Re-locating South African hip hop into global intercultural communication

ABSTRACT

The founding ideology of modern South Africa followed a unique path that favoured the discourse of racial purity, exclusion of political rights for blacks and the silencing of black narratives justified in the phenomena of ‘separate development’, officially called the apartheid system in 1948. In response to these exclusive racial politics, Africans in South Africa, with significant assistance from African countries from the north, gained independence in 1994. However, as early as 1994, a new discourse of black South African racial nationalism was promoted, and it named some blacks from the north as ‘economic refugees’ or ‘foreign guests’ and the intensity of this exclucive language resulted in the xenophobic attacks on foreign blacks carried out by ordinary South Africans in 2008, with more or less white and black elite approval. More than 65 black lives were lost in the new crusade to purify South Africa of black foreign elements. However, the discourse of racial purity, engendered in the sort of narrow nationalism promoted by both white and black supremacists before and after 1994 has not gone unchallenged. In some popular music, black South Africans have problematise notions of ‘multiculturalism’ and ‘cultural diversity’, which underpin the liberal discourse of postapartheid South Africa. The tendency in some selected lyrics by black hip hop artists is to embrace ‘intercultural’ communication as a basis for renegotiating questions of identities in the context of the local and global crisis informed by residual ideologies of colonialism, apartheid, the Cold War and most recently, the War on Terror.

Keywords:

• apartheid
• black purity and racial nationalism
• Cold War
• cultural diversity
• hip hop
• interculturalism
• multiculturalism
• popular music
• South Africa
• War on Terror
• xenophobia