The History of South African Hip Hop

During the early 1980s, what started out in the Cape Flats as a youth rebellion turned into today's South African hip hop style and culture. Although artists were influenced by American hip hop, South Africa had been in the grip of apartheid. Artists embraced all aspects of hip hop culture---especially graffiti and break-dancing---in order to fight apartheid and censorship, transforming the music into expressions of frustration, anger and hope.

Origins

Hip-hop originated in the 1970s in New York's inner city African-American community and has been characterized by four key elements of its subculture: MCing, DJing, breakdancing, and graffiti writing. Since then, hip-hop has spread all over the globe, with many countries developing distinct styles. Although Senegal in West Africa was the first African country to start producing its own hip hop artists, South Africa quickly followed suit in later years.

Themes

The political history of South Africa has greatly influenced the themes found in South African hip hop. Many artists also choose to address the issues that South Africans struggle with: class, corruption, gender, HIV, violence, racism, poverty and sexism. Another prevalent theme in the music is the question and answer of what it means to be South African, especially in a post-apartheid culture.

Influences

Although South African artists originally drew inspiration from the hip hop coming out of the United States, the Johannesburg area had a high percentage of the population come from different tribes all over the South African region. Traditional South African music mixed with European music and developed into a unique style and sound found nowhere else.

Criticism of American Influence

Older artists have critiqued Western influence on hip hop, citing the links that US hip hop has to the structures that created the devastating conditions in Third World countries. However, younger artists have rebutted through the localization of the music in order to convey the stories of the South African peoples.

Kwaito

Kwaito is not considered South African hip hop proper, but rather as a subgenre that developed from Johannesburg hip hop during the late 1990s, characterized by catchy melodic and percussive loop samples, and deep basslines and vocals. Kwaito differs significantly from typical South African hip hop in that the lyrics are shouted, blabbered and chanted. The word comes from the Afrikaans word "kwaai" which usually means strict or angry, but recent slang has transformed it to mean "cool." Kwaito is especially significant because of its apolitical musical stance rejecting the political status quo, contrasting the deeply political Cape Town South African hip hop. It is largely a South African phenomenon that has received little attention outside of the region.

References

• A Rolling Shout-Out to Hip-Hop History
• South Africa - Hip Hop Revolution
• Rhythms of the Continent

Resources

• African Hip-Hop
• Kwaito: Much More Than Music