Hip-Hop and Cultural Citizenship on Kenya’s ‘Swahili Coast’

Abstract

The Muslim-dominated ‘Swahili coast’ has always served as a conceptual as well as physical periphery for post-colonial Kenya. This article takes Kenyan youth music under the influence of global hip-hop as an ethnographic entry into the dynamics of identity and citizenship in this region. Kenyan youth music borrows from global hip-hop culture the idea that an artist must ‘represent the real’. The ways in which these regional artists construct their public personae thus provide rich data on ‘cultural citizenship’, in Aihwa Ong’s (1996) sense of citizenship as subjectification. I focus here on youth music production in the Kenyan coastal city of Mombasa between 2004 and 2007. During this time, some local artists adopted a representational strategy that subtly reinscribed the symbolic violence to which members of the coast’s Muslim-Swahili society have long been subjected. I examine the representational strategies that were adopted during this period by Mombasan artists who happened to be members of the Muslim- Swahili society (‘subjects of the Swahili coast’, as I name them), with an ethnographic eye and ear trained on what they say about the ways in which young subjects of the Swahili coast are objectified and subjectified as ‘Kenyan youth’ in the twenty-first century.

The making of a ‘superstar’: the politics of playback and live performance in post-genocide Rwanda

“…While he, too, performed at state events – a concert in honour of the RPF's twenty-fifth anniversary in December 2012, for example – his music often articulated a sense of defiant sorrow. Much in line with other work on hip-hop in East Africa (Eisenberg 2012; Kerr 2016; 2015; Perullo 2005; Weiss 2009), we can see Rwandan hip-hop as offering the opportunity for marginalized young people, particularly young men, to fashion alternative forms of selfhood. Here, this sense of self was built not on the ability to ‘play back’ government ideology, but rather on the ability to survive and rise above hardships.…”

Global frictions and the production of locality in Kenya’s music video industry

“…Even for musicians, Nairobi signifies a site of post-colonial anxieties, where artists must negotiate their social and economic ties to the city, their rural homes, and their international aspirations (Wasike, 2011). Beyond urban–rural tensions, Eisenberg (2012) notes that hip-hop artists on the Swahili Coast seek to cast Mombasa as a Kenyan Los Angeles, ‘an urban space that can be just as cosmopolitan or gritty as Nairobi even though it happens to be situated amid beaches and coconut palms’ (p. 563). In short, global music broadly and Kenyan hip hop specifically are hybrid cultural forms shaped by a myriad of local and supralocal forces while being produced, distributed, and consumed in contested local environments.…”

Locating Hip Hop Origins: Popular Music and Tradition in Senegal

“…But as much as the griot origin myth romanticizes the griot as a symbol of a timeless, ahistorical Africa (Tang 2012: 81), hip hop's origin myth at times idealizes and codifies the musical culture, centring as it does on a canon of figures and practices that represent a specific and limited historical moment of creative innovation coupled with radical social consciousness 16 . Thus global hip hop scholarship – including literature on African hip hop – is replete with almost obligatory recitations of hip hop's origin story: born in the Bronx; defined by the four performance elements of rapping, deejaying, breakdancing and graffiti; enhanced by a fifth element of knowledge (for a few examples in the African context, see Auzanneau 2001: 715; Eisenberg 2012: 558; Ntarangwi 2010: 1317; Schneiderman 2014: 91). Recently, however, some scholars have critiqued the centrality of the Bronx origin story, arguing instead for a multiplicity of origins that allows for alternative narratives like those of Senegal's first generation of rappers (Mbaye 2011: 105; Osumare 2012: 33; Pennycook and Mitchell 2009: 27; Terkourafi 2010: 4).…”

“… 18 Hip hoppers themselves often draw connections between hip hop-mediated representations of African American experience and their own lives, from identifying as ‘thugs’ in Arusha (Weiss 2009), to a more general identification with the African American experience in Kenya (Samper 2004), to ideas of realness (Eisenberg 2012) and street cred (Mose 2013). …”