The hop, skip and a jump to  a half century

Adam Haupt remembers exactly his response on that early Thursday summer’s evening in 1993. 

The video of Understand Where I’m Coming From by hip-hop group Prophets of da City had just ended on the weekly Toyota Top 20 TV show. 

The song’s opening lyrics set the tone: “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?”

It was the most incendiary four minutes, not just lyrically, but also with its gut-punching visuals of South Africa’s violent apartheid past. But co-host Neil Johnson carried on like it was nothing going, “Oops, next up,” before cutting to the ad.

Haupt, remembers: “But I’m, like, ‘Dude, this is going to get you into trouble!’” 

The song was off Prophets’ third album Age of Truth, which was released on 11 November 1993. 

Then 21-year-old Haupt “literally ran out to try and get this album because Prophets really set something off”. He had the right instinct because the album rattled cages, with most of the songs being banned. 

The group’s debut Our World, released in 1990, widely touted as South African hip-hop’s first album, was followed by Boom Style the following year.

But it was the powerful, politically eloquent and musically epoch-making Age of Truth that not only became the group’s most revered release but also South African hip-hop’s most important album. It is therefore a fitting coincidence that the 30th anniversary of Age of Truth overlaps with the 50th anniversary of hip-hop.

When I asked Haupt, who is now the director of the Centre for Film and Media Studies at UCT, if South African hip-hop had a big-bang moment like DJ Kool Herc’s supposed foundation night on 11 August 1973, he said: “I don’t think so. I wouldn’t talk about moments of origin; I will talk about turning points.”

The release of Age of Truth was certainly such a turning point, for local hip-hop generally, but also for Haupt personally. He has written extensively on hip-hop, including co-editing the recent Neva Again: Hip-Hop Art, Activism and Education in Post-Apartheid South Africa (an HSRC free download).

The album’s release marks the 30th anniversary of his relationship with South African hip-hop as a scholar.

“I happened to be working on an honours dissertation on Ice-T’s Body Count album. 

“So, I was already looking for contemporary examples of subversive anti-racist, anti-sexist artists. And, of course, Body Count was anti-racist — but it was homophobic and misogynist. 

“And so my thesis was about that — can you pursue social justice as an artist and just be focused on race and not think about gender? 

“And my punchline was, ‘No, you’ve got to do both!’ 

“And then this song — Understand Where I’m Coming From — comes on TV and I’m, like, I know what my master’s is going to be on!”

Haupt decided he better find Prophets and interview them. 

He ended up being the first South African to do academic research on local hip-hop and became a freelance music journalist for the Mail & Guardian and SL Magazine. That way, he got to know the hip-hop community as he really spent time with them.

What was it like that first time when he sat down and interviewed the guys of Prophets? 

“Very intimidating! I was 22. They were seasoned — by the time I caught up with them, they were sufficiently burned.”

Age of Truth was recorded at massive discount in the fancy Bop Studios in the Bophuthatswana “bantustan”. This caper is hilariously recalled by the group’s MC Shaneen Ariefdien and DJ Ready D in Neva Again.

It ended badly because the shit-stirring group included the line, “Fuck Mangope, even if we record here.” Lucas Mangope was the homeland’s cantankerous puppet president. 

The studio’s head engineer confiscated the master tapes when he heard that. Fortunately, Prophets had made backups. 

“Ramone [de Wet, the group’s dancer] managed to get hold of the box; he managed to grab the beweging [the thing], while they were threatening us,” Ariefdien recalled.

The group literally had to rush for the “border”. They released the album but, unbeknown to Prophets, a lot had been happening behind the scenes.

Age of Truth was banned. Their tour itinerary suddenly dried up, there were cancellations and their music was pulled from stores.

“I interviewed them. It was bloody, it was very intimidating because it wasn’t going to be this wonderful talk to me about the potential of hip-hop … they were fuming, they were angry,” Haupt recalls. 

To this day, he remembers this one quote from Ariefdien: “When we speak gamtaal and kak like that, the shit’s on purpose. It’s not for some white-ass, middle-class motherfucker at home. The shit is for the streets. You know, we want the laaitie at home to say, ‘Now, we can relate to that!’”

Prophets did a voters’ education tour before 1994’s first democratic election. The group thought they were exercising their right to free expression by saying, “Don’t vote for the Nats; don’t trust them.”

“But the ANC was, like, ‘Whoa, whoa, whoa! We are trying to reconcile and you are agitating for what?’ And their response is, ‘No justice, no peace, that’s what we’re advocating.’”

Haupt adds: “And they weren’t wrong because the compromises we made really hurt us today. And so that’s what’s funny because they were called Prophets of da City, and Age of Truth was a prophetic album. They anticipated the ANC’s betrayal of its promise to the electorate.”

So, if there was no big bang, a ball-park idea of when South African hip-hop started? 

“I think the very early 1980s is probably a safe bet for a lot of people. I don’t think there’s any singular moment. What does seem to be clear is that it started in Cape Town first, that the uptake was in Cape Town,” Haupt says.

He adds that, at the time, people came to hip-hop through different ways, many through dance, with Emile YX? of Black Noise, graffiti artist Falko and Prophets of da City’s DJ Ready D prominent examples.

One of the big turning points was the Saturday matinée at The Base in Cape Town in late 1980s, early 1990s, which provided a space for artists like them to come together.

“What happens there is a lot of people don’t just get exposed to the music but they talk philosophy, they talk politics, and they share reading, and they share tapes. That is a pedagogical moment.

“Once it takes that shape, it becomes a movement … what they’re doing, they’re not just listening to cool music or learning to spin on their heads. 

“They are literally in the mode of the struggle; they’re in ‘each one teach one’ mode. And that is powerful. And it’s obviously cognate with what was already happening with a mass democratic movement, the anti-apartheid struggle — kids are taking control of their own education.”

But hip-hop was just one thread. There were other places, such as the Congress of South African Writers’ office in Belgravia Road in Athlone, Cape Town, which was “a space of subversion for creative writers”. 

Some of the people on the hip-hop scene were already activists, such as Ariefdien. 

“And so, it’s just that conscious hip-hop, this particular version of hip-hop, was what was needed in a political moment. So, that is a turning point.”

Another turning point, says Haupt, was when Prophets of da City began to rap in their mother tongue and affirm what they call “gamtaal”, or what scholars would now call Afrikaaps or Kaaps. It’s a language created in settler colonial South Africa, developed by the 1500s. 

It took shape as a language during encounters between indigenous African (Khoi and San), South-East Asian, Dutch, Portuguese and English people. Today, Kaaps is most commonly used by working-class people on the Cape Flats.

Groups such as Prophets of da City, Brasse Vannie Kaap and Black Noise used hip-hop “to validate black modes of speech”. In the process, they validate black identities. 

“It didn’t just upset the apartheid sensors, it also upset their peers because, ‘Wie praat so? Jy moet reg praat.’ [Who talks like this? You must speak correctly.] And, ‘Is jy dan ’n skollie?’ [Are you a gangster, then?] All of that is going on at home as well,” Haupt explains.

That was when people stopped sounding American, and started “using Cape history and Cape vernaculars in service of black consciousness ideology, in opposition to the way that the apartheid state positioned them as coloured and separate from black”.

He concludes: “So, for me, those are the turning points. That’s how I would see it. Some other cats might want to talk about moments of origin like, ‘Yo, I was the first to this and I was the first to do this and I was the first to do that…’ but I think there were multiple things happening at the same time.”

Sidebar:

Few shoot from the hip on the exact origins of the genre

Hip-hop’s big bang 50 years ago was not one loud explosion. It was the sound of a young, Jamaican-born DJ mixing between two copies of the same album extending them into one seamless breakbeat at a party in the Bronx, in New York.

But was it that back-to-school party that birthed hip-hop? Many think so. Others hedge their bets with a “maybe” here and a few provisos there. Those of a more sceptical persuasion go, “Let’s not mess with the story of origin,” while some realists give it a firm rebuttal.

The History Channel states under the headline “Hip hop is born at a birthday party in the Bronx” that “it came to life precisely on August 11, 1973, at a birthday party in the recreation room of an apartment building in the west Bronx”.

To remove any doubt, they continue: “The location of that birthplace was 1520 Sedgwick Avenue, and the man who presided over that historic party was the birthday girl’s brother, Clive Campbell — better known to history as DJ Kool Herc, founding father of hip-hop.”

Several prestigious universities have conferences this year to celebrate hip-hop turning 50.  Prominent international publications have printed celebratory features. Fans can look forward to a major concert in the Bronx featuring hip-hop luminaries including Lil Wayne, Ice Cube, Snoop Dogg, Slick Rick, Common, Lil Kim, Eve and the headliners Run DMC.

History Detectives, a popular show on the American PBS channel, sent sociologist Tukufu Zuberi to find out if 1520 Sedgwick Avenue was really the birthplace of hip-hop.

“I know unearthing hip-hop’s roots, now mired in decades of oral history and urban legend, will be a challenge,” Zuberi said before he interviewed Curtis Sherrod, executive director of the Hip Hop Culture Center of Harlem, and the centre’s musical director, DJ Silva-Sirfa.

Then Zuberi puts a damper on festivities: “Curtis and Silva-Sirfa are convinced that Kool Herc threw a party at which a new kind of musical performance was introduced but neither can offer me proof that it actually happened.”

The best approach comes from The New York Times which recently published a splash of “50 influential voices”, chronicling hip-hop’s evolution, while calling the 50th anniversary “a framing of convenience”.

“Insisting the genre has an origin point, therefore, is really just another way of insisting on its importance, its stability and its future,” wrote their critic Jon Caramanica. “You can quarrel with the specific details — and many do — but not with the intent, which is to ensure no one again overlooks the genre’s power and influence.”

South African hip-hop scholar Adam Haupt responds with a nudge and a wink to the Kool Herc story. “That’s a nice story. It’s a lovely story. Let’s not mess with the story of origin …”

Haupt warns against exclusion, saying by establishing Kool Herc as the founding father, you “embed patriarchy into hip-hop”. 

“You can do two things at the same time: acknowledge the multiplicity of the actors on the scene, as well as reverse engineer where the stuff comes from.”

Haupt refers to Shante Paradigm Smalls’ book, Hip-hop Heresies: Queer Aesthetics in New York City, which highlights that queer heads were involved from the get-go and in different scenes — disco, punk and hip-hop — at the same time. Many other people were immersed in the scene, including Latinos, women and white hip-hoppers.

“So, to present the formation of hip-hop as purely the story of African American heterosexual males is reductive and exclusionary,” Haupt says. 

“The music industry had a big role to play in co-opting hip-hop and reducing it to a particularly narrow version of black masculinity, to the exclusion of other kinds of masculinities and other kinds of gender identities.” — Charles Leonard