A Child in a Musical Household
Fanuel Amimo was born in 1947 in Shianda, Butere sub-county, Kakamega County — a land of rolling tea hills and tight-knit Luhya communities. Blind from birth or early childhood, he compensated with extraordinary hearing, cataloguing every sound the world offered him.
His earliest experiments were percussive: sufurias, cooking pots, any surface that resonated. By the age of five, mealtimes had a rhythm section.
The Jerrycan Guitar
At twelve, Fanuel constructed his first guitar from fishing line and a jerrycan — a creation that would foreshadow the whole spirit of his career. Where others saw scrap, he heard strings. Where others heard noise, he heard melody.
His early performances at "disko matanga" — local funeral discos, a peculiar Luhya institution where grief and celebration blur — gave him his first real audience.
The 400-Kilometre Walk
At seventeen, with one song in his head and no map in hand, Fanuel walked over 400 kilometres to Nairobi. The journey alone is the stuff of legend — blind, young, carrying nothing but ambition and a melody.
He arrived at the capital in 1964 and positioned himself outside the Hilton Hotel, where a producer named David Amunga passed by and heard something extraordinary.
"Rosa Nokhwebwe" topped Voice of Kenya charts for 14 consecutive weeks in 1973 — a feat no Omutibo record had achieved before.
VOK Broadcasting RecordsThe debut single "Someni Vijana" (Study Hard, Youth) — recorded almost immediately after Amunga heard Fanuel busking — sold 8,000 copies in its first week. For a young man who had walked to Nairobi on bare faith, this was vindication of staggering proportions.
Fanuel's most distinctive technical innovation drew equal parts bewilderment and delight: he used spoons on Coke bottles for percussion. In an era before beatboxing had a name, tourists filmed the spectacle, and those recordings still circulate online today under the improbable subtitle "Kenyan beatbox origins."
Joining the Butere Sharpshooters — a tight-knit ensemble that blended Luhya folklore with rhythmic, dancing guitar lines — Fanuel found his fullest expression. The sound they developed, rooted in Omutibo, the Luhya guitar tradition, was by turns celebratory and melancholic, always recognisably of the soil.
His 1973 composition "Rosa Nokhwebwe" — a portrait of a heart-stealing beauty whose name meant something close to "one who makes you lose your senses" — became a phenomenon, topping Voice of Kenya radio charts for fourteen straight weeks. It remains the track people hum when his name comes up.
The invitation to perform at State House in 1972 was not merely a professional milestone — it was a cultural consecration. Post-Kapenguria celebrations brought the country's elite to Nairobi's most guarded address, and Fanuel Amimo, the blind boy from Butere who had walked to the city five years earlier, was their entertainment.
He played "Safari ya Magadi" — a track that captured the restless movement of people across Kenya's landscape — and Mzee Jomo Kenyatta reportedly rose and danced with his wife Margaret. The image endures: the father of the nation moving to music made by a man who could not see him.
After the performance, Kenyatta summoned Fanuel and pressed 500 shillings into his hand — the equivalent of two cows by the livestock values of that era. It was, in every sense, a royal acknowledgement.