Many must have seen the short video of Rwanda’s Bruce Melodie’s song "Katerina” on TikTok. It was widely shared on other social media platforms.

The hit song deserves the accolades. It was a pleasant surprise to many the reason it garnered such attention was Kenya’s Mombasa Country Governor Hassan Joho captured in the TikTok video lip-synching and clearly enjoying it as he rocks to the tune.

The performance is a great endorsement for Bruce’s number. I imagine it played to a large audience around East Africa given the wide sharing on social media.

Those who watched the video and hadn’t known the song, or hadn’t sampled the creativity in Rwanda got a taste of it.

In a tweet sharing the video, Bruce was exuberant that; "It is our time”, hopeful it could be a harbinger to Rwandan music capturing a wider audience in the region.

The country has its other stars — Knowless easily comes to mind, and I’ve on occasion heard a Rwandan crooner in the vibrant FM radios in Nairobi and Kampala.

This means that Rwandan music is not exactly unfamiliar in the region and, because of proximity, actually places it the environment that music in East Africa has developed, including the markets that have enabled it.

I went looking and found that across the region popular musicians from the early years of independence were less inspired by American music than their West African counterparts.

One scoping analysis by the British Council finds that in those early years influences were taken from closer to home, including Arabic sounds from the coast, South African rhythms adopted in Tanzania and Kenya, and the predominance of Congolese Rumba that touched Rwanda.

More recently urban genres have dominated the youth market. Initially, these styles were heavily influenced by American R&B and hip-hop, but increasingly they have a more homegrown character, often sung in local languages.

In these languages, the different countries in the region have their distinctiveness in the cultural mix that flavours their music.

There are also the lyrics infused with a mixture of languages such as the English, Kinyarwanda and Swahili Bruce’s song.

Then there are the middle classes who want a more "sophisticated” sound, reflected in the smooth stylings of R&B and neo-soul, where there is a large overlap with what is commonly termed "afrofusion”.

Afrofusion are elements of African music — harmonies, melodies or even guitar lines - combined with heavy doses of generic soul, pop and slick, middle-of-the-road, production.  

It however may seem that’s as far as it goes. Whilst the music is popular with middle class urban African audiences, the downside is that it has a very derivative sound that makes it hard to popularise outside of the region.

In this respect, international cultural profile of East Africa has been much lower compared to Southern Africa, and particularly West Africa.

Take, for instance, the new Afrobeats Chart. Tomorrow (Sunday) BBC Radio 1Xtra will be launching the Official UK Afrobeats Top 20.

The chart arose from the musical movement out of Nigeria in the 2010s presenting a different sound dubbed Afrobeats.

This is not to be confused with Afrobeat — which was pioneered in the late 1960s by Nigerian artist and activist Fela Kuti.

The new chart is based on streaming data and sales and names in it are well known locally – Burna Boy, for example.

In 2019, Afrobeats artistes including from the African diaspora collectively spent 86 weeks in the Official Chart Top 40, up from 24 weeks in 2017.

Given that many of these artists are danced to locally, it speaks to how the dominance of the American sound has waned in favour of a stronger African influence.

Notably, this influence has to a large extent been Nigerian and West Africans in the diaspora, whose music has dominated youth markets.

It is acknowledged that diaspora communities are vital to the development of new economic powers such as India and Nigeria, but have not played a major role in East Africa.

The diaspora communities are important in providing an "international” audience, and perhaps more importantly being the conduit for feeding ideas, innovation and "style” back to their parent countries.

Twitter: @gituram

The views expressed in this article are of the author.