The release of Kensoul, a new CD by Kenyan Liz Ogumbo, completes the evolution of a fashionista who has always viewed music and fashion as essentially one thing.
The 33-year-old model migrated to the United States in the late 1990s to study computer science. While there, she realised that people like her — dark and tall, thin and beautiful — were highly sought after in the world of fashion modelling.
At first, the Nairobi-born beauty found it confusing. “I had never had that much attention in my life,” she says. “I was a tall, thin girl who got no love from the brothers and suddenly there was all this interest.” Indeed, a song on her 15-track album, Big Ass in Blue Jeans, references the Sarah Baartman physiognomy.
The model and fashion designer was born in Kenya to an entrepreneur father and an educator mother. Her mother was a French teacher before her secondment to the Kenyan education ministry as a French expert, and the linguistic gene seems to have been passed on. Ogumbo, apart from speaking her native country’s official language, English, also speaks Swahili, Luo and French.
The second in a family of four, Ogumbo says she grew up in a musical family and Luo folk music was always being played at home. But traditional music aside, like most teenagers, Ogumbo was also listening to Mos Def, A Tribe Called Quest, Talib Kweli and other rap acts. Unlike most teenagers, Ogumbo also listened to Chaka Khan, Aretha Franklin and rhumba muso M’bilia Bel from the Democratic Republic of Congo.
Cooking up a storm
We met at DKH, a horse farm and private resort in the Swartland, 40km outside Cape Town. She looked decidedly uncomfortable on a horse but, wearing red high heels, cooked a superb lunch for us, including her fiancé, telecommunications entrepreneur Nicolas Regisford, and the Mail & Guardian‘s photographer David Harrison. It comprised lentils, spinach, chapatti, a rich chicken stew and rice. It wasn’t a Kenyan-style nyama choma (meat braai) and Harrison, a vegetarian, said he enjoyed it.
While she tucked into the meal (using her hands), I asked her at what point she decided to become a model. Her response, “I didn’t decide to become a model, life decided that I would be a model”, might sound metaphysical and cheesy until you see Ogumbo, all 1.8m of her. If she hadn’t become a model, one could imagine people would have been constantly asking her: “So, are you a model?”
She says her slim figure is “genetic” — she doesn’t work out and “eats like a regular person. I eat all the things people trying to lose weight don’t.”
Her parents were opposed to her taking up modelling as a career. At the time when she left for the US, the Face of Africa modelling competition had just been launched and she had been contacted. But her father was adamant that his daughter wouldn’t be part of it — tales of sex, drugs and anorexia in the industry nauseated him.
“I had to be discreet about my modelling,” she says.
Heading out into the world
But by juggling a music scholarship in rural Missouri, studying for a BSc in computer science at Montgomery College and modelling in New York, she was able to establish herself on the competitive ramps of Milan, Paris and New York.
After graduation, she worked for several years as a programmer at Microsoft. She has just penned a book about her life, The Modelling Industry: Who Is the Ideal Model?, which she hopes will be on the shelves sometime next year.
Music or fashion? I ask. “Fashion and music,” she shoots back. “Fashion coincides with music. I have found ways to present both in one package. Music is my lifestyle, so is fashion.”
Indeed, in a photo shoot later that day on the beach, she is clad in one of her earthy, flowing garments.
The album is an experimental, neo- soul offering that deals with love and human relationships, sexuality and the female body, lust and the fashion world. Vocals are in French and Luo, English and Swahili and she features several local musicians.
The album’s mood and textures are varied. There is the sparse, hip-hop accentuated tune, Le Coeur Qui Crie L’Amour, which includes the flowing and racy Tumi Molekhane (Tumi and the Volume), but in my favourite track on the album, Searching, she brings in the expansive vocals of Mxo to seek out her soulish accents in a reggae style.
The standout track on the album is Big Ass in Blue Jeans, written when she was working as a model in New York. It is a contemplative imprint of the times and politics of the ramp. As a tribute to her Luo heritage, there’s the traditional Maro Pa More, a song she first sang when she was four.
If Ogumbo had followed her parents’ wishes, she might have been working as a dreary programmer in a two-by-two-metre office somewhere in Silicon Valley. What is the likelihood that as an IT geek she would have put out a book, an album and set up a fashion business?