Race Narratives Through Hip-Hop
The project will be a year-long podcast series that will profile 6 current and former Black hip-hop artists whose work addresses themes of race, history, space and struggle. The podcast will be hosted by Minhaj Jeenah and a co-host (co-hosts will be young working-class individuals based in the city where the interview will take place).
Each segment will be 45 minutes and allow a conversation where the artist speaks about their lived experiences, struggles, identities and how that informs and is expressed in their music. The podcast will be produced in audio and video form – with a focus on the video. Each segment will be shot at a location that reflects the lived experience of the artist (eg: a street or house where they grew up)
The conversations will attempt to draw out:
The lived experience of some Black people in South Africa
An understanding of spatial and racial injustice in South Africa
How hip-hop is used and has been used as a form of resistance and struggle
PROBLEM ANALYSIS
In South Africa, race and identity have been constructed through European settler colonialism and cemented through apartheid. Almost 400 years of colonialism and slavery has forced identities on people who are not of European heritage. These constructions erased histories and memories in order to dehumanise and control diverse groups of people with rich traditions to sustain white supremacy and racial capitalism.
Apartheid, to divert resistance, defined people through the largely abstract identities “white”, “African”, “Indian” and “Coloured”. These identities, although mostly nonsensical, still define groups today, and are further entrenched along class and spatial lines.
All these groups, reduced to being defined by simplistic racial categories. Now, many black (I use the term black to refer to all people who have been oppressed by white supremacy – consistent with the Black Consciousness tradition) people living in South Africa struggle to navigate through issues of space, identity, memory and history. And now, South Africa remains deeply fractured along race and class lines and still restricted to spatial boundaries created by apartheid.
Impact
I created a podcast brand called “Broad Street Radio”. As part of this brand, I designed, produced and hosted a 6-part podcast series exploring the history of Hip Hop in Cape Town, South Africa in the context of the country’s struggle into democracy. The series called Voices of Da City can be viewed here.
This series was the first series of the brand, and I plan to expand and produce several other series, with similar themes.
Voices of Da City successfully gave listeners a deeper insight into race, space and identity in Cape Town.
Long-term impact: Black communities in South Africa embrace their blackness.
Direct impact: An increased conversation on anti-Black racism, identity and spatial injustice among young people living in South Africa.
Indirect impact: An increased interest in South African hip-hop as a form of resistance.
