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SNAPPY 7: Juukua band – We want to be a different act from Mombasa


Formed in 2012, Afro-fusion group Juukua has been through turbulent times, yet the band members remain committed to their dream; to share their love of music and art with the rest of the world.

During their media tour to promote their new song Fading Flower, they stopped by Nairobi News and talked about their lives and what they are aspiring to do in the Kenyan music industry.

1. Talk about your new song Fading Flower – The song is about love and basically it talks about how hard love is and talks about how the beauty and ugly side of love is.

2. Why did you choose to sing in English and how has the reception been? – We decided to challenge ourselves because we had already done a few other songs in Swahili. There is this thing about people from Coast not singing in English and always singing in Swahili, so we decided mix it up in both languages.

The song itself is a laid back genre of R&B. When we launched it recently people we surprised and we didn’t expect to see people taking out their phones and recording us sing live. We have so far had positive feedback from people who have watched and listened to it.

3. What are your names? – The group has, Julliet Mumia, Winnie Bwire, Enos Opiyo, Victoria Ofula, and the youngest one Henry Ominde.

4. How has your music journey been and why do you think your songs do not get much airplay? – We started singing cover songs and in 2015 we thought that we had a lot to offer because we are artistes and we can educate and at the same time entertain. With our creativity, we have grown since we started becoming an act.

To us we are still new and it is one of the greatest things that we are facing to be able to get our music out there, because we marketing ourselves and I think another challenge is because we are based in Mombasa.

5. What was the inspiration behind the song Minwa?Minwa is a Luo word meaning (our Mother).The song is basically a song about the mother who is in the society. We felt that it was high time we appreciated our mothers. You will find that most of us were raised by mothers and we wanted to celebrate them. We also wanted to celebrate the women who are no popular, as society tends to celebrate mostly the popular people.

6. Is it difficult working as a group? – It is not that hard but there are challenges especially when it comes to making decisions. You have to factor in that we are very different people with different aspirations and goals, but what we try to do is we try and fuse it together and at the end of the day we are Juukua and that is what unites us together.

7. What are the future plans for Juukua? – Juukua is looking forward to being a different act. We have a lot of artistes from Coast who are respected and they all have a particular genre of music, so coming from the Coast we want to be recognized by our very own genre.

We also want to be able to take it a notch higher to the international music scene and be recognized there as well. We are also looking forward to be able to sustain our selves from our music.