South Africa/ Mali: Theorizing Hip Hop
April 30, 2010, Harvard University -- Dr. Ingrid Monson, professor of African Music Harvard University, talks about hip hop--rap music that is--in Mali and the way it interacts with all the other musical cultures around it. She makes the point that artists in Bamako view hip hop as the diasporic child of the Malian griot tradition - she argues that the same messages you might hear in the other Malian musical traditions is also articulated, just over a different musical language, in Malian hip hop, even to the point of paying some kind of genuflection before you speak critically.
Mandela Mellon Fellow at Harvard U/University of Cape Town's Adam Haupt talks about Youth, Media and Social Change in South Africa. He points out that the introduction of hip hop to Cape Town, for instance, coincides with a kind of social activism--something we've also wondered about here--and with left leaning youth creating an alternate education system for themselves outside the formal system, and how, like in America, that space has morphed into a non-corporate space populated by like minded hip hop group-NGO hybrids. He does not include the likes of Ben Sharpa and Terror MC in that grouping though. Thought they rep'd Cape Town?