I don't know about Kenya, but South Africa has a fairly old rap scene. I know at one time the apartheid government wanted to ban rap music on radio and I remember reading that rap groups like Prophets of the City organized concerts around the anti-apartheid struggle. Rap may be more subsumed under kwaito right now, the locally-based dance style/culture that uses a lot of heavy beats similiar to hip-hop.
Wojtek: I also understand that rap catching up outside the US is a very recent phenomenon - something that probably has more to do with advertising and promotion than with its actual appeal.
I don't know how you reached this understanding but it is entirely inaaccurate. I know from both participants and recordings that by the late eighties there were already established rap scanes in both Algeria and Brazil, two very different countries both geographically and culturally. For some perspective, consider that at that time rap was still just moving into the mainstream of the US, spreading out from the cities and getting more regular radio airplay. Hip-hop spread into Europe around the same time if not earlier, France has had a well known and long-standing scene. In 1993, Tommy Boy records put out a so-so compliation of international rap which by then was already able to draw on artists from regions as disparate as Brazil, Japan, Austrailia and South Africa: http://www.uajournal.com/?rev=226 Rap's migration out of the US is anything but recent.
I also think chalking up the spread of hip-hop globally to some faddish interest induced by commerical advertistizing is an incredibly superficial assessment. Most of the non-US rap scenes that have lasted for any real duration have evolved styles unique to their region that are anything but simple emulations of commericial US hip-hop. In Brazil rapping isn't some random US import but an activity that has been thoroughly reappropriated culturally and now has an authentic place in urban brazilian communities. Just recently, several brazilian rappers boycotted a concert that was going to be headlined by two major US rappers because they thought the promoters were misrepresenting their music and because the organizers were unwilling to split the show's profits with the local communities, a custom of brazilian hip-hop: http://www.rapnewsdirect.com/News/2004/02/05/Snoop.JaRule.Boycott/ Hard to understand how such strong sentiments could well up around only a passing consumer-fad. Similiarly in Algeria, rap has taken root and been made into local activity common in the cities along the coast, a very distinct style of rap has evolved there that draws heavliy on Algerian rai music. Two groups who have prefected this style, Intik and MBS (Le Micro Brise Le Silence), have had big cross-over successes in France, eschewing the standard first-world to third-world flow of cultural exports. And most of what these group's rap about is life in Algeria, the country's many political upheavels and the deteriorating social situation found in the country's urbal sprawl. Not exactly the material I'd expect advertizers to be clamouring for. (For more on Algeria's political situation search for algeria on hrw.org, you can find intik and mbs albums on amazon, if you can get your hands on it, I recommend listening to intik's "Si Chacun Faisait De Son Mieux" for an example of a distinctly algerian rap creation) So what explains rap world-wide appeal? There are probably are a number of reasons but a few trends stand out. One reason is the symetry found between the descriptions of urban life in US hip-hop and what's going on in the rest of the world's cities. I don't think it's in any sense a one-to-one match, but the depictions of crime, poverty, and neglected youth resonate strongly with audiences outside the US. I know that's true of rappers who emerged out of brazil's slums, they strongly identified with the images of other-wise marginal urban youth gaining an actual presence in the larger culture. Describing the rise of polish rappers, this article notes hip-hop's rise coinciding with Poland's growing poverty and it's increasingly frustrated, jobless youth: http://www.hoogbouw.nl/euroforums/cgi-bin/topic.cgi?forum=5&topic=494 Matthieu Kassovitz's film "La Haine" is a good depiction of the geniune presence hip-hop has acquired in the project neighborhoods and ghettos of French cities (and it's just a good film around).
Another reason is that urban outgroups usually find a strong affinity with rap and the way it grew out of US cities. The idenitification is usually along ethic lines that mirror America's hip-hop presence within urban black and latino outgroup populations, so you get strong rap communities among sengalese and magrebi arabs in France, turks in Germany, south asians in Britain, blacks in Brazil. There is a cross-over idenfication with depictions of discrimination and de-facto segregation in the US and it's couterparts elsewhere in the world.
Lastly, I think it's important to consider the role different languages play in relocating rap into another culture. Because rap relys so heavily on langauge play, it doesn't work to just parrot US rappers, you have to start drawing from the language you are rapping in, using its idiosyncratic speech patterns, vocabulary, phonetic rules and proverbs. This quickly shifts you from just emulating another culture's practice to moving it within the particulars of the culture you're in.
Not recognizing rap's roots in language play is probably a big part of why people can't understand rap's mass-appeal. When you miss this, all you tend to see is mimickry of gansters and rivalries of bad-assedness. Combining language play with song sprouts up cross-culturally, South American accordion music resembles rap battles quite a bit in it's trading of verses, improvised lyrics, and rapid talking-singing. Similiar resemblances exist with Carribean folk music and jazz-jive talking, and probably a host of other musical forms from many different cultures. Rap just seems to be part of this sort of universal appeal humans have for musical-poetic forms.
And as these types of musical-poetic forms develop over time, they tend to have a vast repertoire of creative and poetic usages of langauge that can be directed to artistic ends. That's definately true of rap in America, just look at it's progression from the stilted rhyme style of the 80s to what is now. Hardly anyone rhymes in a straight, thudding style that's lodged in the popular imagination, most rappers play on sound recognition between words, rhyming from "bankrobbers" to "rapconcerts", varying the distance between rhymes, rhyming multiple words within a phrase, breaking syllables and intonations to change emphasis, and on and on. Then there is also a rich array of applications of metaphor and analogy. Like punchlining, where rappers resolve a proverb or epithet in a creative, emphatic way, "Your girl says you're just a small piece of wood stuck in her finger tip. What? Little prick." Similies that focus on the words and phrases rather than meanings, "People get passed out like Jehovah's Witness pamphlets." And then you have a narrative level that can bring all the other elements together. My favorite example is Ghostface's "All that I got is you":
Check it, fifteen of us in a three bedroom apartment Roaches everywhere, cousins and aunts was there Four in the bed, two at the foot, two at the head I didn't like to sleep with Jon-Jon he peed the bed Seven o'clock, pluckin roaches out the cereal box Some shared the same spoon, watchin saturday cartoons Sugar water was our thing, every meal was no frill In the summer, free lunch held us down like steel And there was days I had to go to Tek's house with a note Stating "Gloria can I borrow some food I'm dead broke" So embarrasin I couldn't stand to knock on they door My friends might be laughin, I spent stamps in stores
So rap's mass-appeal generally is probably the same as what it is for most literary/poetic arts, admiring how someone can turn a phrase. NY author Peter LaVelle recently sent up Ghost by using one of his lyrics as the title of his book of short stories, "Slapboxxing with Jesus." Related to this appeal is that rap is a fairly unpretentious poetic form, a pretty rare thing in US culture. I can't listen to more than five minutes of spoken word stuff before I start to feel nauseous. The knowledge that many rappers have of sounds classes of different vowels and consonants is very complex, you could spend a whole linguistics seminar outlining the same aspects, but all the knowledge is gained implicity by observation and practice. I think rap is a good example of the kind of practice that should be signified when you call something a "rich folk tradition."
Arash
PS Watch for the next Ghostface album, "Pretty Tony", should be out in May.