo at some point.”
And some of the criticism was right, which she says without being asked.
“The opinions were... zingeniumiza inside. I’d think about what I was told and be like, ‘Heh, huyu ameniambia ukweli’, because I could not even sing on-key.”
So she taught herself, with what was free. “I would practice using social media. I would load a video of a vocalist training on social media. I would try it out, but I could not make it.”
Free lessons online assume a phone with data, somewhere private to make noise, and the stubbornness to fail an exercise in front of a screen and come back the next day. She had the last of those. “I sacrificed all that I could to practise and push on.”
And she had a voice she used on herself.
“I would call myself into a private space and talk to myself. I'm like, 'Damackline, you have to do this and you will do it and you will make it to where you want to be.”
When the crowd moved
She'd watched other singers do the thing she wanted. “When I watched my role models sing, it was like, ‘One day I'll be out there,' especially the way you see people wanaimba kwa stage and they are moving crowds.”
Then the church asked her to lead.
“One day I was called to present praise and worship, and that is when I saw the crowd move. I said to myself, 'Damackline, you have to do this and you can do something more than this.'”
We asked her what it's like now, having just watched her perform.
“Now it is really credible and I can say it is through my sacrifice and the support that I gave to myself despite the words, vile vitu watu wanakuambia things like, ‘Ah, wewe? Hapana. Huwezi.”
She credits one more thing alongside the work: “Putting God first because I really wanted this.”
“It has taken me a step of sacrifice to become who I am, here where I am today.”
Music pays
Asked whether her whole life could be funded by singing, she didn't describe a dream. She described a job.
“There are some people outside here that they think that music can't pay, but music pays.”
“I can find an artist who knows how to write the song, but doesn't have the vocals to sing or perform it. But I can do that for that person. So that person will pay me.”
It's the work of the session singer, the guide vocal, the voice on somebody else's track, and it's how a great many working musicians eat. Her example insists on the part that's usually skipped: the voice is a skill, and the skill has a price.
She'd also like to pass it on. “Music can be forever for me because I will mentor those people.” And she gives a reason she'll keep going whether or not the money comes on time. “Music is therapy.”
“So, I will say that it can all be funded.”
Look at the potential
At the end we asked her to speak to the people who decide where money goes in Kenyan music. She didn't ask for a grant. She told them how to look.
“Don't look at where they are now, look at the potential that they have in music.”
“Keep on supporting the artists from the lowest point to the highest point because music is an investment to the society and music has a return on it after you have given out sacrifice.”
Most support for artists arrives once there's something to show: a following, a release, a list of bookings. Producing that evidence costs money. A uniform, a fare, the data for lessons, a decent recording. The singer who can pay for the evidence gets backed. The one who can't is told to come back when she has some. Damackline spent years on the wrong side of that, rehearsing with a choir she couldn't afford to perform with, and carrying the risk herself because nobody else would.
Her request is that someone else carry some of it, earlier.
“Fund them as you can. Please, don't just let them be there because you don't see the potential now. The potential will come later in the days that are coming.”
Asked again whether she'll keep singing, she didn't hesitate.
“Forever.”
Story: Recentred Africa. Sanara is a Mastercard Foundation programme delivered in partnership with HEVA Fund, SNDBX-Ubuntu, Baraza Media Lab and GoDown Arts Centre.