East African Hip Hop: Youth Culture and Globalization by Mwenda Ntarangwi (review)

Mwenda Ntarangwi’s East African Hip Hop: Youth Culture and Globalization is a concise and worthwhile read for anyone interested in Hip Hop or youth culture in East Africa, particularly if one’s interests extend to socio-political issues. Ntarangwi’s ethnomusicological study of popular music in Kenya, Uganda, and Tanzania argues for hip hop culture as a vehicle of youth empowerment affirming a commitment to society’s most marginalized. Ntarangwi recognizes contemporary globalization—driven by neoliberal economics—as characterizing the neocolonial condition of continued exploitation through biased global trade norms rather than formal political authority (ix, 3). Yet, he sees hip hop as both a product of globalization and a medium to critique it (2). Though hip hop arrives in East Africa on “the wings” of American capitalism, Ntarangwi is in line with most scholars of hip hop outside the United States who reject the notion that it amounts to cultural imperialism. Rather, hip hop’s emphasis on locality and affinity for the dispossessed mean that it constitutes a diasporic “cultural citizenship” that opens a space beyond nationalisms to critique global and local phenomenon with equal vigor. Through an analysis of songs, live performances, and supplementary interviews, Ntarangwi supports his case. Unfortunately, the lyrics in their original languages do not make it into print alongside Ntarangwi’s translations. More significantly, his broad application of key terms such as “hip hop,” “Raga,” [sic] and “youth” may reduce the precision of his arguments.

Ntarangwi defines East African Hip Hop (EAH) as American and Jamaican influenced EA popular music that emerges from the late 1980s and borrows yet breaks from indigenous forms. As he acknowledges, his broad definition leads him to include artists in his analysis whose status as hip hoppers is questionable. Technically, his definition would not exclude a westernized EA rock band from counting as hip hop. More practically, we might take issue with his definition’s inability to distinguish between hip hop and Reggae. Indeed, this is his intent, as he tells us that Uganda’s music scene differs from Tanzania’s and Kenya’s in that Reggae is more prevalent than rap. What these musics share in common is a commitment to Ntarangwi’s principle interest—social issues—so he applies hip hop as a “compromise” term in order to discuss them together (viii).

Ntarangwi clearly opens himself to criticism by choosing to identify hip hop without reference to its four most established aesthetic “elements”: emceeing (i.e. rapping), DJing, breaking, and graffiti writing. However, the virtue of his preferred focus on social issues may be a contribution to the relative dearth of scholarly attention to hip hop’s “fifth element”: knowledge. That hip hop culture has a particular knowledge or “worldview” has long been asserted by its pioneers and follows from Ntarangwi’s invocation of a Geertzian understanding of culture as “the shared ethos and world view of a group” (18). Ntarangwi contributes to the discussion of the “values” of hip hop culture by noting that, in East Africa, a particular commitment to social justice characterizes the culture’s adherents. He observes that EA artists who self-identify as hip hoppers distinguish themselves from other popular artists by a professed commitment to the dispossessed (ix). This measure of authenticity is an extension of the value that many scholars of US hip hop claim is at the core of the culture: maintaining a commitment to disadvantaged black youth. Although some hip hop artists and their songs have been co-opted by politicians, on balance, Ntarangwi finds that EAH effectively criticizes clientelism and neoliberalism as against the interests of the people.

Like many works on hip hop, Ntarangwi slips between discussing it as a genre on the one hand and a culture on the other. As musical genres, hip hop and Reggae are established as distinct despite sharing many aesthetic elements and similar histories of development in the face of adversity. However, as cultures, Ntarangwi’s work might contribute to an argument that hip...