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AEGIS European Conference on African Studies
11 - 14 July 2007
African Studies Centre, Leiden, The Netherlands
Show panel list
Kenyan Rap and Hip Hop Music: Youth and the Politics of Identity.
| Panel |
21. Visions and Voices from East Africa - Initiatives of cultural production in Past and Present
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| Paper ID | 472 |
| Author(s) |
Mutonya, Maina
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| Paper |
No paper submitted
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| Abstract | Amidst a proliferation of foreign forms of music in Kenya, a new form of Kenyan rap and hip-hop has emerged in the late 1990s into the 2000s. The music is a successful combination of Kenyan local essence and the Trans-Atlantic hip hop and rap genre resulting to what can be called distinctly Kenyan music, just like Kwaito in South Africa. It is important to note that the rap and hip-hop genres are mostly an African-American invention. Just as music benefits from the Black Atlantic influence, the musicians themselves embody what might be called the cosmopolitan identity. However, music provides an important site and space for redefinition and re-negotiation of identities. With the musicians rooted in Kenya, they stand between a cosmopolitan, global identity and a traditional, local identity, by using local languages and idioms in foreign genres in creating a new hybrid cultural form. The fact that they are attracted to rap and hip-hop music is because of its connection to what Paul Gilroy has called ‘diasporic intimacy’ with the Black Atlantic, where proximity and distance are in a dialectical tension. This paper will explore questions of identity, arguing that local musicians are informed by a global black popular culture. In addition, this suggests that young Kenyan musicians are forcing open moments and spaces of freedom that allow for the re-definition of identity (global/local, urban/rural, global/national, young/old etc). The paper will focus its exploration on the themes that include and resonate with themes resulting from this interaction with a special emphasis on redefinition of identity. |
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