Hip-Hop in Africa. Msia Kibona Clark
many ways the African emcee informs each about the other. To deny African emcees their ability to represent Africa would be to reject an important part of the African experience.
African hip-hop is connected to the “notion of a global black experience of oppression and resistance” (Haupt 2008, 146). To understand hip-hop as a Black music form is sometimes a controversial position, although this characterization of hip-hop does not negate the connection nonblacks may have to the genre. There are hip-hop communities all over the world, many of them belonging to people who are not of African descent. But this does not mean hip-hop is not rooted in an African past. Stephanie Shonekan’s article “Sharing Hip-Hop Cultures: The Case of Nigerians and African Americans” looks at the linkages between African and African American hip-hop and highlights the cultural links that exist in “all manifestations of Black music,” referring to the progression of Black music not as a “continuum, but as a cycle” (2011, 11). Shonekan says that hip-hop is a Black music genre based on its roots in Black musical traditions and its role as a space to navigate and express Black identities and oppressions.
An essential element in hip-hop authenticity lies in truthful representation, in representing the culture and the environment from which the artist emerged (Forman 2002; S. Watkins 2005; Pennycook 2007; Hess 2009; Appert 2016). Authenticity in hip-hop is the degree to which artists remain true to hip-hop’s core principles (see the next section). According to Catherine Appert, Senegalese “hip hop’s very generic parameters allow for music that is grounded in Senegalese particularity and still definitively hip hop” (2016, 292). The same can be said for hip-hop globally. This study will use this definition of authenticity and apply it to hip-hop in Africa. Therefore, as long as an artist is representing his or her reality and experiences as an African, through hip-hop, it can be seen as African hip-hop.
When scholars consider hip-hop in Africa, they often include some of the talented artists who make up popular genres of urban youth music all over Africa: kwaito in South Africa, bongo flava in Tanzania, hiplife in Ghana, kuduro in Angola, genge/kapuka/boomba in Kenya. All these genres contain elements from hip-hop, reggae, R&B, house, and other music genres. Each has blended genres and influences to become its own genre, in much the way hip-hop did decades earlier. Artists like Yemi Alade, Davido, and P-Square (Nigerian), Obrafour (Ghanaian), Diamond Platnumz (Tanzanian), and Nonini (Kenyan) are extremely talented and have all become stars of urban pop music genres that emerged in their countries in recent decades. These artists are not necessarily hip-hop artists.
Boundaries between music genres are often fluid, making defining genres difficult. Mikhail Bakthin says that text belongs in the same genre when there are similarities “in theme, composition, or style” (1986, 87). While attempting to come up with a system of automatic music classification, Tao Li, Mitsunori Ogihara, and Qi Li (2003) and Nicolas Scaringella, Giorgio Zoia, and Daniel Mlynek (2006) concede the difficulty of the task. Li, Ogihara, and Li claim that a lot of “music sounds sit on boundaries between genres. These difficulties are due to the fact that music is an art that evolves, where performers and composers have been influenced by music in other genres” (2003, 282). Scaringella, Zoia, and Mlynek say that “musical genres are categories that have arisen through a complex interplay of cultures, artists and market forces to characterize similarities between musicians or compositions and organize music collections. Yet, the boundaries between genres still remain fuzzy as well as their definition making the problem of automatic classification a non-trivial task” (2006, 2).
Scholars in communication, computer science, and engineering have proposed methods by which music can successfully be automatically categorized into genres, including hip-hop. Such classification is helpful, and further examinations of how those methods could be used in hip-hop studies are needed. This book focuses on a variety of factors when defining hip-hop as not only a genre, but also a culture.
Hip-Hop Authenticity
That hip-hop would have a significant impact in Africa is not necessarily surprising. When hip-hop made its way to Africa, it caught on among the urban youth, who were attracted to the words, images, and beats of the music. The research tells us that the first attempts at performing hip-hop were often in the form of imitations and were not representative of local realities. Many simply imitated the cadence and style of popular American hip-hop artists. There are still artists who imitate Western musical styles, who incorporate images common in Western hip-hop, images foreign to their own experiences. For example, Haaken, Wallin-Ruschman, and Patange (2012), studying hip-hop in Sierra Leone, found that many hip-hop artists regularly used the word nigga because of their exposure to American hip-hop, but few knew anything about the history of the word or its current controversies. We will revisit the appropriations of African American and hip-hop culture more fully in chapter 6.
Many of the first hip-hop artists to break away from the pattern of imitation with their own unique styles helped shape hip-hop culture in their countries. In addition, the economic realities of the 1980s brought many African economies to their knees, and in the early 1990s these conditions would influence young artists across Africa to begin to transform hip-hop into an expression of contemporary African realities.
The foundations of hip-hop culture have been embraced in hiphop communities throughout Africa, and in many cases there has been an understanding of the five elements of hip-hop as well as hiphop values of authenticity, or “keeping it real.” Hip-hop’s five elements, recognized as the foundation of hip-hop culture, are the emcee (MC, or rap artist), the DJ, the b-boy or b-girl (breakdancer), the graffiti artist, and knowledge (of self) (Kitwana 2002; Chang 2005). The official website of the Universal Zulu Nation, a hip-hop collective that began in the 1970s in New York City, describes the five elements:
1. Graffiti is the writing of language or the scribe that documents the history.
2. Emcee is the oral griot, the conveyer of the Message.
3. DJing is the heart beat, the drum of the art or movement; DJ comes from the Djembe drum.
4. B-Boy/Girl is the exercise and the human expression through dance or body movement to keep the body in proper health.
5. Knowledge is the reason why we are who we are where did our roots comes [sic] from, what is the beginning of Man and where are we today. How do we take the artistic expression of Hip Hop and find our purpose in LIFE! (UZN, n.d.)
In Kenya, Malawi, Senegal, South Africa, Tanzania, Uganda, Zambia, Zimbabwe, we see that hip-hop artists have embraced these hip-hop elements (Haupt 2008; Parris 2008; Mose 2011, 2013; Casco 2012; Charry 2012; Fenn 2012; Perullo 2012; Clark 2013; Kellerer 2013). In a 2011 interview, Ghanaian artist Edem indicated that hip-hop was about “staying true to yourself.” In interviews with artists in Tanzania, several indicated that hip-hop was about representing the streets and keeping it real (Clark 2013). Malian emcee Amkoullel l’enfant Peul spoke in our interview about the importance of preserving the history of African hip-hop, as well as its connection with hip-hop’s roots, in both New York and African cultures.
Hip-Hop and Representation
Universally the question of hip-hop authenticity has been a subject of debate, and definitions of hip-hop authenticity have varied. The link between hip-hop authenticity and an artist’s relationship to poor, urban communities (ghettos) is based on hip-hop’s emergence from the Black urban underclass, as a response to the wealth of the elite and corruption and racism among public figures. This brings us back to the idea of representation, a core aspect of hip-hop. Place and representation—where an artist represents—is almost as important as what an artist represents. Because of hip-hop’s origins many still believe that in order to be authentically hip-hop one needs to be from the ghetto and espouse “ghetto” values, to speak to and represent “ghetto” culture (McLeod 1999; Forman 2002; S. Watkins 2005; L. Watkins 2012; Williams and Stroud 2014). The US hip-hop group Blahzay Blahzay captures the presence of these values in hip-hop in their 1996 song “Danger”: “I rocks hardcore, even when I dress suited. / On some business shit my street is deep rooted.” The idea of these lines and this belief is that even with money and when outside the physical space of the ghetto, being hip-hop means maintaining roots in