Songs and Politics in Eastern Africa

12. Hip-Hop, Westernization and Gender in East Africa

273 12 Hip-Hop, Westernization and Gender in East Africa Mwenda NTARANGWI Augustana College Introduction The end of the 20th Century saw an increase in cultural flows and exchange across many of the world’s different nations and peoples due to an intensified interaction and exchange made possible by the process of globalisation. While this process has been seen from different perspectives including some doubting its credibility as a process in the first place, it is quite clear that the process of Westernization which predates globalisation has intensified across the larger part of the developing world. In East Africa, this process has been on-going for many years and it has produced various facets of cultural expressions that have taken different forms and picked up different definitions. Increase in Western cultural products such as movies, music, and dress has continually influenced many facets of culture in the region. For instance, the culture embodied in rap music and expressed through urban styles of dress and speech often associated with urban AfricanAmerican youth constitutes a genre referred to as hip-hop (Rose, 1994). This culture is one aspect of the process of Westernization and globalisation found in East Africa. Thus a hip-hop culture has continually developed on the East African urban scene since the early 1990s and has taken on some localized form and content. What is not clear though is whether this cultural form is indeed a local indigenous East African hip-hop or a Western (American) hip-hop expressed and mediated through local cultural and creative processes. Furthermore, 274 it is not quite clear whether there is distinct and identifiable Kenyan, Tanzanian and Ugandan hip-hop within such geopolitical enclaves. However, an internet search for hip-hop in each of these three countries would result in numerous entries thus denoting a presence of hip-hop in these three countries.159 Many popular music groups in East Africa perform rap music and the musicians themselves try to build a specific culture around it. Such a culture is built around the live performance antics and mode of dress. Some artistes try out specific designs of apparel such as Kenya’s Fundi Frank, who himself tried his hand at rap music while in Mombasa. Performers on stage are often seen making hand gestures, grabbing their crotches, and holding the microphone in a manner identical to that seen on many rap music videos on America’s popular music channel MTV. There are thus local appropriations of this style expressed through music and performance. In Tanzania, hip-hop takes on a specific local identity signified by the term Bongo Flava which loosely translates taste or flavour of Dar es Salaam.160 In Kenya Sync Sound and Ogopa DJs premiered the hip-hop culture with full-length CD compilations of Kenyan hip-hop music featuring various artistes who had not been publicly heard on radio stations. In Uganda, musicians such as Kawesa, Bébé Cool, and Chameleon have had to move to Nairobi to develop their music careers. Despite all this activity around hip-hop, very little study seems to have been done on it in East Africa except for a few works on specific countries (cf. Fenn and Perullo; Remes; “Karibu”; “Global”; and Haas and Gesthuizen on Tanzania; Robensdorf (n.d.) and Nyairo and Ogude on Kenya). This scarce scholarly work on hip-hop in East Africa is, however, dwarfed by the numerous newspaper articles and internet sites that continually write about hip-hop in East Africa in general and 159 A more specific search would benefit from www.Africanhiphop.com, a site managed by a Dutch NGO, Madunia, which seeks to promote African hip-hop through the internet. Its webmaster Thomas Gesthuizen (Juma4) got involved in Tanzanian hip-hop musician as early as 1993. 160 Since the late 1980s when Julius Nyerere’s experimentation with African socialism (Ujamaa) failed and a socio-economic ideology shaped by capitalism came in, Dar es Salaam specifically and Tanzania in general started to be referred to as Bongoland (a land of the brains, bongo is brains in Kiswahili) to denote the move from a collective consciousness that nationalised most public enterprises to individual efforts to survive propelled by one’s use of his/her brains. 275 on specific East African countries and artistes. The flourishing presence of articles in the internet about East African hip-hop is reflective of the flourishing Western influence on music...