Hip-Hop in Africa. Msia Kibona Clark
One of the best-known Motswako artists is Hip Hop Pantsula (HHP), while younger artists Chazz le Hippie and Missy RBK have emerged recently. Zef rap was a style started by White Afrikaans speaking hip-hop heads and is performed in Afrikaans (Williams and Stroud 2013).
In Tanzania, hip-hop is not as commercially viable as bongo flava: many hip-hop artists are critical of the pop genre and have turned into activists invested in maintaining and developing Tanzanian hip-hop culture. While hip-hop culture remains strong through the youth involved in the culture, the tensions between bongo flava and hip-hop may have had an impact on hip-hop’s development and the willingness of hip-hop artists to experiment with sound. For example, many hip-hop artists in Tanzania have been hesitant to experiment by using beats and sounds that come from other music genres, exclusively using hip-hop beats, in an effort to stay “authentically” hiphop. Meanwhile in Senegal, with a variety of youth music, hip-hop artists do not have a popular pop hybrid to compete with, though in recent years Senegalese hip-hop has begun seeing a trend toward dance music and more commercialized hip-hop, as discussed in the short documentary 100% Galsen (Sene 2012).
As in Tanzania, some Senegalese hip-hop artists use only hip-hop beats, believing that using beats from other musical genres would affect the authenticity of their music (Appert 2016). According to Appert, mbalax beats are usually performed with socially and politically conscious lyrics in Senegal, though conscious lyrics are not always accompanied by mbalax beats. Also, as in Tanzania, Senegalese artists have a difficult time earning a living from their music (Keyti, pers. comm., August 2, 2009; Herson 2011; Clark 2013). Artists often have to rely on other business deals, paid appearances, shows, and touring to make a living.
Into Africa
As hip-hop spread globally, it made its way back across the Atlantic Ocean to Africa. Hip-hop arrived on the continent in the 1980s and brought with it a new sound and new styles of dance (e.g., breakdancing). Many young Africans first heard hip-hop as it trickled in via radio stations, house parties, and night clubs. As the music spread, it would often be those with relatives who traveled to the United States or Europe, or those with access to exchange students studying in their country, who would get the latest hip-hop cassette tapes. Copies of the prized tapes would then make their way around the neighborhood. Pioneering hip-hop artists like Zimbabwe’s Doom E. Right, Tanzania’s KBC of Kwanza Unit, and South Africa’s Shaheen Ariefdien have all reflected on these experiences in their first contacts with hip-hop (Doom E. Right, pers, comm., August 26, 2011; KBC, pers. comm., September 1, 2011; Ariefdien and Burgess, 2011).
In his 2007 memoir A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier, Ishmael Beah recounts his first contact with hip-hop music in early-1990s Sierra Leone. After hearing hip-hop for the first time, Beah and his friends became so absorbed by the music and the culture that they formed a hip-hop group. Though later forced into becoming a child soldier for the Sierra Leone military, it was his hip-hop cassettes and his skills as an emcee and dancer that initially saved Beah from being killed (Beah 2007). The civil wars in Sierra Leone and Liberia were infamous for their use of child soldiers. Often the boys forced to fight would be kept high on drugs (marijuana, cocaine) and plied with images and sounds of gangsta rap (Sommers 2003; Beah 2007). Armed with the lightweight, easy-to-use AK-47s, they were numb and ready to kill.
Elsewhere in Africa it would often be middle- and upper-class Africans who, with access to the appropriate equipment, formed the first rap crews. By the late 1980s African emcees grabbed the mic and began to transform hip-hop. Groups like Prophets of da City (POC) and Black Noise emerged to help pioneer hip-hop culture in South Africa. Both groups would be influenced by the music of American hip-hop groups like Public Enemy, X-Clan, and NWA as they told their own stories of life in apartheid South Africa (Ariefdien and Burgess 2011).
In West Africa the Senegalese group Positive Black Soul (PBS) emerged to help usher in hip-hop culture in that country. Along with rapper MC Solaar, PBS greatly influenced the emergence of hip-hop culture in Senegal. MC Solaar would go on to become one of the first African emcees to do a song with a major American hip-hop artist when he recorded “Le Bien, Le Mal” with Guru in 1993. Eric Charry provides a detailed account of hip-hop’s arrival in West Africa via Europe. Charry is especially thorough in detailing hip-hop’s history among francophone Africans. An important element in the growth of hip-hop in Senegal, for example, has been the migration of Senegalese immigrants into both New York and Paris, which would become important routes for hip-hop exchanges (Charry 2012).
The emergence of hip-hop culture varied all over the continent, but by the early 1990s several countries in Africa had flourishing hip-hop communities. In East Africa, groups Kwanza Unit and the De-Plow-Matz, and artist 2 Proud (now Sugu), were integral to the growth of hip-hop in Tanzania in the early 1990s. A photo (fig. 1.3) shows Kwanza Unit founding member Zavara Mponjika (aka Rhymson) in his old neighborhood of Temeke in Dar es Salaam. In Kenya, hip-hop artist Hardstone and the group Kalamashaka were influential in the development of hip-hop in that country. In West Africa, Reggie Rockstone and the group Talking Drums helped transform Ghanaian hip-hop, with artists performing in both English, Pidgin English, and various Ghanaian languages. Reggie Rockstone and Talking Drums also helped usher in hiplife, which came to incorporate various styles of music. There are hip-hop emcees, reggae musicians, and R&B singers who perform hiplife music.
Figure 1.3. Zavara Mponjika, aka MC Rhymson, of the group Kwanza Unit in the Temeke district of Dar es Salaam in 2010. Photo by author.
These early pioneers of hip-hop in Africa helped transform the culture from an imitation of American hip-hop to something distinctly local. Some of these artists have stepped away from the spotlight and others are still active, while still others are transitioning into politics or organizing with NGOs to make a difference in social issues.
Hip-hop culture has five elements (the emcee, the DJ, graffiti, breakdancing, and knowledge of self). While the emcee has the largest visible presence in Africa, aspects of all the elements can be found in Africa. Knowledge of self as an element emerged last and is often cited only by serious hip-hop heads.3 For most serious hip-hop heads, “knowledge of self is considered to be the fifth element of hip-hop, which informs the other elements” (Haupt 2008, 144). Many of the early African artists were attracted to not just the sound of hip-hop but the words. It was the honesty, and the voice of resistance, that also appealed to African hip-hop artists. Some of these artists understood the fifth element and incorporated it into a holistic approach to hip-hop culture.
In political science the phrase “all politics is local” could be similarly applied to hip-hop. All hip-hop is local. Emcees represent their contemporary local realities. Hip-hop scenes in various cities have their own distinctive styles and sounds. While hip-hop in Los Angeles was largely influenced by the funk music scene and gang culture there, hip-hop in Dakar was influenced by the mbalax music scene and Senegalese Islamic culture in that city. Hip-hop in Africa is a representation of local African communities and is influenced by local experiences and cultures. Hip-hop communities emerged nationally with very few connections with communities beyond their borders, and connections between francophone, anglophone, and lusophone countries were almost nonexistent. Aware of developments in the US hip-hop scenes, hip-hop communities in Africa developed in local contexts, largely a product of the music, culture, and history of the communities within which the culture developed.
The lyrics of those early African emcees encompassed the emotions and experience of entire generations of youth. The result was that artists not only speak to their national audiences, but contributed to global hip-hop dialogues as well. The goal for many artists was not just to speak to their local audiences but to represent their Africa to the world. For example, Senegalese rap pioneers Positive Black Soul (PBS) released their song “Africa” because they wanted to show the world “what Africa really is” (Appert 2016, 286).
African hip-hop artists also brought about conscious connections between hip-hop and African styles of rhyming and poetry, such as tassou (Senegal), maanso (Somalia), ushairi (Tanzania), that have existed for centuries in African