Hip Hop Africa: New African Music in a Globalizing World ed. by Eric Charry (review)

With only a small handful of academic texts published to date on hip-hop in Africa, Hip Hop Africa: New African Music in a Globalizing World contributes to an expanding body of work that delves into the relationship between various African countries and Western popular cultural forms born out of African diasporic communities. It explores questions of reception, adaptation, emulation, and circulation. Not unlike many works about hip-hop, it is mainly about rap music as opposed to other hip-hop elements. At the same time, this book adds new musical perspectives to this area of study. As the preface states, this anthology developed out of a panel discussion on new music among West African youth, and was expanded to consider “what young Africans are doing in the realm of music” and “how recent generations of Africans are making sense of the world around them” (ix). Eric Charry’s collection is successful in this goal by drawing together ethnomusicological analyses of local histories and of distinctive variations of rap music in different countries across the continent.

While Charry notes certain shortcomings from the outset (such as the absence of Arab North Africa), he has compiled a collection of works that expands on and particularizes hip-hop in Africa. There are articles on Ghana, South Africa, Senegal, Côte d’Ivoire, Malawi, Mali, Nigeria, Kenya, and Tanzania, as well as African communities in France and the United States. The value of this approach is that the reader is tasked with thinking across the continent through the specificity of different countries without homogenizing Africa or hip-hop in the process.

Telling the story of African hip-hop sometimes entails other, imported “new music” like gospel, R&B, jazz, reggae and ragga, and zouk. As well, this story necessarily entails a multitude of African musical forms: national musicmaking practices like jembe rhythms, praise singing, and verbal and embodied aesthetic practices like baara (a Bamanan musical form) and taasu (Senegalese rhythmic poetry); transcultural or Pan-African forms with distinct national identities like highlife in Ghana; “world music” artists like Youssou N’Dour, Angelique Kidjo, and Salif Keïta; and local or “Africanized” versions of the aforementioned “new music.” In other words, what constitutes “African music” has infinite possibilities, and rap music is being brought into the fold.

The text is divided into six parts: “Rap Stories,” “Griots and Messengers,” “Identity and Hybridity,” “East Coast,” “Popular Music Panoramas,” and “Drumming.” Each of these sections contains at least two articles, except for the drumming section, which consists of a single piece. The only geographically themed section is on East Africa, suggesting that regional influences are less noteworthy than thematic resonances.

The work opens with the aptly titled “A Capsule History of African Rap.” It presents a thorough overview of hip-hop’s coming to different countries through various routes. The introduction begins in the United States “out of New York” and expands by way of media, immigrants, elite African youth with the capacity to travel, and the French connection—first on the fringes and finally its slow movement, through the 1990s and early 2000s, into local and national mainstream cultures. The overview effectively primes readers for the range of processes that facilitated hip-hop’s presence in Africa, a necessary precursor to the works that are presented in the following pages.

Articles by Lee Watkins, John Collins, and Jochen Seebode provide broad overviews of contemporary music on various national stages. Across these works, readers are exposed to lengthy catalogs of club names, producers, MCs, cities, awards, and song titles, which can be distracting but remain deeply informative. Works by Jean Ngoya Kidula, Stephanie Shonekan, John Collins, Alex Perullo, and Dorothea E. Schulz address several particular issues as they manifest in Kenya, Nigeria, Ghana, Tanzania, and Mali respectively. Specifically, their analyses interrogate issues of nationalizing rap forms—especially in the face of pressure toward traditionalism, respect as artists, and youth identities attuned to struggles between...