Adam Haupt
It’s Sunday afternoon at Making Music Productions and I’m hanging out with Cape hip- hop crew Black Noise and some Swedish hip-hop heads, who are participated in the recent Heal the Hood anti-racism, anti-crime campaign in the Western Cape.
It’s been a long and hard two weeks for the Swedes and things are going kind of slow in the studio. Black Noise is still grumbling over the fact that the Swedes ditched a Macassar gig to go to the beach for a tan. That’s dedication for you. Somehow, a touristy day at the beach doesn’t fit the hard-core hip-hop image.
The campaign took shape when Black Noise toured Sweden in 1997. Black Noise have been around for about as long as Prophets of da City and have been responsible for organising many community cultural and educational projects. The Swedish tour was organised by the Swedish Institute and Rikskonserte in an attempt to address the increase in racism toward immigrants.
Black Noise’s Emile YX? says that they met hip- hop heads from a town called Hammarkullen in Gothchenberg, which he describes as an immigrant village. “People come to Sweden and then at Immigration they say, `We suggest that you live here.’ But once you get to Hammarkullen, it’s like a no-way-out situation. If you try to get a job, they check out your surname, where you’re from.”
Emile cautions that the town is not exactly like Mitchell’s Plain or Khayelitsha, and is more like Rondebosch. It is, however, a very cosmopolitan place which is plagued by unemployment, and it often receives lots of negative press coverage. These similarities with the Cape Flats are what got Black Noise excited about inviting these Swedes to South Africa for the “Heal the Hood” campaign. Emile was struck by the fact that the youth of Hammarkullen tend to converse in combinations of Swedish, Somali, Swahili, Spanish or Arabic, and that they do much to overcome cultural barriers.
He explains the concept behind the campaign: “To heal the hood, you need for people from the neighbourhood to tell their own stories, to give their views of what is happening, their histories. It must be from their perspectives so that people from that neighbourhood can relate to it and gain a sense of pride.” The campaign in South Africa involved anti-racism and anti- crime workshops as well as hip-hop performances. An exciting dimension to the workshops is that all of the high school participants wrote short stories and poetry as well as rap lyrics.
Emile hopes to secure funding for the publication of the pupils’ creative work and also hopes to produce a CD or cassette containing the rap songs which were performed by Black Noise, the Swedish visitors, and the school kids. The idea is thus to get everyone involved and to supply “vehicles for people to express themselves, whether it be breakdancing, spraycan art, poetry, rapping, DJ’ing, or short story writing,” says Emile. If funding is not secured, Black Noise hopes that they will at least be able to produce a short cassette compilation of 10 artists from the participating high schools as well as a selection of short stories in The Juice magazine.
If everything comes together, though, they will have secured a “CD with endorsements from a record label, the backing of sound distribution, a tour as well as a book of short stories and poetry”, says Emile. One hopes that they get their way because few artists and community workers actually manage to organise exciting cross-cultural youth events, which turn all participants into proud and productive contributors.
Some of the Swedes were from hot spots like Somalia and Kosovo. One can only imagine what sorts of cross-cultural exchanges took place. In fact, Black Noise’s Gavin proudly proclaims that Chilean-born rapper Morris already knows a range of terms from Cape ghetto code. No prizes for guessing which ones they are.