Nairobi—Everyone was waiting for the Americans. Dead Prez, the New York hip hop duo, had touched down in Nairobi twelve hours ago for a brief tour of the motherland. They had a noon appointment at Ukoo Flani’s courtyard-in-the-slum.

Friends, rappers, and rastas started filtering in well before that, and by late morning the compound had taken on a fairground atmosphere. Three girls with magnificent posture set up a jewellery stand beneath Haile Selassie’s watchful gaze, while a troupe of devout Rastafarians hung T-shirts in the bougainvillea. “Give t’anks,” said their leader, Joseph, when I bought one, tapping his heart with his fist.

By two o’clock, about fifty of us were milling about as best we could in the limited space, but still no Prez. I met Ngulu, a photographer from Capetown who had been backpacking around the continent for the last couple months. We talked about the relative merits of African slums. “Kenyans are lucky,” she said. “Most of them have families with land in the country. But South Africans have nowhere to go. Mandela let the whites keep everything.”

The Dead Prez, if only they were here, might have described the “unyielding” American slum they grew up in:

“…something like three hundred million
Gun-wielding black rats trapped in one building
With low ceilings, and no feelings,
Cutthroat villains, dope dealings, and glassy-eyed pavilions,
Sunken faces and powder traces,
My people slave for the basics…”

Easy to see why such lyrics have reverberated throughout Africa’s urban centres. The only question was, why weren’t we hearing them now? So far, the only music to be heard was a muezzin’s call to prayer from a nearby mosque.

Just as the rastas’ turbans were starting to sag, Dead Prez finally burst through the gate. The cameramen trailing them must have got some great footage. M-1’s matching red cap and hoodie were vivid against the used-clothes-wearing crowd, who greeted him like a long lost brother. It turned out his usual partner, stic.man, had stayed in New York, but another rapper named Umi had taken his place and received the same welcome. Elaborate hand shakes, introductions, and “yeah mans” took up the next half hour.

“I know I’m an African,” said M-1 when it came time for a public address. “I been waitin’ to come to east Africa for a long time now, and I gotta say it feels good to come home.”

But it was a fourteen-year-old aspirant named Jackson who started the freestyle session everyone was waiting for. Standing off to one side and hesitant at first, he picked up momentum as a small circle gathered around him. Ukoo Flani’s unassuming leader, MC Kah, soon joined in, holding his twelve-year-old sister by the hand as she sang a few lyrics of her own.

By now everyone was in on it. The locals took turns in the circle’s center, passing Swahili lyrics back and forth while M-1 and Umi watched from the edge in delight. At length the celebrated guests took their cue and entered the fray. Their performance was brief but professional, a crackling delivery that touched on police harassment, black power, self discipline; the message hit its target like a ball swishing through a net.

The next day, Dead Prez gave a public show that was on time and longer lasting, but disappointing. This time, a thousand or so fans crowded the three-tiered space provided by the British Council. Dozens more clung to the high cement walls that surrounded the enclave.

“Make money money money, make money money,” came the opening line. It seemed the dark side of hip hop had possessed the New Yorkers overnight. Greed, ego, and reverse racism replaced the more thoughtful anger I’d witnessed the day before. “Fuck the British imperialists,” M-1 shouted between songs, “even if they do give us the space to say it.” And later, “We’re here to start a revolution. That means when you see a cop walkin’ down the street, you just smack him around if you feel like it.”

Risky advice in a country where police shoot to kill at the least provocation. The argument could be made that this was simply an entertaining way to vent some justifiable frustration, but even so, I passed on the after party.

It was the last I would see of M-1 and Umi, who were due to visit a Black Panther camp in Tanzania the next day. As I left, I ran into Jackson, the kid who’d initiated the rap circle at Ukoo Flani.

“Good show?” I asked him.

“Too tough,” he said, smiling in appreciation. “Too tough.”

Tags: international, kenya, performing arts

More in Notes from Nairobi | Email Arno Kopecky <-->| Blogs Home | Current Issue | SUBSCRIBE »

Posted on Tuesday, September 25th, 2007 at 6:43 pm. Follow comments through the RSS 2.0 feed. Comment or trackback.