AfricaIs aCountry

Music Break. Dengue Fever

Africa Is a Country Podcast
African Five-a-Side Podcast

Music Break. Dengue Fever

By
Sean Jacobs

A lot of music we like don’t come from Africa. Like this one from Dengue Fever, the California-Cambodia combo: an Indonesian protest song “Gendjer Gendjer.”

… [T]he song was originally written during the Japanese occupation of Indonesia during World World II when food was so scarce that people resorted to eating Gendjer, a weed that grew in rice fields. The song re-surfaced in the 1960s in Indonesia when there was a violent military coup and government crackdown on communists and ordinary citizens–a period of political turmoil dramatized in the movie, “The Year of Living Dangerously.” “Anyone caught listening to or singing ‘Gendjer Gendjer’ was considered an enemy of the government …”

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