‘Orality is my reality’: the identity stakes of the ‘oral’ creation in Libreville hip-hop practices

Abstract

Based on an ethnographic study in Libreville, this presentation examines the political and identity issues contained in the inscription in the register of orality for Gabonese hip-hop artists, mainly in rap music and slam poetry. It describes the history of these two genres’ appropriation in Libreville, then analyses how the claim for orality is deeply shaped for Gabonese youth with a dynamic of identity construction and of reafricanization, manifested in three different ways: the creation of a peer language (toli bangando), the use of a traditional Fang epic (mvet), and the staging of religious initiation societies. It finally discusses how this identity construction coincides with postcolonial issues and with connections with the black diaspora.

Keywords:

• hip-hop
• orality
• identity
• postcolonial context
• Gabon

Notes

1. As in other African countries (Künzler 2012; Shipley 2013), rap scenes have become a media employed by the youth to integrate themselves into local hierarchies and power issues, and it has sometimes contributed to the reproduction of older systems of power and hierarchies.

2. In a paper published in 2012, Jean Derive argued that ‘the reference to orality as a specific African feature’ and the perception of oral literature as the ‘essential expression of a cultural African identity’ (Derive 2012, 230) had germinated since 1950 in the crucible of French Africanism and its colonial ascendances. Kusum Aggarwal has discussed elsewhere the intimate links between Africanism and African literature, which has sometimes borrowed its ‘fixist and passeist theories concerning the existence of an African substratum at the origins of particularisms’ (Aggarwal 2010, 1196, my translation).

3. This fieldwork started in 2008 has been realized for a thesis dissertation in anthropology at University Lyon 2 (Aterianus-Owanga 2013). It consisted of an immersion of several years in the urban life of Libreville, interviews with numerous rappers and musical agents, observations of rappers' activities in recording studios, of their daily life and their artistic travels in the countryside of Gabon and in foreign countries, and the production of their life stories.

4. As a non-exhaustive selection of references about rap music in the United States, we can quote Rose (1994); Chang (2005); George (2001); and Kelley (2011).

5. In the only exception to that observation, the sociolinguist Michelle Auzanneau published two papers in which she addressed the case of Libreville's rap (Auzanneau 2001a, 2001b).

6. Studies about African hip-hop have frequently focused on the linguistic aspects (Auzanneau 2001b; Perullo and Fenn 2003) or on the political transformations (Moulard-Kouka 2008) that accompany hip-hop's implantation in Africa. The question of the construction of local identities through rap music has also been discussed in recent contributions (Ntarangwi 2009, 20–43; Shipley 2013), but mainly about English-speaking countries.

7. This sentence is an extract of a slam poetry performed by the artist « Le Wise », observed in 2010 in Libreville.

8. This is an extract of an interview accessible on the following website: http://www.bondyblog.fr/201006111600/mondial-de-slam/#.VCfGGvl_tb4. See also about that slammer and three other slam artists of Libreville the documentary movie that I made in 2010: “New writings of the self” (Aterianus-Owanga, 2010).

9. For notes on Gabonese history and descriptions of the 1990s events, see among others Metegue N'Nah (2006).

10. Dance constitutes the first discipline of hip-hop that has been appropriated by young people, in Gabon but also in several others countries, like France (Hammou 2012), Brazil (Ailane 2011) or Japan (Condry 2001).

11. Murray Forman describes how the diffusion of hip-hop from New York to the other towns of the United States (US) has also been facilitated and boosted by the influence of the first hip-hop movies (Forman 2002, 74).

12. In the US, even if slam poetry was initially rather associated with white and working-class roots, and even if it tended to be a democratic and multicultural expression, Susan Somers-Willett also notes that ‘as it has grown, the slam has seen an infusion of hip-hop inspired performance, so much that newcomers may mistakenly assume that the competition grew out of African American hip-hop culture’ and that ‘hip-hop is an important influence on many slam poets today’ (Somers-Willett 2009, 12).

13. For Cyril Vettorato, who studied the history and rules of verbal sparring, the word ‘clash’ is employed to qualify a kind of verbal sparring of insults that is practiced nowadays all around the word, but which finds its origins in American ghettos of the twentieth century, in African-American communities, whether in dirty dozens or in freestyle battles of hip-hop culture. In both dirty dozens and battles of hip-hop culture, to clash means ‘to face each other using series of poetical invectives, that are used by the player to affirm his superiority and belittle his rival’ (Vettorato 2008, 8, my translation).

14. Movaizhaleine, ‘Le bilangom’, in On détient la Harpe sacrée Tome 2, 2008, Zorbam Produxions.

15. About this epic, we can refer to Tsira Ndong Ndoutoume (1970), but also Daniel Assoumou Ndoutoume (1993) and Grégoire Biyogo, one of the most prolific writers about this subject (Biyogo 2002, 2006). In her analysis of the relationships between epics and social organizations where they are performed, Christiane Seydou also tackles the question of the mvet, and demonstrates that this epic leads to the reproduction of social orders (Seydou 1988, 11). The word mvet can be written either with one or two final t (mvett).

16. Interview with Okoss, rapper of 241, Libreville, February 2009.

17. 241, ‘Chez les immortels’, in 241, amour, immortalité, Nofia sound, 2009.

18. The identification with Nyabinghi order is an emblematic illustration of the dialogues between Afro-diasporic and African cultures, who both imagine themselves in relation to the others, creating a permanent transatlantic circulation of some referents and symbols like that one. Concerning the settlement of Rastafaris in Africa and the history of these dialogues, see Bonacci (2010). About Rastafari ideologies and Nyabinghi dances or secret orders, see Chevannes (1994).