Keeping it real
Poetic, interesting and relevant, Nairobi’s Hip Hop Parliament provides inspiration for Kenya’s burgeoning youth culture. Daniel Howden reports
The style is self-consciously urban, the pose is cool, the delivery is urgent, aggressive, it’s unmistakably hip-hop. The words are what’s unusual about it: “Ask yourself what is fair and what is not/You were born as a life not an afterthought/It’s often thought there’s someone else to blame/If you ask me I feel that is lame…”
The lyrics are part of what the MC Muki Garang calls “conscious hip-hop”. And they flow from an extraordinary experiment that’s been taking place in the underground clubs of Nairobi’s ghetto music scene since the creation of the Hip Hop Parliament.
One of the most thoughtful and optimistic legacies of the turmoil that engulfed Kenya after December 2007’s disputed elections, the ‘parliament’ began as a collective of hip-hop artists to symbolise unity regardless of ethnicity and is an eloquent retort to those who lazily dismiss hip-hop as a malign force.
Although he hasn’t given himself the title, Muki – not his real name – has become the parliament’s speaker.
How can you tell whether a rapper is from the Hip Hop Parliament? Well, they “won’t get on the mic and start rapping about shaking your booty, they’ll get on the mic and start provoking your thoughts,” says Muki.
After the word went out, 60 MCs turned up for the first ‘session’ of the parliament. These sessions developed into a forum for the artists to perform and to recount what they had witnessed.
Among the MCs was Bankslave, one of Nairobi’s most talented grafitti artists. His brilliantly coloured street art was usually employed to “hype up” the names of rappers but he realised it could also be used to convey more profound messages.
“My graffiti is conscious (like the hip-hop) it speaks to the sober and to the insane mind. Its colours can change your feel.” Standing in front of five foot red letters bearing the legend “guts”, he smiles, “before this was just a wall.”
Together, they drafted a declaration that was handed over to the United Nations during post-election talks on a unity government for Kenya. The statement is a youthful and charged mix of street and diplomatic language: “We, the Hip Hop Parliament MPs/MCs, will use our dope MCing skills to influence our peers in order to reduce the negative effects of tribalism… We can only be cool if there is peace in our country.”
Sitting on the rooftop of Ghetto Radio, in the downtown area of Kenya’s capital, Muki tells the parliament’s story. He explains that Kenya is a country with “deep ethnicity” and the force that neutralises ethnicity is urbanisation.
Most of the Kenyans who have flocked to Nairobi in recent years are teenagers or younger, making its notorious slums – like the million-strong Kibera – the engines of the country’s burgeoning youth culture. Hip-hop burst into this new world in the mid-90s and immediately found a youth following that identified strongly with it. Urban subcultures have been a “neutral” space in which tribal tensions are muted, making them an obvious starting point for an effort to come together. This post-ethnic culture even has its own language – Sheng, a mix of broken Swahili, English and tribal languages. It’s given Nairobi hip-hop its own distinctive, classless flavour.
“When you speak in English, I can tell where you come from, what education you have. The same in Swahili,” says Angel from Ghetto Radio, which has Sheng as its main language. She complains that Swahili, with its lingering introductions, is too formal for the youth.
“The parliament has been a uniting factor,” says Mwafrika, a DJ on Ghetto Radio and one of the collective’s founding members. “We are brought together by a love of hip-hop and music.”
Mwafrika, a performing name that means African person in Swahili, knows about ghettos. Born in the slums, his mother was a street hawker who made what living she could by selling Odawa – soft chewable stones that pregnant women sometimes crave – in Nairobi’s markets. “The only thing that gave me hope was hip-hop,” he remembers. He now has an evening show called Nai Raw, three times a week, on Ghetto Radio, and performs as an MC on the side. “Most ‘conscious’ artists have to have a second job,” he says. One of the MCs, Die Hard, is a reporter for the news agency Reuters; Muki is a telecoms engineer; another, Mwaura, sweeps floors in a downtown café.
After its early blast of exposure, the Hip Hop Parliament’s founders believe the MCs need to remember their responsibility to their communities. “When you are hungry, you can’t get in the mood and rap,” Muki points out. “For some it could be the inspiration to open a small business, like a barber’s shop,” he says. For others, it will be a starting point to become noticed as a promising MC.
Muki is adamant that while individual artists continue to put out music, the parliament must “evolve into something bigger”.