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"Aboriginal singer Kimbo has been playing the blues since the 1970s, giving a voice to Taiwan's disenfranchised and dispossessed. His first album, made after more than 30 years in the business, is now set for release." (Taipei Times, 2005-03-27, Yu Sen-lun,
Protest singer sings again) This excellent article gives a good job of covering Kimbo's artistic exploits, but while Yu calls Kimbo Taiwan's Bob Dylan, not much is said about the fact that Kimbo has not only been a musician that places him at the forefront of the movement for social change, but also an activist who has put his heart and soul into writing, demonstrating and agitating to get people involved.
After finishing his studies at National Taiwan University's Foreign Language Department and presumably a couple of years in the military, Kimbo immediately fell to organizing a mid-seventies movement, led by Li Shuang-ze, to reclaim music for the people. By 1976, at the height of martial law, there was now for the first time "folk music" with social content. Naturally this drew the apprehensive attention of the government, and made Kimbo and his comrades a force to be reckoned with.
1982 -- still five years before the end of martial law and the founding of Taiwan's first opposition party -- was already seeing quite a bit of courageous, in-your-face opposition activity, which took the name of "Tangwai" ("outside the party," the party being the Kuomintang), but all was still quiet on the aboriginal front. It fell to Kimbo to organize the first aboriginal Tangwai activity, the Minority Peoples Committee, for which he served as convenor.
In 1984, he founded the Taiwan Aboriginal Human Rights Promotion Society, the first such organization in the annals of indigenous peoples' rights development. He served as first- and second-term president. Writing in the organization's newsletter, he held forth for public action: "The most important thing about these elections, and of most direct significance, is that they are stimulating our young aboriginal intellectuals (including the candidates and their workers), letting them understand that so-called 'awakening' does not lie in closing yourself up in a room and writing something, but rather in going forth and participating in practical work." (The Aborigine No. 3, 1986-7-15)
At this time of intellectual ferment, the one event that most caught the public's attention was the destruction of the Wu Fong statue in front of the Chiayi Train Station. Wu Fong was the "hero" in a story, presented as historical fact, who was supposedly instrumental in ending the aboriginal practice of head-hunting. When the statue came down, so did Wu Fong's hero status, and within a few years the Wu Fong story was removed from the literature curriculum of Taiwan's elementary schools. That was in 1985.
Kimbo also assumed leadership of the 1984 movement for name rectification (the right to be called "indigenous people" rather than "mountain compatriots," which finally prevailed with an official name-change in 1994), and the 1988 drive for the return of tribal lands to their rightful custodians (which still goes on today, and, in my opinion, is doomed to failure).
These are some of the reasons why it is not only his music that allows such musicians as Chen Chien-nien, Biun, Dakanao, Afu and others to call him "my teacher" and "my uncle."
Lynn
Sources:
Taipei Times, 2003-04-04, Gavin Phipps, Melodies of nature with a native twist
Taipei Times, 2004-12-31, David Momphard, Taitung rocks out the near year
Taipei Times, 2005-03-27, Yu Sen-lun, Protest singer sings again
Taipei Peace People (archived Rising Formosa), KMT plutonium legacy, Longtan wasteland
Chinese -- Kimbo's website, kimbo-hu.com
Chinese -- Kimbo's website, About Hu Defu
Chinese -- Folksong Banquet Dawu Mountain
Chinese - The Call of Dawu Mountain, Amnesty International Magazine Publications, Aboriginal Series No. 1, Jan. 1999
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