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YOUTH CULTURE IN THE WEST AFRICAN NATION TAKES THE REINS TO CREATE A NEW FORM OF EXPRESSION
WHENWE ARRIVED IN THE GHANAIAN CAPITAL OF ACCRA, U.S. RAP ARTISTS, ESPECIALLY 50 Cent and Tupac Shakur, were so popular they could be heard almost constantly on radios and boom boxes. Some Ghanaian rap groups emulated the dress and posture of their commercial U.S. counterparts, putting forth an "American" image while rhyming in English (a practice often called Ghanaian hip-hop). Other local rap artists rap predominantly in local languages, such as Twi or Fanti.
In the mid-1990s, Reggie Rockstone, a U.K.-born rap artist of Ghanaian descent, coined the term "hiplife" to highlight the uniqueness of Ghanaian rap artists rhyming in local languages. After 15 years of living abroad, Rockstone returned to Ghana and discovered a burgeoning hip-hop scene, but mostly in English. He started rapping in Twi and immediately developed a following. Considered "the godfather of hiplite," Rockstone was encouraged by his father, a noted fashion designer, to "name" what he was doing. As he tells it, he "grab[bed] the 'life' from 'highlife' and the 'hip' from 'hip-hop,' and then put it together. Highlife, hiplife...sounds smooth and it go down real easy. So we started throwing it around. Hiplife. Highlife. Boom. Revolution right there."
In doing so, Rockstone was riffingoff the traditional Ghanaian cultural form called "highlife," itself a mixture of Western instruments and traditional Ghanaian rhythms and languages. Rockstone explains that one of the important and powerful dynamics of hiplite is that, for young people from the poverty-stricken areas in Ghana, rhyming and getting into the music industry have kept many of them off the streets and from getting into crime. This was, in fact, Afrika Bambaataa's motivation for forming the Universal Zulu Nation in the South Bronx in 1973. Bambaataa, a former Black Spade gang member, created a place for young people to meet and "battle" using their artistic skills instead of more lethal weapons. From its earliest incarnation, hip-hop has provided a positive and creative space for young people to gather, especially-but not exclusively-in urban areas that offered no formal alternatives to societal oppression. And it still does, especially when theatre and hip-hop's modes of performance are engaged.
In 2006, I traveled to Ghana...