South Africa’s finest hip-hop talent is the son of a preacher man.
Amukelani Tshawame (Amu), an MC (hip-hop rapper) refers to himself as an M’rapper — a South Africanised word for MC. He says to live within the hip-hop culture includes break-dancing and being an MC as well as a DJ.Amunishin’, as some call him, was born in Chiawelo, Soweto, in 1977 Amu is hardly a product of his birthplace.”I went to the States when I was about six and unfortunately forgot everything I had learned here [as soon as] I got there. But I brought back everything I learned there,” Amu says. The family lived in Virginia and it was in the United States that Amu was exposed to hip-hop culture for the first time. ”A friend’s brother was into hip-hop and we used to watch hip-hop movies and break-dancing,” he says. Amu returned to South Africa when he was about 13 and went to boarding school at St John Bosco in the Vaal where, he says, it all really began.”Most of the kids were from overseas, and we used to rap altogeda,” he says.They used to listen to LL Cool J and Vanilla Ice, but Amu insists that Vanilla Ice did not inspire him. Instead he’s proud to say he looked up to groups like Niggaz with Attitude, Public Enemy and Eazy E.The teenage M’rappers used to go to clubs, rapping and free-styling (impromptu rapping), much like in Eminem’s movie 8 Mile, except that these youngsters were hardly from humble beginnings. ”There weren’t a lot of hip-hop heads then,” he says, adding that nowadays many local M’rappers imitate other artists.”Hip-hop is different wherever you go: London, the US, Germany. I don’t understand why we have to imitate people when we can create our own styles. At the end of the day, hip-hop has to sound like hip-hop, but you have to make it your own.” Amu wrote his first song in 1992. ”It was about nothing. Okay, it was about me, saying how I’m better than anybody else — I was misdirected,” he says. Four years later he was involved in a collaboration with other M’rappers on the album The Motherload. ”We didn’t sell because at the time EMI was having problems and we got caught up in that bull … ”People still consider it the tightest hip-hop collaboration in South Africa,” he says.Amu has been accused of being ”anti-kwaito” and he admits that he used to dislike the music because it received too much attention at the expense of other genres.”But I grew out of it. I thought, this is local music so I should embrace it. The only problem I have is that a lot of kwaito artists are producing kak music. Every Tom, Dick and Harry thinks that they can produce music and it kills the art,” he says. He fondly recalls his days in the US when he was considered the coolest kid at his school because he came from the whole apartheid system in South Africa. Amu says he made his first white friends in the US and that he had never been exposed to white people back home. His favorite memory, however, is of how the Americans celebrated their holidays. ”Americans love their traditions. Whether it’s Christmas, Halloween, Easter, Thanksgiving, they go all out. Anybody with a Santa Claus suit is guaranteed a job at Christmas … They have egg-nog and mistletoe, they take it seriously … ”Here, people are just happy that they don’t have to work. And they just get drunk on holidays. That’s sad. From a kid’s perspective, it’s a tight experience … even Guy Fawkes day is dying out here.”His own childhood was marked by religion. As the son of a preacher man Amu had no choice but to go to church on Sundays. But he started rebelling about eight years ago because he couldn’t stand the boredom any more.But, he says, he remains religious in the sense that he believes in God and follows the Ten Commandments. Amu has worked on albums with various artists, including Zola and Prophets of da City as
well as on the two Yizo Yizo soundtracks. He launches his first solo album, The Life, Rap and Drama, this week and says that there’s been a lot of hype. ”If this album doesn’t’ sell, there’s no hope for local hip-hop.”