Hip-Hop activism in post-Apartheid South Africa

‘Why should I fight for a country’s glory/When it ignores me?/Besides, the township’s already a war zone/So why complain or moan?’ The opening lines from Prophets of da City’s (POC) 1993 song Understand where I’m coming from expressed a deep suspicion of the emerging ‘new’ South Africa. Twenty years later, this course examines the role hip-hop has played in engaging young South Africans both creatively and politically. It will offer an account of hip-hop’s political orientation in relation to debates about commercial co-option, censorship, gender, race and other identity politics, and examine how these politics have been taken up by South African hip-hop artists. It will focus specifically on hip-hop’s reception in Cape Town in the late 1980s and early 1990s and explore the work of early Capetonian hip-hop artists, in particular the Prophets of da City. Widely acknowledged for setting the scene for a range of emerging mother-tongue rappers in South Africa, POC’s influence on struggles over language, race and identity and on early Afrikaans hip-hop will be explored. The final session will be a panel discussion, featuring hip-hop artists and academics, which examines the warnings of Understand where I’m coming from, and considers the role of contemporary hip-hop artists in post-apartheid struggles for justice and equality