Tag Archives: South Africa

Omotayo’s book, You Can’t Go to War Without Song

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https://iupress.org/9780253063212/you-cant-go-to-war-without-song/

Tayo Jolaosho died on October 21, 2021, months before their book was published in July 2022. We honor their work and memory with an interview with their dissertation advisor, Dorothy Hodgson, about their insights.

Interview by Deborah Durham

Deborah Durham: First let me say how devastating it is that the author themself cannot answer these questions: their book, You Can’t Go to War Without Song, is so full of life, and promise. One thing that struck me in particular about the book was how attuned Omotayo was to the embodied dimensions of performance, from toyi-toying in the streets to discomforts and assertions in South African offices. Their accounts of embodied political activism are so powerful because of their combined intimacy and acute insight. How did Omotayo come to have such intimacy with embodiment and performance?

Dorothy Hodgson: I share your devastation.  I had the honor of serving as Tayo’s PhD advisor and mentor, and eventually their close friend. Although Tayo (who used the pronouns they/them) is no longer with us, I have the benefit of being able to cite their own words to answer some of these questions from their various application letters, personal and research statements, and other sources I have kept over the years. Their words will appear in italics.

Tayo’s extraordinary book, You Can’t Go to War Without Song, draws on their formative experiences of embodiment and performance growing up in Nigeria and later as a playwright, performer, poet, and singer at Simon’s Rock College of Bard, where they started at the age of 14. At Simon’s Rock, they studied music and integrated arts, won a national playwriting competition, and twice received the Division of the Arts prize, awarded by the faculty to recognize significant contributions to the division of Arts and Aesthetics.

In the course of my life, I have had the opportunity to experience the power and importance of the art both personally and within a process of community. Growing up in Nigeria, whereas in many other parts of Africa, the arts are not divorced from everyday life, my consciousness of and passion for the arts was nurtured. I remember how each morning my mother, my brother and I would gather to sing hymns; song and dance would also manifest in the course of our daily duties and activities, in our childhood play, in storytelling, etc. These artistic expressions served as our inheritance as members of a community.

This connection to the arts did not leave me when I came to live in the United States. In fact, it only deepened to the point of my going on to study music and integrated arts at an undergraduate level. When asked why I chose to pursue this course of study as opposed to “something more practical” my response came easily: music and performance saved my life, for me there’s nothing more practical than that. Music and performance enabled me to preserve a presence of mind, a sense of identity and functioned as catharsis for me during a traumatic period of living in a physically, sexually and emotionally abusive home. Singing songs written by others but which nonetheless told my story encouraged me and served as my resistance in that it became a source through which I could express my dissent without fear of adverse consequences. It enabled me to speak my dissent in the presence of my “guardians” but under the protection of someone else’s voice.

What Tayo called their “passion for creative expression” infused every aspect of their scholarly, professional and personal life. Some of my favorite memories are watching them start many presentations- whether their dissertation defense, a public talk, a conference panel – with song.  They would close their eyes, take a deep breath, and start singing with no accompaniment – usually one of the songs dear to the activists they worked with in South Africa. Initially, audience members would be startled, but quickly entranced and moved as Tayo demonstrated their argument – the power of performance to disrupt and shape the world.

Deborah Durham: Following through on that, Omotayo engaged with issues of women’s rights, dignity and ubuntu, and concern with inequality though a variety of expressive media – could you tell us more about their writing and work outside of conventional anthropological ethnography?

Dorothy Hodgson: All of Tayo’s work pushed – and often broke – the boundaries of
so-called conventional ethnography.  Two notable products were what they called “performance ethnography” and “digital anthropology”- explanations and examples of both are available on their still-live website.

As a performer myself, I have a unique opportunity to explore the benefits of ethnographic performance for research and dissemination, including through policy. Towards this, I developed a one-woman show based on my interviews and field notes with South African women activists. The show, “Three Women (Break The Silence),” subsequently expanded into an ensemble piece that examines what it means to find one’s voice amidst gendered repression and restrictions on women’s bodily and sexual autonomy. These themes—of harassment and consent, in particular—have risen to prominence in political debate and public discourse here in the United States and in South Africa, especially over the past two years with the resurgence of #MeToo as a worldwide movement. Being a work of theatre, Three Women highlights these concerns in non-didactic ways, seeking rather to open audiences to further dialogue and inquiry into African women’s lives and varied experiences. Following a staged reading at the renowned Market Theatre Lab in Johannesburg in 2018, the play received a touring production in three South African cities in 2019.

In addition to their powerful show, “Three Women (Break The Silence),” which I had the pleasure of seeing them perform at the 2017 Berkshire Conference on the History of Women, Genders and Sexualities at Hofstra University, Tayo was also finalizing a digital anthropology project, “The Freedom Sung Project,” which they described as: an online interactive exhibit built from a digital collection of video footage and song recordings I made during ethnographic fieldwork in South Africa. The collection includes over 120 footage hours of unedited interviews and coverage of collective rallies that countered the invisibility experienced by politically marginalized communities. The online exhibit will serve as a companion site for [my] book … and will feature snippets of interviews with activists, edited video footage documenting protests and performances, select music tracks, images, and analysis.

Deborah Durham: There is, in You Can’t Go to War, a kind of disappointment in the possibility of social movements in such situations of extreme inequality and, for many, lack of basic resources. Movements get routinized; high-level protests generate low-level disputes and tensions; South Africa remains the most unequal country in the world (in Gini coefficient) and, nationally, its infrastructure is increasingly failing everyone. How did Omotayo retain a sense of hope in the face of this?

Dorothy Hodgson: As anyone who met Tayo, even briefly, recognized: they were an extraordinarily smart and gifted person: an accomplished playwright, singer, and performer; a brilliant student and scholar; a compassionate, engaged ethnographer; and a joyful soul. Tayo’s fierce, joyous engagement with the world and search for hope and meaning was also tempered, at times, by despair: not just about the dire situation in South Africa, but the brutal violence of structural racism, sexism and homophobia in the United States that they witnessed and experienced as a queer person of color. Like many people, their despair was amplified by the uncertainties, restrictions, loneliness, and losses of the COVID pandemic.

In the face of these at-times overwhelming challenges, they used their gifts and skills to try to understand the deep disparities of the world and do what they could to bring change – whether through their writing, teaching, singing, yoga, or activism. And they were brave- defying convention at every turn. They actively sought embodied ways to heal, hope and change the world: through learning and excelling at capoeira, becoming certified as a yoga instructor and starting a yoga practice, and in 2020, at the height of racial justice protests amidst the COVID-19 pandemic, founding a non-profit organization dedicated to promoting healing and collective recovery for multiple marginalized individuals and communities. Tayo was also an exceptional teacher and mentor, committed to educating new generations of scholar-activists through engaged, experiential forms of teaching and learning. In all these acts, they embodied hope. I think the dedication of the book sums up the source of their hope: “For our dead, not a moment’s silence, but a lifetime of struggle.”

Russel Kaschula on his book, Language, Identities and Intercultural Communication in South Africa

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Interview by Jennifer Cox

https://www.routledge.com/Languages-Identities-and-Intercultural-Communication-in-South-Africa-and/Kaschula/p/book/9780367364359

Jennifer Cox: Your book focuses on language in South Africa and other African countries and appears to be written for an African audience. Speaking as an American graduate student, I learned a lot from the book about the African linguistic landscape and the unique ways that language interacts with identity in African countries. What do you hope that readers from non-African countries will take away from your book?

Russell Kaschula: There are many multilingual countries in the world, including the USA, which is really a melting pot of languages and cultures (even though these languages are hardly recognized officially, with the exception of Spanish to some extent). In a sense, this allows for anyone interested in multilingualism and identity or identities to engage with the book. My hope is that people can identify with the issues in the book (even though it is Africa based) and that they will find themselves in the book as issues related to identity and multilingualism are universal. Indeed, we live in a global village and any issues related to language and gender, power, prejudice, workplace, identity and so on are universal to all of humanity.

Jennifer Cox: One concept I found intriguing at the beginning of the book was the debate over the place of colonial languages in African society, particularly the “yo-yo effect” that occurs when governments alternate between supporting exoglossic and African languages. I imagine that this instability has further complicated language attitudes in the countries where it occurs. How have unstable policies affected attitudes toward certain languages in South Africa and other African countries?

Russell Kaschula: The question of language attitudes is indeed an interesting one. At the forefront of such attitudes is the power of English and other exoglossic languages as global languages. Everyone aspires to English in South Africa and there is nothing wrong with that. However, as the late Professor Alexander said, it is often a case of English being unassailable but unattainable as we do not all have easy access to this language. Nevertheless, the post-democracy linguistic pendulum swung towards English in South Africa and there was a dismissive attitude towards indigenous languages, arguably a win for neocolonialism which perpetuates a neoliberal approach entrenched through English hegemony.

There is however an empowering legislative framework though the democratic Constitution and other legal texts which has helped to improve language attitudes related to the use of African Languages more generally. However, in the schooling system, the school governing bodies (SGBs) that are responsible for language policy still tend to retain English as a medium of instruction. There are however instances where in Cofimvaba, a rural area, where isiXhosa has been chosen as a language of instruction in schools by SGBs for mathematics and science. This all serves to changes our attitudes towards using African languages. If we do not follow such an approach, then we will be responsible for contributing to the colonial project rather than the decolonial project.  Language attitudes are central to freeing South Africans from the apartheid linguistic divide and rule policies of the past.

Language attitudes are indeed personal, but they need to be informed by issues of what languages work best in certain contexts such as education and the workplace. One learns best in a language that one understands best. It is that attitude that we need to change – to realize that our languages are resources that can be used and our attitudes to these languages are pivotal in freeing us from trying to persist with a language that is only a first language to 9.7% of the population.  These attitudes that favor English are often also entrenched through the media and advertising. However, the South African Broadcasting Association has done its best, creating over 15 radio stations operating in various languages, including UKHOZI FM which has over 9 million listeners and a number of television programmes in African languages. This has boosted the visibility of African languages and contributed to a more positive attitudinal change towards African languages, at least in the spoken domain.

Jennifer Cox: Throughout the book, you discuss critical theory and critical language awareness in relation to the linguistic situations in African countries. In one such discussion, you note that “the opposite view of critical theory is to emancipate people into societal structures that serve their true interests, and to allow them to choose the best options for themselves in their particular contexts, whether economic or otherwise” (p. 28). What are some examples of situations where this ideology has been implemented in language policy in African countries?

Russell Kaschula: There are examples from East Africa where a language such as Kiswahili has become a language of trade, industry and education. It is now also one of the working languages of the African Union. Ironically the banking sector in South Africa and elsewhere has been quite proactive in this regard, with one being able to choose an African language at the autobank in order to conduct one’s banking. This is true too of call centres. Cellular or mobile companies have also seen that if you speak to people through their own languages then it benefits these companies in the market place. In a nutshell, in order for this emancipation to take root, African languages need to gain capital value in the market. 

Jennifer Cox: Another recurring theme is the importance of embracing multilingualism and the effect that this policy could have on African economic development. You write that multilingualism should be seen as a resource on the same level as gold and African wildlife. Do you expect to see this attitude becoming more widespread in African countries in the near future? Are certain countries more likely than others to recognize the significance of multilingualism?

Russell Kaschula: Well – there is a difference between aspiration and reality. There will be pockets of excellence when it comes to the use of African languages as a resource. However, the reality is that language polices and usage is also linked to funding models, for example the World Bank requires countries to operate in English. Rwanda is a case in point that has suffered the yo-yo effect from Kinyarwanda and French to English. What is encouraging though is to see how people have developed urban varieties of African languages that are being used in the streets and even at universities. As the youth develop their identities it would seem to me that African languages and varieties of these languages have come back into play, from Sheng in Kenya to Sepitori and Afrikaaps in South Africa. This is an interesting space to watch as young people will now drive the decolonial project as they also drove the #feesmustfall protests against university fees. This places African languages back at the center of the voice of protest in African countries which is an important and continued development.

Jennifer Cox: One of the last chapters of the book presents an analysis of your own experiences with language and identity in the form of an autoethnography, including three short stories. What inspired you to include an autoethnographic piece in this work?

Russell Kascula: My own identity is beige – it is neither white nor black, European nor solely African. It is an amalgamation of experiences and linguistic repertoires. I guess this goes for many people in Africa and the world. So in my own mind I am choosing to celebrate this and to show that people are not one thing, but a conglomeration of history and contemporary realty. One’s life lies somewhere in between. I think my refusal to be boxed within an English only milieu and the opportunity that my multilingual background has offered me to be a better citizen has influenced these stories as part of an autoethnographic approach. At the end of the day we are all split, living in between spaces of constructed reality and that of fantasies, dreams, and aspirations.  

Steve Black on his book, Speech and Song at the Margins of Global Health

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Speech and Song at the Margins of Global Health

Interview by Yeon-Ju Bae

https://www.rutgersuniversitypress.org/speech-and-song-at-the-margins-of-global-health/9780813597713

Yeon-Ju Bae: How did you become interested in the South African gospel choir group that works on HIV/AIDS activism? It looks as if your background in musical training and ethnomusicology would have played a role, but I was wondering how you came to conduct research on choir performance amid HIV/AIDS stigma, whose interests intersect the fields of linguistic, medical, and psychological anthropology with a regional focus on South Africa. Also, in what ways does your identity play a role in negotiating the fieldwork process with your research participants?

Steve Black: My fieldwork with the choir was in many ways a serendipitous leap of faith—an effort that could have easily fallen apart many times before it really began. In part, I was guided by chance. As a linguistic anthropologist-in-training, my mentors suggested studying a non-Indo-European language to enhance my comprehension of the breadth of linguistic diversity. From my background as a jazz saxophonist and ethnomusicology student, I knew that South African jazz was nearly unparalleled globally in its quality and long history, and isiZulu happened to be among the few African language courses offered at UCLA. I applied for and was fortunate to be awarded a Foreign Language and Area Studies (FLAS) fellowship for an intensive summer introductory-level isiZulu course at Ohio University led by the UCLA isiZulu instructor, Dr. Zilungile Sosibo. Unfortunately, Dr. Sosibo had trouble renewing her work visa and decided to move back to South Africa after that summer, which meant that UCLA no longer offered any isiZulu courses! I suppose I could have begun studying a different language, but instead I decided to apply for and was awarded a fellowship to be part of a Fulbright-Hays Zulu Group Project Abroad, which was an intensive summer intermediate-level language and culture study abroad in Pietermaritzburg, South Africa (near Durban, in the province of KwaZulu-Natal). This was how I established isiZulu-speaking South Africa as a general focus for my fieldwork.

After this second summer of intensive isiZulu studies, one day I was relaxing in my apartment in Los Angeles and browsing the movies available through my cable TV’s on demand function (this was pre-online streaming, back when Netflix was a service that mailed DVDs to your home!). I stumbled onto a documentary made by some American film students about the choir. From that point forward, I hoped to work with the group. This prompted me to study medical and psychological anthropology perspectives on HIV/AIDS. I felt that I needed this disciplinary expertise in order to conduct ethnographic fieldwork with the choir. In other words, the project motivated my cross-disciplinary theoretical interests rather than the other way around.

I was very fortunate to be awarded a National Science Foundation (NSF) Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Grant, and even more fortunate that the choir agreed to allow me to conduct fieldwork with them! It is true that my musical expertise as a jazz musician helped me to engage with choir members. I occasionally participated in music-making as a saxophonist and more often as an informal sound engineer for trouble-shooting the group’s amplifiers and microphones. I was also able to sidestep questions from community members about why I was involved with the choir and present myself to most non-choir members as someone interested in Zulu gospel music. This helped to maintain the group’s non-disclosure of their HIV support group and AIDS activist functions in group members’ home communities.

Being a White American man from a middle-income family conducting fieldwork with Black low-income South Africans, many of whom are women, also deeply impacted my research, but not always in ways that might be assumed (Religious difference was also sometimes a factor—I am Jewish by heritage, and choir members are Christian—but not nearly as significant). Some group members saw me as a person with access to more resources than they had, and I did my best to live up to their expectations and contribute to the group in the ways that I could within the limits that the NSF set on how their money could be spent. While by the ethical standards of experimental scientific research my efforts might be thought of as coercion to participate in research, I do not think this is a valid interpretation in the context of ethnography. Rather, I think that the choir was doing an enormous amount to contribute to the success of my research, and that if anything the limits set by the NSF restricted me from providing reasonable forms of compensation for group member’s efforts. Also, while I was an outsider, people like me (white American researchers, doctors, and aid workers) had long been implicated in the complex webs of racialized power imbalances amid patterns of uneven global exchange and intervention, and choir members had personal experience interacting with others like me. This made initial encounters (including explanations of the research project) easier, but it also meant that it took a few months to get beyond the more restricted sorts of encounters that group members had had with other researchers and aid workers. By the end of my fieldwork, I was pleased when a choir leader made a speech to the group in which she contrasted me with other researchers, complimenting me by saying that I had “blended in” with the choir (only to an extent, of course).

Yeon-Ju Bae: You analyze the choir group that you studied as a “bio-speech community” which presents shared biomedically defined characteristics (HIV-positive status), shared ideological orientations toward biomedical models of HIV/AIDS, and shared verbal repertoires making use of biomedical terminologies and understandings. At the same time, it seems as if the group members sometimes show internal dissonance when it comes to gendered understandings of the HIV/AIDS epidemic in South Africa and to the potential misappropriation via individual access to the uneven global circulation of resources. Would you elaborate on the socioeconomic background of these precarities and their role in producing or changing dynamics in the group as a “bio-speech community”? Continue reading →

Liz Gunner on her book, Radio Soundings

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https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/radio-soundings/032576130F53ED88EA2765200B763F9F

Interview by Louisa Meintjes

Louisa Meintjes:  In analyses about popular culture produced during apartheid, Zulu radio dramas have been summarily dismissed. You place them at the core of Radio Soundings. Could you tell us about this choice and its relation to the argument of the book?

Liz Gunner: It’s not that they’ve been summarily dismissed, more they were never even considered as cultural artefacts. Rather they were simply seen as puppet-mouthings by compliant hangers-on of the apartheid design for radio. Why did I choose the dramas? And put them at the centre of the book? Well I began to realise the more I listened to them and the more I asked people about them, that they kept coming up whenever I asked about radio and radio listening habits. They seemed to be set deep in people’s memories and were a way they could tap into certain emotions about the fascination and strain and pleasure of events that circled usually around the family. They seemed to provide sites of recognition, self-knowledge, self-exploration, ways of accessing the self, often the deep self. They were also important as narratives, journeys. So I thought – Well, they’re important if you’re going to understand how people had vibrant and creative lives in spite of the pains of apartheid. This is a point Jacob Dlamini makes very well in his book Native Nostalgia.

Louisa Meintjes: Fascinating, idiosyncratic radio personalities people the book’s chapters. Exiles Lewis Nkosi and Bloke Modisane are the most internationally renowned of them. Yet listeners are crucial to your take on the radio voice as well. Could you tell us about the thought process that led you to the balance you chose for the book among backstage personalities, broadcast voices, and avid listeners?

Liz Gunner: I felt that unless you got in to the text a sense of the listeners and how they lived their lives through the dramas you would simply be doing half the job. Certainly this was true for the dramas from within South Africa – such as the Radio Bantu, Radio Zulu, and the Ukhozi FM dramas which are in the latter part of the book. I felt that what was being produced was a sort of public, self-generated intimacy which was very sustaining. People modeled themselves on the radio personalities who had parts in the dramas, wrote the dramas and in some cases had their own programmes; they became culture icons. The broadcast voices maybe together produced a kind of meta counter-voice to the crushing views of the dominant group. I wanted to try and get a kind of balance so that what would come out was an understanding of the making of sonic worlds that were culturally dynamic and deeply sustaining. And the fact that all this was in Zulu – in the case of the people within South Africa this is very significant. So K E Masinga, Thokozani Nene, Alexius Buthelezi, all very different personalities, to name a few, could all have a place on the sonic stage of this radio world. And one must not forget amazing white sound technicians like ‘Unogwaja’. He is mentioned by Eric Ngcobo as pioneering in his playing with the psychic-sonic sound effects in the 1980s drama ‘Yiz’ Uvalo’ (In Spite of Fear.)

The exiles Nkosi and Modisane had different paths to travel – Modisane worked with the very best in BBC Radio at a time when radio drama was a queen of genres but he could never build up a faithful following in the way that the radio voices from within could – say Eric Ngcobo, or Winnie Mahlangu. This was because his plays were not serialised and also were part of a different landscape of sound. They mediated, with the powerful intimacy of radio, the tensions and excitement of a country and a situation which impinged on the British consciousness of outsider and insider, home and colony; and then increasingly, race and power and Britain’s role in the anti-apartheid struggle. His plays were more part of high culture perhaps, than the plays from within which were more within the space of popular culture. Nkosi was different again – his voice became for a while well known on the African stations which bought tapes from the transcription Centre. He became a kind of key mediator of a stream of black voices of the world, when ‘Africa was on the Rise’ as James Baldwin saw it in the 1960s. So Nkosi and Modisane were complex and important mediators but the intimacy worked very differently.

Louisa Meintjes: Through a fine series of analyses of radio dramas and their producers/authors, variously situated through the decades (1960s through the 1990s) and at different sites (from London to Durban), you write about mediated intimacy. Radio reached into domestic space and it generated global affiliations and diasporic networks, all while it served the interests of the apartheid state. You ascribe to intimacy an important role in cultivating oppositional politics by means of radio dramas. As a researcher, how did you get at intimacy? Could you share an example here of mediated intimacy? And am I being reductive in asserting that it was the possibility of oppositional politics that this mediated intimacy enabled?

Liz Gunner: I think I’ve partly answered this question, above, but let’s see. You’re absolutely right to say radio reached into domestic space and generated global affiliations and diasporic networks – you see that with the Nkosi programmes, but his had a kind of fragility; Modisane’s were firmer because he had a place within the BBC because his work as a radio dramatist was so respected, and at the time the genre was flourishing. Your question about mediated intimacy is difficult.  I think for the dramas from within, voice carried and mediated intimacies through complicated personal encounters lodged in narratives of the domestic which drew in many other things. For Nkosi, let’s say the kind of intimacy he mediated was through throwing up moments of insight into the huge dramas of race and rights being played out in America and on the African continent. The most powerful example for me is when he played through interview the voice of the African American sociologist recalling how he’d spoken in Congress as part of the civil rights struggle. Maybe you’re partly right in your last point. But there is also the question of mediated intimacy as a counter presence – this is more than oppositional politics I think.

Louisa Meintjes: You have written about song, praise poetry, theater, and literature. This book draws on your work in all those performance arenas. Were there new challenges for you in writing about performance in the medium of radio?

Liz Gunner:  Yes absolutely. There was the question of what radio ‘did’ to these other genres and kinds of cultural production. Praise poetry for instance. Did it distance them or diminish them/ ? Did it confine them? Or could you see it as an extraordinarily powerful extension of the kinds of linguistic skills and affect that these forms could draw on? How did radio make use of song and praise poetry? Especially a radio station that was not free of apartheid control. I think in the 1970s, say, there was a huge drive to record ‘live’ performances of royal praises, chiefly installations and so on. But often the effect was to present a kind of double voice – the dignity of the form surpassed its ideologically controlled usage. Performance in the medium of radio struck me as very different to theatre. New terrain – theatre of the mind – perhaps you could compare it to Grotowski’s poor theatre in some ways. But it drew on new kinds of listening resources and auditory strengths – new domains of the auditory rather than the ocular and visual. So, something very different and the whole world of listeners, producers, actors and so on had a part in this different configuring of reality.

Louisa Meintjes: Radio Studies seems to be flourishing in our current epoch of social media and AV streaming. (Thank you for your lively contribution to it!) What’s your take on the reasons for this flourish, and on its promise?

Liz Gunner: I think the physicality of sound and its ability to express the temporal and spatial in new ways is giving radio huge impetus. And it may be the way it mediates intimacy, its physicality that is giving it such pull in an era saturated with the visual. And it can do things with communities and publics in ways as yet still not properly understood.

Quentin Williams on his new book, Remix Multilingualism

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Remix Multilingualism

https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/remix-multilingualism-9781472591135/

Interview by Msia Clark

Msia Clark:  In your book Remix Multilingualism, you state that you are a Hip Hop Sociolinguist. What is a Hip Hop Sociolinguist?

Quentin Williams: It´s something that I think quite accurately represents what I do in terms of my documentation of language, and its intimate link to and use in the Hip Hop community. So, the first aspect of the Hip Hop Sociolinguist is the Sociolinguistic part. A Sociolinguist is interested in the intimate use of language in society, from the perspective of linguistics. So, you use the tools of linguistics to understand how people who are formed by social structures and cultural practices use language. And you report on their practices and performances. In this case, a Hip Hop Sociolinguist is interested in how Hip Hop artists, and those who are interested in the Hip Hop culture, but also fans of the Hip Hop culture, use language, and also perform and practice multilingualism within and outside Hip Hop culture.

Msia Clark: In the book, you focus a lot on freestyle battles and freestyle rap battle space, which is kind of a very sacred space in Hip Hop. Why focus specifically so much on freestyle rap?

Quentin Williams: The way I became interested in it was when I started to document the freestyle rap battles during my fieldwork. In Club Stones, one of my fieldwork sites, there was a distinct difference made between freestyle rap battles on the street, when you´re on the corner, than it being staged in the club. And I´ve always loved freestyle rap battles because you can see the difference between emcees biting rhymes and an emcee rhyming off the top of his head. So, when I started doing the research with Suburban Menace and MobCoW (my main participants), I realized the emcees had a particular format which they´ve taken from somewhere else and my assumption was from the States. So, where you would usually freestyle on the corner in an equidistant circle and two emcees go at each other, mediated by a cipha mediator, or managed by a cipha mediator, in the club they would have a coin toss, the audience would be in front of the stage, and the cipha mediator would toss the coin in the air, and two emcees would go at each other and then at the end there would be a decision by the audience, by virtue of who would shout the loudest, for the emcee to win.

I found it quite interesting how the freestyle rap battles were organized and how different it was, but more significantly for me was the language and genre aspect. So, my question was at the beginning of the research: would the freestyle rap battles be the same as in the States, with the same American accents, with the same genre styles of introducing your rhymes and your lyrics, and with the same verbal cues as you perform, “Yoh/Yoh/Check it out/Check it out”?

I remember the first time I recorded a freestyle battle in the field, in the Club, I was stunned, because it was not like that in the States, it was completely in the local variety Kaaps (a variety of Afrikaans), and with a mixture of the prison register, Sabela, and the local movements were completely different. So, for example, an American emcee would introduce her or his freestyle rap battle through verbal cueing, “Yoh, Yoh, Yoh”, but the local emcee here in Cape Town, in the club, I found, would introduce his cipha in Kaaps like, “Yes, is ja/Is ja/Check it out/Check dit uit”. There would be code-switching between English, a version of South African English, and I found that to be just absolutely amazing.

Msia Clark:  You do a lot of self-reflection in the book. I want to talk about that. In one part of the book, you say “as an ethnographer and an outsider, my sociolinguistic class and racial background either validated me or pushed me to the margins of just observing social and linguistic interaction”. So, what does that mean?

Quentin Williams: I met my participants in the following way: I saw a poster of the show and I asked my participants could I meet you, I´d like to do research and document what you are doing. When I got to meet them, they just started doing the show, so I was at the beginning of something, I think, quite significant in terms of localizing the Hip Hop culture and then giving it a new twist. So, I was from the university and I came with some sort of symbolic resources for these emcees, but also with symbolic power because they realized I come from the university and that I could add weight to what they are doing. But at the same time, I also realized every time I would record a freestyle rap battle or a rap session or a dance competition, that usually would involve females, I would go back to watch the tape, listen to the recordings, start transcribing and then realize as a male I´m also enjoying the Hip Hop show like the other male participants in the club. More so, I also realized I´m Coloured, I share the same fraught racial history with my participants, and so, that is what I mean. I realized during my field research that I have to reflect on my own position with the Hip Hop space, and I also have to reflect on what I experience and so that´s why I thought it was necessary.

Msia Clark: One of the things you say when you first met members of the group Suburban Menace, and you introduced yourself, did you also thought it was important to talk about your taste in rap music?

Quentin Williams: Yeah. It was a test. Let me set the scene for you. I get to meet my participants. I met them at the house that they rented out. And they called the house, the Menace Mansion, which is a play on Hugh Heffner´s Playboy Mansion. I thought it was quite funny. So, we sit around the table in the kitchen and I start introducing my project and these guys are listening intensely to my pitch, and they start asking all the right questions, and then it turns to the test: “So, what kind of Hip Hop music, rap music, do you listen to? What did you grow up with?” And because we are more or less the same age, the moment I said that one of my biggest rap music influence was Tupac Shakur, and it just took off from there because we all shared a similar taste in rap music.

Msia Clark: You say that the book speaks to Black and Coloured multilingual speakers in township spaces. For those outside South Africa it is difficult to grasp identity in this country and how identity becomes raced – I want you to talk about the relationship within Hip Hop culture between Blacks and Coloureds?

Quentin Williams: Eight months into my fieldwork a rap show was staged at the University of the Western Cape. I invited a few Coloured emcees, my participants basically, to come to the show and perform. When they came through, members of Driemanskap were also there. And as you know Driemanskap is a famous Spaza rap group. We get to the event and they ask my participants if they would stage a freestyle rap battle with Driemanskap. There´s no incentive for it, and we find it strange for emcees to freestyle rap battle because they have no beef to settle nor are they getting paid to win a trophy. But the interesting comment that one of the Coloured emcees made was, “I don´t speak their language, so, I don´t think we can freestyle rap battle”. My reaction was one of curiosity because in other cases the Black emcee can freestyle in English, perhaps code-switch to isiXhosa or isiZulu and if you don´t have those African languages in your linguistic repertoires, that´s cool, you do your thing in Kaaps. But what struck me was the emcee was reflecting, if only temporarily, on a much more deeper problem that stems from the ultimate racial success of apartheid: the Groups Area Act of 1954 and monolingual socialization. You live in Gugulethu (a black township) and that other emcee grows up in a Coloured township. Both emcees are socialized differently linguistically, through different language, through different racial experiences. But they share racial experiences in relation to Whites and Whiteness, that´s quite clear.

It´s easy to describe white on Coloured and Black relations, but much, much more challenging to do so when it concerns Black on Black relations, and Coloured on Coloured relations. I started to critically think about the distinct differences linguistically that emcees make but also how they link it to space and also place, and of course their socialization. But these emcees make a cultural distinction that they link to race: there´s a Coloured culture, then there´s a Black culture which can be traced to ancestors and mobility, stereotypically. I´m trying to think about it more deeply and acquiring more examples and data, and so far I find that this is not only a reflection of what happens outside the Hip Hop culture and South Africa as a whole, but also inside the Hip Hop culture: that there are divisions that some Hip Hop artists make across language, say the use of a Tsotsitaal (spoken mainly by black males in the township) with English in a freestyle rap battle in Gugulethu, compared to the exclusive use of Kaaps in a Coloured township. You do get few instances of a true collaboration across these raciolinguistic barriers in a real sense.

Msia Clark: You talk about Braggadocio and in trying to play devil´s advocate, what about those that may dismiss braggadocio as just simply about materialism or promoting conflict among artists? 

Quentin Williams: That´s the prevailing idea of Braggadocio. Yes, I would completely agree that I think in early Hip Hop scholarship, what we have come to know Braggadocio to be is, yes, this idea that emcees celebrate money, make it rain in the club and brag about styles. But that I think is a particular, very unique take that USA Hip Hop has given the world. Now, if you´re saying that Braggadocio is still only about that outside USA Hip Hop, you´ve not looked at it very closely. The question we should ask, what types of Braggadocio will female emcee have or an emcee like Dope Saint Jude (a queer Hip Hop artist)? Braggadocio is gendered because it celebrating a male centred Hip Hop lifestyle. I think I´m quite clear about Braggadocio in the book, and I update the literature.

Msia Clark: It is easy to make assumptions about what Braggadocio looks like in the States and even what masculinity looks like in the States. So, one of the things you also talk about is “body rap”. You describe it as a sub-genre of local Hip Hop where the overarching theme of the lyrics is the sexualization and often denigration of women’s bodies performed for the pleasure of men. Could you talk about that a little bit?

Quentin Williams: After the event I describe in Chapter 8 about how the Hip Hop club ambience was transformed into a stripper Club ambience, I began to reread the scholarship on Hip Hop and Hip Hop sociolinguistics, feminist Hip Hop scholars to try and understand what was clear to me: the pornification of Hip Hop culture. That chapter gets into the experiences of Black and Coloured women, and expectations put on their bodies, about the sexualization of their bodies, and I thought this notion, idea and performance genre, body rap, accurately describes what was going on. I asked what does body rap do in the South African context, in the postcolonial context to the debate about female agency and voice: does it continue the sexual myth that too often frame interaction with females in Hip Hop culture or does it actually open up discussions about female agency and voice?

Note: This is a significantly shortened interview,  edited for publication, following the more than one hour audio recording published by Prof Msia Clark on her Hip Hop Africa blog, which can be found here: https://hiphopafrican.com/2018/01/01/hhap-episode-18-quentin-williams-on-multilingualism-hip-hop-in-south-africa/.