Indigenous Kenyan Music and Social Wellbeing: the Contribution of Arts Education towards a Healthy Society

Abstract

The discourse surrounding the term wellbeing is broad and wide since it encompasses a range of conditions by which a person's healthy state of being may be defined. These conditions include: inter alia, health, safety, welfare, comfort and happiness. In the current scholarship, it is becoming increasingly clear that a definition of wellbeing that focuses entirely on a clinical view of illness and health is inadequate because such definition fails to address a multiplicity of challenges that human beings confront on a daily basis. For instance, activities such as singing that invoke human emotions remain largely unaccounted for in such simplistic definition of wellbeing. Thus, this paper interrogates the relationship between music and social wellbeing, with a particular focus on indigenous Kenyan music. The thesis of the entire discourse is that indigenous Kenyan music, by virtue of its communal nature, plays an integral role in social wellbeing and ultimately, the health of those who engage in it. Using the biopsychosocial model as its conceptual framework, the paper explores how indigenous Kenyan music can be utilized in promoting the social wellbeing of individuals in the society.