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Rap as a medium


Devious (artist from Cape Town)

Like in Dar es Salaam, the hiphop scene in South Africa is greatly influenced by their American forerunners. Due to South Africa’s history of apartheid, the hip-hop scene has developed its unique political dimension.

As early as the mid-eighties, kids in Cape Town were seriously involved in making local hip-hop content: rapping, breakdancing and spraying graffiti art. The music had a strong appeal to the audience in ‘colored’ townships such as Mitchell’s Plain. In part due to the way society was laid out under apartheid, their artistic expressions stayed within these communities.

Locally produced rap had a strong appeal among the youth, particularly those between 12 and 24 years old. A club in Bokaap called Da Base started hosting hip-hop evenings where dj’s like Shamiel X would play the latest hip-hop music from abroad and offer the microphone for local artists to perform.

Self-respect

From 1990 on, a group from Cape Town called Prophets of da City (POC) released a number of complete albums. Mixing local slang (a mixture of Afrikaans, English and other languages) in songs like ‘Ons stem’, they pioneered in getting on eye level with their fan base and representing their voice outside the community.

The P.O.C. albums were very popular, and public awareness of the group grew nationally; they later also performed abroad.

Apart from addressing social problems in their lyrics, members of the hip-hop scene were active in the struggle against apartheid, and in improving living conditions within their communities.

Soon, hip-hop provided a useful instrument in workshops where kids were playfully introduced to issues like self-respect and the history of the suppression of people of colour in South Africa. Around the 1994 elections, songs by POC were played in a campaign to get people to vote.

Underground

Coming from the townships without any state involvement, hip-hop emerged as a medium with more support and trust among township youth than national TV and radio, which had a history linked to apartheid.

Without much support from the national music industry to this day, it has remained a more-or-less ‘underground’ movement. Groups like Black Noise have been organizing events such as rap and breakdance workshops and the yearly African Hip-Hop Indaba which aim at presenting the youth with an alternative to gang activities and a medium for focusing their thoughts.

Hip-hop has seen little institutional involvement; one of the earliest organizations to pick up on the hip-hop community was Bush Radio, a community
radio station which has offered rappers a place to present their work across the Cape peninsula since 1994.

The hip-hop ‘vibe’ was transplanted into radio and , for the first time, kids living in townships were addressed in their own slang with content that they could relate to. The presenting team developed the show into an on-air platform, which would host weekly discussions with callers and guests.

Taboos, which were simply not touched on at other stations, became hot topics that were talked about long after the radio show was over.


Potential

Only recently, with the world-wide popularization of peripheral cultures like hip-hop, have state institutions and NGOs started to realize the potential of popular youth culture, and hip hop in particular, as a way to reach an audience which has become increasingly immune to messages presented in national awareness campaigns.

Projects such as HIVhop, which was initiated by NIZA and the Madunia Foundation for Bush Radio, are efforts to link the aims of NGO-like organizations with the grassroots development projects set up by members of the hip-hop community.

It is evident that the conditions under which rap successfully communicates messages to the audience are present within the community.

Mixture

While a rap song is a unique medium for presenting a problem or its different aspects, its fairly tight rhyme structure and adherence to certain stereotypes also limit the possible use in communicating with the audience. Therefore, the impact will be greater when the audience is reached through a mixture of several media.

Hip-hop culture does offer many ways of presenting of a message, e.g. through visuals (music videos, graffiti) or hip-hop theatre and dance shows.

Still, there are alternatives that have some of the same characteristics as hip-hop. In Cape Town, for example, in March 2000, community radio station Bush Radio decided to use musicians playing other types of music such as kwaito to be part of a music event raising HIV awareness.

Kwaito is very popular in South Africa, reaching a broad audience, which is not limited to the boundaries of the townships. Research should be able to clarify its particular strengths and potential for informing the audience. Its lyrics are less dense than rap music, and it lacks the history of hip-hop as a community-based, awareness-oriented medium, but might provide clues on other levels.

Text: Thomas Gesthuizen.
Gesthuizen is a committee member of Madunia Foundation (Development in music) He has co-operated with the HIVhop-team as a NiZA consultant.