Continental Drift: The Politics and Poetics of African Hip Hop

Abstract

In October 2011, during its annual Hip Hop Music Awards, Black Entertainment Television (BET) paid tribute to African hip hop with a Nigerian cipher, an ‘informal’ gathering of emcees in which everyone contributes to the creative experience.¹ Since 2009, African hip hop has had a presence at the popular awards show. Gsan of Tanzania was featured in 2009 among a host of prominent emcees, something I briefly described in the introduction of Native Tongues: An African Hip-Hop Reader as marking the shifting nature of African hip hop from the margins to the centre of the hip hop world (Saucier, 2011). This shift was further illustrated in 2010 when BET broke new ground by featuring an all-African cipher; a cipher comprised of male and female emcees from Ghana and performed in four languages. The Nigerian (or Naija) cipher of 2011 was once again ground-breaking in that emcees and femcees each had their own ciphers. While this short chronology of events illustrates the growth and cultural import of hip hop on the continent, each of the three events are also generative in the sense that they make apparent the poetics of political forms of African youth.² In other words, African hip hop culture more generally, and the hip hop ciphers that emerge in multiple African spaces and places more specifically, can tell us something about the relationship between poetic expression and political composition.