Hip hop! This movement, cult, culture, and way of life started 30 years ago as a way for young people to voice themselves in a system that saw them as disposable.
In the 1980s in South Africa it was popularized by crews like Black Noise and Prophets of Da City, who used hip hop as a mechanism to speak out against an apartheid government. This would see the first stages of a nationwide phenomena that would shape the post-apartheid South African youth.
Hip hop! This movement, cult, culture, and way of life started 30 years ago as a way for young people to voice themselves in a system that saw them as disposable.
In the 1980s in South Africa it was popularized by crews like Black Noise and Prophets of Da City, who used hip hop as a mechanism to speak out against an apartheid government. This would see the first stages of a nationwide phenomena that would shape the post-apartheid South African youth.
When the sun sets in Grahamstown, the streets awaken as local poets, emcees and beat boxers get together.
Here is where background and experience are used through words as educational mechanisms to share life experiences.
It is 360 degrees of pure energy, where thought and words collide. This is where life is a lesson and its teachers are kids from all kinds of backgrounds. Wordplay and thought provoking ideas are thrown around sending ones brain to a vacation away from reality and into a world of rhythm and poetry.
To many who lack knowledge and understanding of the genre, the term “hip hop” has negative connotations: It has been deemed as rebellious and chaotic because of the image it has attained thanks to the artists on the commercial mainstream.
But in its own right, hip hop is an educational tool, where a multitude of the world’s influential people have learned a lesson or two from it. American President, Barack Obama, regularly interacts with famous hip hop artists, because they express the politics that happen in American and global black communities.
But above culture, many have testified to it as a way of life, lived and done daily. Most use it as a way to educate themselves and others. They share life experiences and in so doing, they educate others about things they never knew.
As a young South African in the modern age, hip hop has transformed my way of thought and saved me from a lot of bad situations in terms of decision making.
Growing up was never easy, but because I got in to the hip hop culture I learned many important life skills, many of which I took for granted. I drew from influences like Tupac Amaru Shakur, Pharoahe Monch and Tumi Molekane. To have someone you've never met articulating what you're thinking and feeling, is a god-given gift that cannot be found in any book.
Hip hop for many of my Grahamstown brothers and sisters has been life changing in an educational sense, to the extent where you find young people watching local and international news, questioning, researching and acquiring knowledge to better themselves as people in society.
Grahamstown emcees and poets speak about love and peace and do not follow misleading commercial hip hop where women are made to seem like they are just objects and not people.
”I write therefore I am” is a quote I have heard many times from different Grahamstown wordsmiths, and I must say as someone who's been into hip hop for eight years, it is soothing to hear it coming from the mouths of the young ones, because in a sense it goes to show that learning has occurred and is being continued by a new generation of poets and emcees.
Hip hop is the second classroom for most, a mentor, a teacher, a psychologist for troubled minds, a way of pain release, and a way forward for troubled spirits.
Masauko Chipembere of Blk Sonshine, whose music is heavily influenced by the hip hop culture, once said of artists: “It is our responsibility to articulate life and try to transform it.”
*Sinethemba Konzaphi is part of the NGO, Save Our Schools and Community (SOSAC).
