hip-hop is not an African music form, so all African hip-hop artists are just imitating American culture. Lliane Loots’s (2003) piece on American hip-hop in South Africa claims that the impact of American hip-hop on Africans is negative. Loots (2003) compares the influence of hiphop on Africans to Frantz Fanon’s idea of cultural colonialism. This perspective deletes hip-hop’s African past as well as its links to traditional forms of rapping and storytelling that exist in many African languages and cultures. Fanon’s pivotal discussion of culture can be used to examine hip-hop in Africa (see chapter 3), but from the perspective of hip-hop as a tool for mobilization.
Some argue that hip-hop music is African only if artists are performing in local languages and over African rhythms. These arguments narrow the definition of hip-hop to simply a focus on music, ignoring the culture that surrounds African hip-hop. Hip-hop culture includes music but includes various other cultural elements. African hip-hop’s influence is found in new slang emerging from various urban centers in Africa, and in the graffiti that colors African cities and towns. In addition, this argument ignores the contributions of the African diaspora to African music, such as mbalax (Senegalese dance music), highlife (West African dance music), or Afrobeat (Nigerian dance music), all of which were heavily influenced by the US diaspora.
There are those who argue it is about location. A fundamental principle of hip-hop is the idea of representation, of representing where you are from, your reality. The “locationists” argue that unless one’s experience as an African emcee emanates from living in Africa, one cannot represent oneself as an African emcee. This perspective calls into question artists such as Nigerian American rapper Wale, disregarding whether or not Wale self-identifies as an African emcee. Wale’s music is not considered African because his experience is not based on living in Nigeria. Some would also discount Somali-born artist K’naan as an African emcee because his perspective may not represent life on the streets of Mogadishu today; he has spent more than twenty years away from Somalia. This definition robs the African emcee of the power to self-identify as an African emcee. The emcee’s representation of an African in the diaspora and all the identities and experiences that blend together is a representation of an African reality.
The past thirty years have seen dramatic increases in the African immigrant population in the United States. Between 1990 and 2000 the number of Africans living in the United States jumped from 200,000 to 800,000; by 2013 the African-born population in the United States was 1.8 million (Anderson 2015). In cities such as New York, Minneapolis, Atlanta, Houston, and Washington, DC, which have been primary destinations, the increase has been even more significant. In Europe, countries like France and England had large African populations decades before the increase in African immigration to the United States. All these African immigrant communities form bridges between Africa and the West, and in 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.
