Mohamed fervently rummages away at a rat’s nest of electronics. Several weeks have passed since his last attempt, with each failure leading to increasingly desperate experiments. The sun is hot, harshly reflecting off the tightly packed tin-roofed shacks around the district. Many aspire to leave, yet only a few residents raise enough money to do so. Crammed behind a snack stand run by his cousins is the waning dream that is Mohamed’s workshop. Shakily wiping sweat from his brow, he irritably works, stooping over a circuit board, annealing wires into new configurations, and grabbing parts from nearby shelves. The radio plays a fast-paced, Singeli classic as he continues scouring through broken electronics scattered throughout the shop—many of which were hard to come by locally: some were acquired from trips to neighboring districts; others were bartered for scraps from mechanics; the most precious were stolen from wealthier areas of the city. After finding another circuit board, Mohamed rolls his shoulders, straightens his back, and tilts his neck to focus again through a magnifying lens above his workbench.
Without warning, Maiko slams into the side of the workbench, scaring Mohamed, who nearly knocks over the surrounding shelves whilst holding his electronics. Mohamed quietly curses his cousin for his carelessness as Maiko rushes to quickly close the curtains leading to the snack stand. Angry voices chatter outside while Maiko catches his breath; leaning against the workbench, he tilts his head upwards, his eyes closed as he breathes deeply through his nose. After regaining his composure, Maiko smiles and places a Sony Discman on the workbench besides Mohamed, who embraces his cousin before excitedly dismantling it to its barest components, tossing a CD left inside out into the street.
Mohamed checks outside then impatiently motions for Maiko to keep watch. Pulling back another curtain, he reveals a large machine cobbled together from miscellaneous metal scraps and electronics. The contraption is a hoarder’s dream: cell phones, fans, keyboards, televisions, back massagers, children’s toys, vibrators, kitchen blenders, radio parts—anything that sustains an electrical current—all haphazardly interconnected by sinewy knots of multicolored wiring. The unit stands upright, bars extended below and to each side, resembling arms and legs. Its center contains a tiny control panel and a saddle wide enough to fit two men. Mohamed connects the CD player to the panel, inserts their demo, Singeli Ya Maajabu, and clicks play. The machine starts whirring as its control panel flickers on. Maiko whoops but is quickly silenced by Mohamed’s glare, who motions to check outside again.
Before Maiko can peek, though, a large, angry man bursts into the workshop, holding the CD Mohamed had tossed into the street. His face is red, and he’s wearing a shirt that matches the CD’s cover art. Eyes wide and unblinking, the man points at the pair and makes a cut throat gesture with his finger. Without hesitation, Mohamed jumps into the machine and knocks their assailant aside with its hefty metal arm before collecting Maiko and stumbling out into the streets. The song, “Kazi Ipo,” blares out of the machine’s sound system as they clomp towards two buildings looming in the distance: the commercial towers, or the “Icons” as they are colloquially known.
Operating the machine is awkward, as it stumbles along the bumpy, unkempt streets. But Mohamed based its controls off of his favorite computer game, “MechWarrior,” making moving the metal hunk nostalgic. An angry mob forms behind the machine, enraged victims whose electronics were stolen. A man grabs the machine’s shoulder and tries to reach the pair; however, he cannot resist dancing, falling mid-dance back onto the street to the beat of the next track, “Chuma,” with its pleasant melodies and bouncing, shuffling rhythms. One of Singeli Ya Maajabu’s biggest bangers, “Ganzi,” compels the mob to dance so intensely that their swinging arms knock each other over. The scene is pandemonium: even the police cannot seize the pair because either dancers block their path or they are seduced by the glitchy effects on songs like “Jimwage.” No broadcast of the event is available because reporters and citizens cannot focus long enough to record the spectacle.
After reaching the commercial towers, Mohamed and Maiko begin climbing, smashing the building’s windows to create climbing holes. After several minutes of climbing, Maiko looks down, but then quickly looks back up again after realizing a fall from that height would mean certain death. Over the blowing wind is the percussive hum of a military helicopter hovering nearby, searching for any opportunity to shoot the climbers without causing damage to the precious commercial building. The pilot quickly loses control, however, as she also begins dancing to the repetitive percussion and overlapping effects on “Rusha.”
After thirty minutes of climbing, they reach the top. The timing is perfect, as their album’s penultimate track, “Zakwao,” begins playing. The song is celebratory in tone and features an awesome jam session between Maiko and Mohamed that, while repetitive, is improvisational—like an East African techno rave melded with two bar edits of new age jazz jam session. Sirens blare in the distance, and the pair know they must act quickly, jumping outside the mech to set up a tripod to hold their phone. The last track, “Ganzi,” plays as Mohamed and Maiko begin recording a social media post and force the mech into a dancing frenzy, sweeping and striking its cumbersome legs and arms in all directions, but it falls just short of the pace to match the song’s high-octane tempo. In a last ditch attempt, Mohamed puts the mech into turbo mode, its arms revolving in alternating semi-circles, its legs convulsing in disjointed motions that follow no sensible structure or pattern. Maiko screams, but the mech’s overdriven motor drowns out the sound as its back legs slip off the building’s side. A rush… then everything stops. The video auto-posts.