Kenya's hip-hop revolution captured

By Angela Woodall, STAFF WRITER
Inside Bay Area
Article Last Updated:07/06/2007 02:57:11 AM PDT

If hip-hop were a language, it would be the most common spoken in the world — from the Bronx to Beijing all the way to Mombasa.

It is the unofficial language of many lands, including Kenya, where it has joined the East African country's 60 other languages.

But young Kenyans weren't content to simply absorb hip-hop.

Instead they put their stamp on the U.S. export, creating a home-grown version and industry, according to the award-winning documentary "Hip-Hop Colony." "Hip-Hop Colony" already has won Best Feature Documentary in the Oakland International Film Festival, garnered Best Feature Documentary and the Emerging Filmmaker Award in the Hip-Hop Odyssey International Film Festival and won Best Urban Documentary in the Houston Black Film Festival.

The director and producer, Michael Wanguhu, a Kenyan who has lived in the United States for a decade and works as a multimedia producer for an Oakland company, along with writer, set out to retrace the hip-hop revolution that began a decade ago in Kenya and became the most explosive incubator of fresh talent the country had ever seen.

But he and fellow members of the Emerge Media Group — Russell Kenya, Annette Gathoni, Brian Kanyi and Brian Opande — had an agenda. "We are stepping up and stepping out," he said, explaining what was behind the "Emerge" in the name of the production company. The way Hip-hop Colony tells it, the Bronx-born music arrived in Kenya without warning.

But the timing couldn't have been better. Kenyans had spent more than three decades trying to put the pieces of their country together after finally driving the British from the country and gaining independence in 1963.

Hobbled by the legacy of colonialism, things didn't get better under the 24-year dictatorship of Daniel arap Moi.

But by mid-1990, the walls were beginning to crumble.

Young Kenyans emboldened in part by home-grown hip-hop indirectly helped bring it down.

Moi and his henchmen contributed heavily, digging their own brutal, corrupt graves. Originally, Kenyan youth copied U.S. hip-hop. They dressed like their hip-hop idols and rapped in English. The film likens hip-hop to a "new breed of colonialism," although a welcome one.

At first, U.S. hip-hop dictated the look and feel of the music. Then the Kenyan group Kalamashaka burst through the residue that colonialism and authoritarian rule had layered on the country by setting Swahili rhymes to the hip-hop beat.

"Why do people have to buy their (U.S.) albums when they can buy ours?" asked one rapper.

The rag-tag rappers from one of Nairobi's slums were unpopular at first because they rapped in Swahili, which is looked down on despite being the country's official language.

But the tunes took off like fire once Kalamashaka's music hit the newly deregulated FM radio waves.

Their music, and the music of those who followed in their footsteps, created a common sense of opposition, Wanguhu said. People felt "that you could stand up to the government and here you are kids in ghettos talking back to the government," Wanguhu said.

The message was about young Kenyans' lives — "experiences that people know first-hand," Wanguhu said.

Young people are the majority in Kenya — 65 percent of the often desperately poor population.

In hip-hop, the street economy met the formal economy — not an intimate relationship for poor Kenyans.

But the two hit it off, so to speak.

An industry sprung up around hip-hop, which — like its older U.S. sibling — increasingly took on a heavily entertainment, commercial element.

Recording studios, graphic artists, clothing designers and disc jockey academies joined Kenya's money-making mainstays of tourism, agriculture, coffee, tea and pyrethrum.

Although 46 percent of the country still lives below the poverty line, Kenya today is thriving on micro-loans, a roaring stock market, an increasingly sophisticated IT system and dreams.

Even the Masai, traditional cattle herders, can be found carrying cell phones. "Everybody got their own little mobile phone. Does that look native to you? Get your mind right about Africa," as rapper "Bamboo" from hip-hop group K-South put it.

"Kenya is not about lions, giraffes and fast-running men. It's also about studios and hip-hop ...," music producer Tedd Josiah says in the film. Wanguhu said he wanted to show the hope and energy that is bubbling up in Africa. "Africa is an adventure, not a burden as some people think," he said. "There are problems, but also opportunities."

Staff writer Angela Woodall can be reached at awoodall@angnewspapers.com .

You have to understand the power that you have and the hope that is created by what you do.'
-Nelson Mandela