African hip-hop will include hiphop music performed by individuals born in Africa, and who identify as African, regardless of where they live. The definition will also include those who are recent African migrants as a result of migrations of African communities outside Africa, especially in the West, in the past fifty years. While there are African hip-hop artists all over the world, this research will focus primarily on hip-hop in Africa, as well as hip-hop produced by those who migrated from Africa to the United States, the birthplace of hip-hop culture.
While the concept of representation is often discussed by hiphop artists, it is also a core concept within cultural studies. According to Hall, “To say that two people belong to the same culture is to say that they interpret the world in roughly the same ways and can express themselves . . . in ways which will be understood by each other” (2013). Hip-hop music speaks, through the use of shared languages, to individuals within certain cultures. Hip-hop is a vehicle by which artists represent locations, experiences, and identities. It is also a vehicle through which African realities are shaped and told. Representation in hip-hop serves to validate, depict, and define a place, a people, and experiences.
This research contributes to defining African hip-hop and recognizes hip-hop culture in Africa as a form of cultural representation by urban youth on the continent and in the diaspora. African hip-hop culture is tied to both African cultures and global hip-hop cultures. Hip-hop uses the power of words and wordplay while simultaneously understanding and harnessing the power of representation.
The research is based on the premise that hip-hop is a musical form with African roots, roots that predate hip-hop’s contemporary origins in the South Bronx between 1970 and 1973 (Chang and DJ Kool Herc 2005; Kitwana 2002). Hip-hop is part of years of back-and-forth music flows between Africa and the African diaspora. African hiphop has also been influenced by the continent’s own musical history. Hip-hop artists all over Africa have used local, continental, and diasporic elements in their music.
The research will examine representations within this varied and complex culture, on a continent with multiple hip-hop communities. Some hip-hop communities are larger than others. Most began in the capital cities but have spread to smaller towns and villages. There are also a growing number of African artists in the US diaspora, as a result of the large numbers of Africans who have migrated out of Africa and into the United States in the past thirty years. Hip-hop is bringing these artists together through collaborations and is creating both diverse and common narratives of African society.
This book examines the role that female artists play in constructing contemporary representations of African women. These artists are influenced by both hip-hop and local cultures, and they use their music to provide additional perspectives on, and depictions of, women in Africa. Many challenge constructions of femininity and womanhood, or the policing of women’s sexualities. Others direct their commentary toward gender oppressions or gender identities. It is important to understand how the representations created by female emcees contribute to our understandings of urban African women. Media representations of African women present skewed single-story narratives of passive, poor, rural African women. Female emcees offer representations that present narratives of African women having agency, women in both urban and rural contexts, and women who recognize and grapple with privilege in its many manifestations.
The research looks at African hip-hop as a representation of African society, as a representation through which Africa is discussed, defined, and represented. The events and experiences that have influenced the content of hip-hop in Africa, and the representations of Africa it chooses to depict, are significant. These events and experiences differ across Africa, but there are some important similarities. For example, the depictions of African economic and political realities, interactions with state institutions, and access to resources bear significant similarities in hip-hop coming from various parts of Africa. Topics like migrations west, across the Sahara, and in boats, as well as via Western embassies in search of visas, are depicted in a similar way across the continent by both anglophone and francophone artists.
As part of the global hip-hop community, African hip-hop artists have advanced the culture artistically and have created new spaces where Africans are able to tell their stories. In its examination of hiphop in Africa, this study will also illustrate the transition artists have made from providing political commentary and protest music to actually becoming agents of social and political change. As the increase of youth mobilization globally has resulted in popular uprising, the roles played by hip-hop artists and hip-hop culture in specific countries need to be understood as having local and global significance.
The Pan-African Connection
In 2003 the Senegalese rap duo Daara J released an album entitled Boomerang, based on the premise that when Africans left the continent in bondage during the transatlantic slave trade, they took with them their musical traditions, which evolved into hip-hop, which returned to Africa in the 1980s. These music traditions that were taken with enslaved Africans developed and were cultivated on the plantations of the Americas and included drumming, rapping, and storytelling (Keyes 2008; Manning 2009; Appert 2016). Over time, African American culture incorporated these music traditions into new forms of African American music and self-expression.
Hip-hop’s roots in African culture have been discussed in three major ways: by linking hip-hop music to African rhythms and drumbeats, by linking modern rapping to traditional African forms of rapping or poetry, and by drawing parallels between the hip-hop emcee and the West African griot.
Robert Walser (1995) looks at the “percussive sounds, polyrhythmic texture, timbral richness, and call-and-response patterns” found in hip-hop and links them to origins in Africa. Cheryl Keyes (1996) also looks at the continual repetition of particular rhythms in African music, which are similar to the hip-hop DJ’s tradition of repeating and extending the playing time of parts of a song, while mixing in the next song. Keyes says this “reaffirms the power of the music” and creates a connection with the listener (1996, 236). This is manifest in the call-and response traditions practiced at hip-hop performances. Walser’s (1995) article shows similarities in rhythms and beat patterns found in African and hip-hop music, specifically the polyrhythmic nature of both. Music is polyrhythmic when it contains two or more conflicting rhythms at the same time. Many early hiphop drumbeat patterns have similarities with patterns found in many African drumbeats.
Lyricism with rhyme styles similar to those found in hip-hop lyricism can also be found in some African languages. Keyes says hip-hop rapping can be traced from “the African bardic traditions to the rural oral southern-based expressive forms of African Americans” (2006, 225). The language most often cited as having a form of rap is Wolof and the tradition of tassou. Tassou is a form of rapping that is often accompanied by drumming and is found in Senegal and the Gambia (Tang 2007; Gueye 2011; Penna-Diaw 2013; Appert 2016). In other countries, like Somalia and Tanzania, artists have reflected on associations between rap and poetry.
The role of the emcee as a griot has also been discussed by scholars, who point to American hip-hop artists as being among the first to draw the parallels. Hip-hop pioneer Afrika Bambaataa, Professor X (a member of the 1990s rap group X-Clan), Nas, and Kanye West have all referred to themselves as griots (Tang 2012; Kimble 2014). Scholars who discuss the parallels between the rapper and the West African griot point to the griot’s role in their community as a storyteller and historian (Smitherman 1997; Dyson 2004; Tang 2012; Sajnani 2013; Appert 2016). While Sajnani’s (2013) article reflects on the griot’s position among the elite to debunk this connection, the similar functions the griot and the emcee play in their societies remain evidence for many of the connections between the two roles. The collaborative nature of African music and the traditions of call-and-response are also used to point to relationships between hip-hop and African music. A lot of African music is collaborative music, similar to the cyphers, sessions, and battles that take place in hip-hop culture.
In the twentieth century the African music traditions that were present in the African American community
