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Play and Gender
“Can I freestyle for you?” L-Ness asked me at the end of our interview as we sat on
the steps outside of the Kenya National eatre, a site that has always been a space
of tension, possibility, and contradiction.1 e theatre opened during the war for
independence and hosted European plays, and even aer , many Kenyans
were excluded from producing works due to the state’s fear that they would incite
dissent. In , Ngũgĩ wa iong’o and Mĩcere Mũgo managed to put on e Trial
of Dedan Kimathi, much to the ire of the Kenyatta government and the white expa-
triates who held sway at the theatre. Ngũgĩ reported that at the close of the per-
formances, the police stood ready down the street in protective gear for battle at
the Central Police Station.2 Some y years earlier, it was home guards, or askari,
who gathered and slaughtered Mary Muthoni wa Nyanjiru and her fellow protest-
ers in front of that same police building. e theatre has distanced itself from its
troubling past, holding various events, including Kenyan and African dramaturgy
and music and dance performances. In the early s, it was common to see
gatherings of young people outside on the grounds smoking weed, playing drums,
or freestyling, oen there to perform at or support an occasional hip hop event.
However, by the s, the theatre’s high fees pushed planners to seek other ven-
ues. at, in combination with the increase in security, gating, and anti-loitering
spikes on the perimeter sitting walls, means that hip hop practitioners view the
space as catering to a more auent crowd unfriendly to a working-class under-
ground culture.3
On the day of our conversation, L-Ness sat as she rhymed, moving energeti-
cally from one line to the next. One hand was extended, with her ngers and
palms atly horizontal with the earth. Her hand moved briskly and sharply from
side to side. is common rap embodiment resembles the DJ’s gesture of spin-
ning a record. L-Ness extended her hands in the air, creating a space for the
lyrics and building hip hop liveness. ese days, it seems like there are very few
performances that manage to occupy the thick present unscathed by reproduc-
tive technologies, even if it is a cellphone camera lens.4 Indeed, L-Ness’s perfor-
mance was subject to some form of technological capture, for I used a digital
voice recorder for dictation. Archived or not, rappers use their bodies to cre-
ate a temporal spatiality for words to exit their mouths. For L-Ness, each hand
and arm movement might appear without meaning, though taken together,
these styles signify and create hip hop culture. ere, on the steps of the the-
atre, L-Ness created hip hop without a studio, musical instruments, a stage, or a
microphone, and through orature alone.
L-Ness can rap and rhyme at incredible speed without pause or hesitation.
Her rapping is clear and rm; she enunciates her words with precision, using
crisp and sharp bodily movements to match. L-Ness’s movements demon-
strate the creativity and indecipherable wit of hip hop embodiments. At times,
she raps so fast that she passes the beat by, almost as if she expects the beat to
keep up with her stamina and excitement. While she gestures in ways expected
of rappers, her hard and fast rap style is oen at odds with societal notions of
the feminine.
L-Ness’s performance is a primary example of the ludic in hip hop. is ludic-
ity consists of several interlocking components. First, ludicity is a part of orature,
performed and embodied, spoken and verbal, and oen sonically inuenced and
produced. Ludic embodiments found in much of global rap culture encapsulate
the quotidian and formalized ways that artists use their bodies to deliver creative,
oen indistinct disaection and unorthodoxy. I draw from Victor Turner’s discus-
sion of play as containing the potentials of disruption. For him, play is “a volatile,
sometimes dangerously explosive essence” that “cultural institutions seek to bottle
or contain in the vials of games of competition, chance, and strength.”5 Creative
corporealities allow rappers to participate in the urgencies of lyrics while prevent-
ing societal circumstances from informing their perspectives in totalizing ways.
Ludicity is never divorced from the political surroundings, and hip hop play is not
just a performance that produces a hollowed-out area of pleasure devoid of mean-
ing or intention. Rather, at its core lies a constant shiy and trickster ethic that
refuses obedience and contains inherent deance of social norms. To cite Turner,
it is the music’s political seriousness that “bottles” ludicity, framing it as a part of
the substantive strength of the music.
Next, the ludic is based on intentional unreadable alterity, or what Turner
would note as “recalcitrant to localization.”6 Here, I additionally root the hip hop
ludic in what Édouard Glissant terms opacity/opacité, which occurs in the illim-
itable interpretative qualities of alterity, like those found in literature and poetry.
Play and Gender
For Glissant, cultures at large, especially those marginal cultures, need not be
bound to larger social forces. Glissant understands that opacity is a right that all
cultures should have, which avoids an “enclosure within an impenetrable autar-
chy” and can yield freedoms.7 Further, this notion of freeness is fundamental to
hip hop ludicity. ese performances hold indenability as an articulation of the
aesthetic, and such bodily gestures articulate brief notions of freedom. In further
thinking about how play produces epitomes of freeness, Jayna Brown notes that
music-making breeds what she terms a “utopian impulse,” which is an “inef-
fable connection, a collective space free of possessive individualism.”8 Brown
notes that musical experiences, specically in the Democratic Republic of the
Congo, involve the sonic and the embodied to make spaces of utopia that inter-
vene in a society and world lled with crisis, war, and unsustainable transna-
tional capitalism. Nairobi’s rap performances respond to a similar volatile social
context and gesture toward something beyond on-the-ground specicities. Hip
hop nds spaces of creativity as it rejects and responds to the economic crises
of poor youth, state-sanctioned violence and corruption, and the siphoning of
resources toward foreign investments. Moreover, play’s alluring and pleasurable
elements are an intensely local production, as well as radically located in hip
hop’s Black diasporic politics. e opacity of embodiments and the creativity of
music-making allow for openings and possibilities because this art is political,
imaginative, and expansive.
. L-Ness (le) and Baby T (right) st-bumping with other artists. Image by L-Ness.
Lastly, far from awless, playfulness is indeed masculinized. Ludicity is about
opening a space of creative movability and freedom, and so, too, is masculinity.
To perform masculinity, especially one that is cishet, is thus to hold privilege
and authority. When women like L-Ness utilize play as a way to move and spit
rhymes, they are oen read as acting like cisgender men, whereas men who
ow are more easily granted validity as rappers. Cismasculine rappers are, fur-
thermore, the direct beneciaries of hip hop, while for those of marginalized
genders, there is no uncomplicated way to access benets from engaging with
the trope of masculinity. Cismen can play more spaciously, as these rappers
structure and dene the music and have the social power to set the parameters.
Women and many other marginalized genders, alternatively, are oen caught in
a trap between the performances of perceived feminine oversexualization and
masculine tomboyishness.
is chapter investigates the cogency of hip hop ow like L-Ness’s, which occurs
as performed and oen indecipherable masculinized freeness. To conceptualize
how ludicity ts into Nairobi’s underground world, I rst articulate its cityspace as
the focal point from which artists make music, arguing that they draw from the
city’s masculinized tenets, music culture, and the long traditions of protest and
dissent. Next, I provide a section that discusses how rappers draw from the mas-
culinity already present in Nairobi and Kenya, as well as practices from global hip
hop, to produce what I call the armor of gender. Artists draw from local Mau Mau
characteristics and the global culture of the music to perform the armor of gen-
der. Such embodiments work to interrogate local conditions and assist in assert-
ing rappers’ presence in the transnational hip hop game. rough an engagement
with two songs, Black Duo’s “Rap kwa Mic” and “Looking Up” by Udita, Alisha
Popat, Sugar, L-Ness, Baby T, and Taamic, I situate ludic embodiments within the
city’s gendered space and gendered discourse.9 I investigate “Rap kwa Mic” as a
text where cismen’s performative participation in armored gender is comparably
more straightforward; they steward masculinized toughness in notions of play,
earnestness, and subversion. Ciswomen, however, maneuver unfairly around an
intrinsic trap of gender, caught between supposed oversexualization and excessive
masculinity. To escape this snare, women insist that they, too, own the right to play
with space and sound, thus staging versions of political seriousness. In an exten-
sive analysis of “Looking Up,” I explore how women’s performances of play and
modalities of seriousness manage to breach power, both creatively and radically,
even when the music promotes some of hip hop’s pernicious gendered traditions.
Lastly, I investigate how rappers use ludic orature to nd joy and intimacy within
the context of play and how such performances have existed within spaces like the
Sarakasi Dome. Within these explorations, ludicity appears as both locally bound
and consistently diasporic. In this respect, this chapter introduces how ludicity is
inherently tied to how artists cite a U.S. hip hop blackness. Taken together, rappers
fashion creative disruptions and modes of compliance through play and gender
and play as a mode of masculinized gender to facilitate artistic self-making unique
to Nairobi that is also globally recognized.
PLAY AND POLITICS IN NAIROBI STREETS
Hip hop practitioners of all genders engage with the politics of Nairobi to make
music. Many cra ludic embodiments, which though diasporically instantiated,
are localized interactions with the material conditions and discourses of Nairobi.
Women rappers stage their way out of gender constrictions through a political seri-
ousness that draws on a tradition of protest, activism, and a refusal to be repressed
by the city’s strictures. eir work in the underground indicates an engagement
with the connements of the city, the vibrancy of street culture, and the long tradi-
tions of dissent. Alternatively, men reiterate the gendered dynamics of the cityspace
as one made for men even as they speak out against injustices like poverty and state
corruption. Masculine artists’ playful resistance to the city’s politics is from a place of
relative privilege and fundamentally distinct from women’s place in hip hop.
Nairobi has a thriving street culture from which rappers are inuenced. Heavy
foot trac births a complex economic and cultural life. Street musicians occasion-
ally play drums and sing. Magicians perform card tricks. Preachers yell about the
end times. Men and boys shine shoes, jua kali workers push loads through town
with trailers, and women sell books and clothes.10 Street boys get high on glue to
chase away symptoms of hunger and disenfranchisement. Pickpocketing duos and
triads band together to slip their hands into pockets, snatch a purse or watch, or
peruse surreptitiously through a backpack. Workers take long breaks to sleep on
the grass and smoke cigarettes in the now-designated areas of the city. Just out-
side the city center and along footpaths, men sell roasted maize. e further east
one travels toward the birthplace of Kenyan hip hop, Dandora, the more poverty
there is, the more cramped the housing, the more visible the trash, the bump-
ier and dustier and muddier the roads, and the more heavy-handed the police.
Conversely, in the cleanliness and spaciousness of Westlands, there are high-end
stores, fancy nightclubs, malls, cafés, closely guarded apartment complexes, and
well-manicured lawns and bushes.
Matatus (public transportation minibuses) help construct the classed and gen-
dered spaces of Nairobi life. Matatus oer movement around the city while at the
same time serving as culturally complicated and masculine-dened spaces. ey
are Nairobi hip hop’s symbolic and ocial vehicle occupying the streets in a soni-
cally and visually brassy fashion and are seen as representative of street culture.
Before the restrictive Michuki regulations in , touts (workers who take money
and nd passengers) regularly crammed people in, hooking, swinging, and hang-
ing out of moving grati-stained and bass-emanating matatus.11 ese days, the
culture is not forgotten, as grati has slowly returned to the vehicles, and one still
sees touts engaging in this persistent, playful practice. e touts have cautiously
begun to perform this reckless deance again, which can earn them a ticket from
the Nairobi City Council if caught. Touts can be women but are mostly cisgender
men. eir work is hard, but it is also spirited, whipping their bodies in grace-
ful, controlled movements, attempting to catch the ear of potential customers by
shouting the cost of the ride or the vehicle route. ey laugh and argue with other
touts, catcall, chew miraa (khat), buy cigarettes on the street, skip out of their
matatus to run alongside them, and return to their vehicles before their speed
increases. ose heading into the city center call out, “Tao! Tao! Tao!”—a Swahi-
linized word for town. ere is a dicult underside to this space as well; passen-
gers and touts alike have accosted and assaulted women on matatus.12
Nightlife bustles throughout the city. Night-shi hawkers and those not
exhausted from their daytime schedules maneuver through trac on Nairobi’s
major thoroughfares to pawn cheap Chinese goods and sometimes recorded
music, depending on how they perceive the threat of selling bootlegged CDs. Cis-
gender women and men, and some transwomen, sell sex for survival and means.
People gather at bars and clubs aer work. In poorer areas, some might gather
around ch ang a’a (illicit brew) spots and purchase a cup of alcohol to socialize and
unwind. In other places, patrons listen to live music in small bars. e Westlands
hosts middle-class college students and those with well-paying jobs just o work,
and both groups nd their way to higher-end establishments. On the weekends,
Kenyans in their late teens and twenties (and some even older) go out for a night
of leisure, drinking, dancing, and clubbing until daylight creeps up on them. New
venues pop up regularly, but places like Carnivore and K Klub House are long-
standing. Spaces oen host themed musical nights. James Ogude writes that Nai-
robi’s venues host popular “traditional” music nights for genres like Mugithi and
Benga. Ogude contends such music nights dislodge the genres from their ethni-
cized rural locations, allowing for the consumption and appreciation of a range
of music: “It is the openness of the city—its uidity—that allows for the creation of
spaces within which a projection of fantasies rooted in popular cultural memory
could be performed.”13
While the city’s music venues open possibilities, Nairobi’s public spaces have
historically operated as exclusive. It has all the characteristics of a former adminis-
trative colonial center. Racial and class apartness has been a key feature of the city
since colonialism, as the wealthiest parts are to the north and west where the white
settlers resided, while the south and east, once conned to Africans and Indians,
are poorer and more working class.14 Although women take up space in commer-
cial and public areas and work in most professions and at every economic level, the
city is a masculine and heterosexist space. In the city center, men regularly snatch
women’s purses and sexually harass women in the streets. Just like in other cities,
women and gender-expansive people, especially those who are poor, are more sus-
ceptible to violence. Mobility, wealth, able-bodiedness, and masculinity make it so
that abled men can easily move and occupy public space without the same fears of
unwanted attention that people of marginalized genders face.
Kenyan ocial histories privilege cismen, which is profoundly evident in the
structural makeup of the city. Kenyan cultural nationalism proered African tra-
ditions that centered men and encouraged governing women’s bodies as founda-
tional to build the new nation. ese views paradoxically borrowed from colonial
beliefs that insisted urban spaces corrupted migrators. Women have long been the
targets of urbanity’s perceived degeneracy, resulting in the conviction that women
should remain subservient to men and only occupy domestic spheres so as not to
be tarnished by the city’s oerings.15 Besi Brillian Muhonja states that aer inde-
pendence, Nairobi architecturally archived an exclusive history of men freedom
ghters through monuments, street naming, and landmarks.16 For Muhonja, this
action built on and revealed how the city space masculinized itself by removing
women from contemporary public histories. Aer all, and as she notes, the road
outside where Mary Muthoni wa Nyanjiru lost her life protesting Harry uku’s
detention is named uku Road.17 ese gendered elisions correspond with anxi-
eties about Nairobi women that continue to populate television, social media, and
the radio. According to popular heterosexist beliefs, urban women make disad-
vantageous partners for men because they are unruly, assertive, educated, and
untrustworthy. ese supposedly disobedient city women are said to have aairs
with married men regularly, refuse to accept their duties of unpaid house labor
and childrearing, and hold opinions assertively and to the disdain of men.18 Caro-
line Mose also reminds us that hip hop is not immune from participating in this
discourse. Mose argues that rappers attach those viewed as obedient and politi-
cally conscious African women to the struggle and troublingly juxtapose them
with the unruly urban and promiscuous femme gure.19
e femme sex worker, the young university woman, and the educated urban
single woman are held up as examples of how Nairobi corrupts those who suppos-
edly cannot refuse the lure and temptations of urbanity. Men regularly comment
about how rebellious city women are and how wife prospects, domestic and doc-
ile, are to be found in the countryside. When these tales circulate, men are rarely
characterized as culpable for buying sex, courting young college students, having
extramarital aairs, or even leaving their families for mistresses or second wives
and families. ese stories, whether fact or ction, are oen told from masculine
perspectives, lamenting how city women betray their supposed rural roots and
African upbringings. Gendered narratives and other interlaced discourses and the
city’s spatial politics weave together Nairobi’s character. Keguro Macharia simply
terms this ideological and material violence as the “unhoming of Kenyan women,”
where through juridical, discursive, and physical means, women are dislocated
from a society from which they are supposed to belong.20
Amid the city’s constraints, people regularly take to the streets in protest. ese
gatherings attack corruption, call for election reform, and decry both legal and
illegal evictions, to name a few. Political parties sometimes curate these upris-
ings, specically those opposed to the ruling party, and many times receive the
support of people from across class divisions. ere were organized protests
aer Kibaki’s questionable victory in and amid the postelection violence.21
Boniface Mwangi led the Occupy Parliament protest in , where he and others
marched a pig and piglets in front of the Parliament building. ere, Mwangi and
others spilled buckets of blood onto the sidewalk where the pigs furiously licked
the damu, all of this to represent the MPs as vociferously greedy swine who were
then voting to conrm yet another raise for themselves.22 University of Nairobi
students, oen unhappy with unreasonable school fees, many times have orga-
nized public demonstrations, set up blockades on roads, and thrown stones at
cars and police who red tear gas at them. Kenyan feminists have long protested
rape culture, inheritance laws, reproductive rights, environmental concerns, and
education and job training.23 In , , and , sex workers, oen alongside
LGBTQ activists, protested the illegality of both prostitution and queerness. ose
who have taken to the streets don bright red masks and carried banners that read
mwili wangu, chaguo langu (my body, my choice), decrying violence against and
murders of sex workers.24 Beginning in , a movement called #MyDressMy-
Choice began to confront the culture that enables men to assault women wearing
skirts physically and sexually in public.25
Many of these protests contain chants and collective jogs of dissenters mov-
ing through public space. ese performances can quickly turn into a subtle and
rhythmic dance, with participants grabbing tree branches and pointing them
toward the sky as they perform slowly and methodically through the streets. Not
all these examples are situated within lower-class agitation, but many are oen
inuenced by economic precarity. ese are instances of orature, incorporating
song, chants, movement, and just the slightest dance steps in order to inspire the
collective energy of the crowd and any onlookers. Hip hop practitioners situate
ludicity and political seriousness inside many of these Nairobi realities: the per-
formances of life’s regular hustle, the charged discourses of gender, the vibrant
music culture, and the embodiments of political urgencies. Hip hop play is deeply
involved in the sociality of Nairobi life, and since the music so profoundly engages
with street life, it enmeshes itself within the city’s gendered codes.
THE ARMOR OF GENDER
e masculine elements of ludicity include movement-based gestures and stances
of armor that are common in hip hop, such as the sti body, wide-stance pos-
ture, and hardened facial features. ese practices are globally circulated but also
interface with Kenya’s history, the city of Nairobi, and its hip hop spaces. e
performances found in Nairobi rap are similar to Tricia Rose’s early observa-
tion that “ghetto badman posture-performance is a protective shell against real
unyielding and harsh social policies and physical environments.”26 e armor of
gender is a series of performances that practitioners enact that hold hardened,
creative, and underclass-based masculinities as an available set of actions within
the culture.
Men, almost all cisgender, use this performance to assert their privilege as a
broader set of resistance practices that centers lower-class experiences. Such per-
formances draw on Mau Mau tropes used by the Nairobi underground.27 Mickie
Koster notes that the histories of the Mau Mau army and the war with the British
are not seamless stories but oen contradictory and up for debate. Nonetheless,
the Mau Mau moment bred a singular question about the concept and notion of
freedom for Kenyan people that continues to exist in many hip hop spaces.28 Koster
notes that the question of liberation remains “unresolved and painful histories like
Mau Mau that go untreated carry visible scars in the present.”29 Rappers, in turn,
have picked up and developed these pervasive questions about whether Kenya is
free and, if not, what a liberated Kenya would look like. I add that these sentiments
of liberation, ghting, and masculinity meet similar global themes within hip hop
that converge to form an outward-looking Nairobi rap culture. As I mentioned
in the introduction, rappers have largely moved away from the confrontational
and eective ways that Ukoo Flani Mau Mau incorporated the Land and Freedom
Army into their videos and lyrics, and what has remained is a warrior-inspired,
toughened masculinized resistance.
Kenyan practitioners use the armor of gender regardless of their actual gen-
der, though there are critical dierences between women and men artists. ose
who are masculine people use the armor of gender to construct and maintain
the culture. In contrast, women and others of marginalized genders adopt care-
fully fashioned performances within this framework so as not to jeopardize their
legitimacy. Imani Kai Johnson explores this practice in her notion of “badass
femininities” and considers how U.S. Black women practitioners constitute their
subjectivities through histories of slavery, colonization, and anti-Black class mar-
ginalization.30 Johnson argues that badass femininities should not be called mas-
culinity per se, but rather be thought of as the assertive and bold characteristics
that can and do constitute femininity. My analysis is slightly dierent in that I
insist that the women I follow in Kenya negotiate and embody an existing mas-
culinity even while they identify as women and with femininity, thereby pushing
back against the masculinizing presence in the music.
Jessica Nydia Pabón-Colón in Grati Grrlz: Performing Feminism in the Hip
Hop Diaspora is vastly helpful in this regard because she provides a thorough
examination of global grati culture and its community of women and femmes,
most of whom are white, Latinx, white-passing, and otherwise non-Black or Afri-
can. She identies a “feminist masculinity” at work for these artists, which is “a
gender performance characterized by the utilization of recognizably masculine
traits.”31 Her study is helpful in that she demonstrates that women and femmes
enact a recuperative feminist method of performance that fashions a hip hop dias-
pora and uses masculinity to articulate a viable subjectivity. While Pabón-Colón
recognizes a U.S. Black and Afro-Caribbean origin to hip hop and grati, she does
not necessarily factor such characteristic roots into how artists construct feminist
masculinity in grati performance.32 I contend that the armored gender I study is
subversive, masculinized, and historically situated within Kenyan contexts, and in
addition, it also uses a U.S. blackness as a cultural throughline to create diaspora.
Pabón-Colón also distinguishes between the conventional performance of mas-
culinity found with cismen in hip hop and the feminist masculinity that seeks to
redo constructs of power in performances. My observations of Nairobi rap culture
dier from her study of grati culture because, in Nairobi rap, all artists navigate
a similar gender dynamic. While women do not have the same privileges men
do and may use armored gender to assert space in the culture, they also make
music and perform alongside men, as well as understand their work as pulling
from the same traditions as men. For these reasons, I use one term, the armor of
gender, to describe how all artists navigate masculinity.
Women, both feminine and masculine, use able-bodied toughness in perfor-
mance to create a culture where they prioritize themselves. Armor allows artists to
perform impenetrability, which is a necessary tool to protect oneself from social
marginalization. Here, Pabón-Colón’s notion of feminist masculinity is particu-
larly salient. She writes, “I locate feminist masculinity in how grati grrlz per-
form their gender, but it is a performance of self available to any body. Feminist
masculinity does not come at the cost of femininity.”33 She observes how not all
grati artists identied with the term “feminist,” but most understood the stakes
centering women’s work. In the performances of Nairobi’s armor of gender, femme
and masculine women incorporate armor to perform their subjectivity. Just like
the artists in Grati Grrlz, not many women I spoke with identify as feminists,
but most understood the critical task of taking up space and making music using
themes of political seriousness.
e armor of gender helps to compose hip hop’s playfulness. While “armor”
may imply a rigid set of bodily conscriptions, the opposite is true, and it unfolds
with the theme of playfulness to produce willful rebelliousness and shiy subver-
siveness. When I discussed embodiment with Sue Timon, her response indicated
a marked commitment to ludicity: “ere’s the bounce. [Laughs hard.] ere’s that
bounce. [Although she is sitting, she gestures a bounce using the upper part of her
body, while laughing.] You know, the way someone walks, the ‘don’t care’ attitude.
e N.W.A. thing, you know. [We laugh.] You just know.”34 Sue not only gestured
expressively and excitedly when I asked her questions, but she also referenced the
hip hop group N.W.A. (Niggaz wit Attitudes), the Compton gangsta rap group
from the late ’s and early ’s. While Sue did not identify as either a feminist or
a tomboy, her more masculine performances demonstrated that hip hop oered
embodiments that worked with the music she then made.
I asked several rappers to discuss embodiment, and many stated that per-
formance was another element of the culture, similar to breakdancing, DJing,
rapping, and grati art. Others noted that bodily corporealities are found in all
hip hop elements. When I asked grati artist Esen what bodily postures convey,
he smiled, lied his arms a bit, and proclaimed, “Whatchu sayin, nigga?!”35 Here,
Esen responds with a rhetorical question that translates into a protective readiness
that is confrontational, playful, humorous, and U.S.-originated. Additionally, Eva-
redi noted that hand gestures are also meaningful: “I can say, basically, the body
language of hip hop is crazy, like, the throwing of hands, the sign of the st.”36
While he explains this, he puts one hand up slightly and raises his st to illustrate
his point. A part of this st-raising is a vestige of how early conscious hip hop
in the U.S. sought to continue the mission of the Black Power movement of the
s. During the same period, the thrown st became an anticolonial and anti-
apartheid symbol as it spread to places within Africa, especially South Africa. Eva-
redi, Esen, and Sue cited the U.S. in their discussions of embodiment and hip hop
play, which did not convey a sense of alienation or foreignness to their work but
rather a closeness and familiarity. ese embodiments that convey elements like
a deant “attitude” or Black power aesthetic point to how the ludic is a diasporic
proposition, rooted in U.S. Black music, that has been localized and reformu-
lated to work in Nairobi rap, illustrating that citational practices are also exercises
in indigenization.
Artists use ludicity, masculinized and diasporic, to perform freeness even as
they feel restrained by the industry and its lack of real opportunities. Women par-
ticipate in the larger social project that hip hop oers, and they continually chal-
lenge the dominant masculine culture of the underground scene. Further, ludic-
ity allows cisgender men to apprehend performances of cool and subversion to
move their narrations of hood life to the forefront of Nairobi’s chronicles. Taken
together, the armor of gender is a diverse set of embodiments that draw on and
reinforce the masculinity present in the music.
SOMEWHERE IN NAIROBI
Artists’ rhyme schemes, lyrical critiques, and demonstrations of rap skill all
depend on them using their bodies in deant, cool, and stylized manners. Practi-
tioners nd inventive techniques of masculinized play to confer knowledge about
an analysis of Nairobi life. On the surface, it may seem that the ludicity of bodily
performances enables the potency and eectiveness of the political seriousness of
lyrics and sound. However, play can still be found in the lyrics, and armored gen-
der encapsulates both play and seriousness. is unpredictability makes the music
innovative and pleasurable while also allowing artists to nd small moments of
sonic and bodily liberation. Notably, many cismen practice embodiments to cre-
ate spaces of freedom where their voices and raps gain legitimacy. In music videos,
these gestures of self-determination oen materialize through physical movement
and one that mirrors the privileged mobility that men enjoy in the city.
“Rap kwa Mic” (Rap on the Mic) by brothers Judge and Mo Phat of Black Duo
dropped in and illustrates how masculinities are formulated and how they
are in conversation with the spatial politics of the city. e song was an instant hit.
When I spoke with Judge about this, he lamented that bootlegged singles were so
rampant that he hardly made any money from the song. He held no hard feelings,
as he understood that such economic practices were part of the hustle. “Rap kwa
Mic” samples from U.S. musicians Talib Kweli, Hi Tek, and Bahamadia’s song
“Chaos” from the album Soundbombing Vol. 2. Talib has gained mainstream expo-
sure, and his dedication to underground and noncommercial music has earned
him some fame among artists in Kenya. e fact that Talib has an established
career but remains committed to politically conscious music makes him appealing
to many Kenyan rappers.
“Rap kwa Mic” uses computer technologies to create an ample range of diver-
gently assembled noises exuding a solemn and cautionary tone about hood life in
Nairobi, building on the already established serious nature of “Chaos.” We hear
piano keys, a violin, a saxophone, and eventually a horn, which is retained from
the original. e standard kick drum gives the bass, and aer the beat drops, there
is a noted transition to soer and subtle horn sounds that fall into the background
to provide room for the lyrics. It is not just the raps that provide the vocal pres-
ence. Just like U.S. hip hop from the ’s and ’s, there are chuckles and impro-
visational sounds that make the song unfold like a conversation that is rm and
advisory. Also retained from the earlier version is the “la-la-la-la-la” ad-libbing,
which appears in the beginning before Talib begins his lines. In “Rap kwa Mic,” the
la ad-libs exist throughout the song, creating an aura of impending or imminent
danger. e chorus is sung in staccato, with several overlapping high and o-pitch
voices laid on top of each other. At one point, the chorus’s l a’s bleed into the verses
and are met with the rappers speaking “la-la-la-la-la” in lower registers. ese
vocal sounds meet one another and vie for respect, creating a sounded compila-
tion of Nairobi life that produces “reconstituted echoes” of “Chaos,” to cite Glis-
sant.37 ese diering clatters organize “Rap kwa Mic” as a polyrhythmic diasporic
text located in the specicity of Nairobi.
e video opens with grim music and grainy, sepia imagery with the words
“Somewhere in Nairobi.” Viewers are never given a full view of the city, and the
majority of the scenes are from the working-class area of Ziwani, near Eastleigh.38
e scenes are gritty and harsh, matching the serious and contentious words, and
there are few markers to locate where in Nairobi this was shot. Viewers see build-
ings and children playing and dancing on top of metal structures, along with Black
Duo’s crew walking through the neighborhood. Judge and Mo Phat are constantly
in motion, walking deliberately through the streets as they laugh and commu-
nicate with their crew of men and masculine individuals, as the performance of
mobility is a common theme in many videos. Listeners only hear voices sonically
read as masculine; therefore, we encounter a text specically about the experiences
of cismen. e song progresses, and more men join their casual and slow walk,
the strut of collective cool. eir movements are slow and carefree, not labored
or swi. In this way, the rappers represent themselves as not being exploited, nor
are they fearful of or worn down by their neighborhood, where underemployment
and insecurity are rife.
roughout the culture, the playful and the serious reside alongside one
another, and armored gender ts into the presentation of both the ludic and the-
matic earnestness. Songs like this are never about complete social ease—the ludic
is indexed within a conversation about the importance of assuming tough bodily
postures that can withstand economic marginalization. As Black Duo raps, their
crew performs hip hop’s hand gestures in the air as if they are rhyming. Perfor-
mances like this, which are easy to overlook, are part of the shared diasporic ora-
ture that combines the themes of play and earnestness. Michael Jeries names
embodiments like these as “complex cool,” which shapes “a publicly conicted
discourse of black masculinity” and “[arms] black cultural practices and black
collective identity.”39 When Black Duo’s crew walks and then suddenly dodges and
darts toward the camera or provides solemn stares and then outbursts of laughter,
they demonstrate their relationship with the ghetto, that within the unjustness of
their lives resides a space of something spirited and playful. Jeries describes such
interactions as a mutuality: “Rappers represent the hood, while the presence of the
hood ... makes them seem both powerful and authentic as representatives of a
neighborhood constituency.”40
Jeries explores people like Jay-Z, T. I., and Lil’ Wayne, analyzing how per-
formances of thug masculinities in gangsta rap are the toxic and creative meth-
ods used to express vulnerabilities and connections, deliver social critiques, and
position themselves as skillful artisans. He identies how, for instance, nihilism
in Tupac’s music “should be seen as a force ripe with possibility,” understanding
it as a meaningful exercise in perspective.41 Jeries stops short of concluding that
these performative presentations equate to political progressiveness or radical-
ity, given investments in misogynism and capitalism. He ascertains that what
occurs in subcultures does not have enough strength to shi Black people’s lives:
“e symbolic work accomplished by hip-hop practitioners and fans is insuf-
cient for structural change.”42 e U.S. rappers Jeries studied may not be able
to make eective political interventions, but the ways listeners and fans use the
music in their daily lives is essential. Furthermore, evaluating hip hop in terms
of its direct ability for structural reform could limit our understanding of what
music does in society and what it should do. In thinking through the vast dier-
ences between the mainstream U.S. hip hop that Jeries analyzes and the under-
ground Kenyan music I discuss, we should not overlook the cultural force of
play, pleasure, and joy present in both musics, especially as they are tied to con-
tributing to the social discourse that rejects systems of policing and economic
exploitation in both places.
Robin D. G. Kelley makes this oen-referenced point in his discussion of
gangsta rap and infrapolitics in writing that listeners use the music to make claims
to public space.43 Drawing from James C. Scott, Kelley argues that infrapolitics are
the regular forms of working-class, subtle resistance and deance, or the “seem-
ingly innocuous, individualistic acts of survival and resistance [that] shape poli-
tics,” like “footdragging to sabotage, the at the workplace to absenteeism, cursing
to grati.”44 In hip hop music, it is critical we identify how artists and devotees
employ methods of deance through orature, both the commonplace and the
rehearsed. Sonically embodied performances have everything to do with how
the force of imagination meets quotidian subversion.
Infrapolitics in “Rap kwa Mic,” like in much of the Nairobi underground, is
orature that is habitually indecipherable and elusive, issuing a deant sensibil-
ity and social critique. Judge and Mo Phat’s performative repartee is catchy and
styled, and their eeting performance of freeness meets lyrics that exude struggle
and seriousness. Mo Phat opens the song by comparing music to prayer, and he
invites his listeners to participate: “Muziki ni kama kusali / Wee piga magoti / Ni
tamu tu kama sukari” (Music is like prayer / You, get on your knees / It’s sweet
like sugar). In the middle of the song, Judge states that rapping helps to feed and
sustain him: “Na hii rap ‘taweza kuniekea dish (With this rap I can get myself a
dish/some food) / Ama niimbe tu kenye wote mna (Or I only sing about what y’all
have).”45 Lyrics, like embodiment, blur the categories of the ludic and the earnest.
Mo Phat japes: “Ndio maana unapigwa na butwaa[-twa-twa-twa] (at’s why you
are hit by surprise) / Hili kichwani ni kama Doom (In the head, it’s like Doom).”46
At the moment of this rhyme, Judge and Mo Phat walk in front of the crew, and
Mo Phat draws out the word butwaa (surprise): “but-twa-twa-twa!” Just as we
hear the words/sounds “twa-twa-twa,” overlaid with the sound of gunshots, Judge
condently steps forward and provides the nal “twa,” while pointing his hand in a
quick upward formation as a nger gun toward the camera and takes a shot. Firing
his weapon, Judge surprises his opponents and cynics and does not diverge from
the beat, and he continues his rhythmic gait.
According to their words, when a devotee meets Black Duo, they are hit in the
head as if with Doom, the popular cockroach spray. Being struck with Doom for
roaches means instant death if they cannot dodge the liquid. Similarly, if listeners
are not attuned to their rap skill, they will also receive a blow resulting from these
practitioners’ overpowering verbal confrontations. e artists’ creative banter
leads to a grave warning to their rivals about the depths of their ow.
Even with its specic detailing of Nairobi in “Rap kwa Mic,” this song is not
just about the capital city; it is also about the transnational globality of hip hop
blackness. It asserts the city is a grim and unforgiving landscape where men rap-
pers eke out survival. ey walk but start and stop in the same place and never
end up somewhere physically dierent, wanting viewers to know that Nairobi is
the focal point. However, there is a marked global element. Michael Jeries calls
this hood-making, “building the universal hood through armation of local hood
experience.”47 While he cites places like Brooklyn, Chicago, and Atlanta, Black
Duo adds to this by staking a claim in a global hip hop scene outside of only
U.S. cities, thereby rejecting the cultural geopolitics that relegates African music to
the margins.
e combination of the performative, the visual, and the sonic character-
istics in the video eectually emits a global tone worth noting. Specically in
this song, the shrill and admonitory overlapping la’s, the contentious boast-style
raps, the ring of a warning shot, and the full instrumentalities work together to
announce how people must clamor for recognition in the limited spatial realities
of the hood. Mark D. Morrison’s notion of Blacksound is helpful to evidence this,
a theory that describes how racialized performance, sound, and mimetic scripts
are foundational to American popular music. Tracing the origins of Blacksound
to blackface minstrelsy, Morrison contends that music’s historical commodi-
cation constructs notions of race, relying on the exibility and fungibility of
blackness. Morrison states that it is inherently transnational and global simply
because Black music is.48 us, the practices of sampling found in “Rap kwa
Mic” are a part of how the politics of mimicry are tied to the fungibility of black-
ness. e song’s connection to the U.S. through Black sonic characteristics is not
derivative but is instead part of a cultural system of citations. What surfaces is a
long tradition of borrowing that is deeply dependent on how diasporic sameness
is forged and how U.S. blackness and its cultural productions remain reliably
appropriable. It is not that the gunshot, the la’ s, or the ominous sonorous quali-
ties are intrinsically Black, but rather that together they signify a recognizable
hip hop blackness. e video creates urban blackness through its connection
to “Chaos,” using rappers’ embodiments and visualities, and the narrations of
lower-class youth in Nairobi. e song and video produce Blacksound, which
“amplies these low frequencies by directing attention to how the sonic and
material histories of race continue to resonate.”49 ese sonic qualities are gen-
eralizable to any ghetto, and therefore listeners and viewers encounter both the
Nairobi hood and the global hood.
Pairing the diasporic travel of the sample with their motility and rhymes, this
song is a text about play, movement, and freeness. e “Somewhere in Nairobi”
framing exudes an anonymizing element in that these rappers do not wish to
make known where they are in the city. In this way, rappers perform untrace-
ability and indenability, which are central to the ludic themes of the music. eir
playful, dodgy, and shiy gestures add to the idea they resist being fastened to
any modes of surveillance that would undermine their project. Judge, Mo Phat,
and their crew perform a type of movability to walk, exercise leisure, and nd
instances of joy within their movement. By the end of the video, the conditions of
the hood have not changed, but the artists have found space to implement their
ludic contentment. ese practitioners move on their terms and create a conversa-
tion that is not about a desire to leave the hood behind, Ziwani or otherwise, but
rather for them to author their stories of movement within the places they live.
LOOKING UP, PERFORMING FROM BELOW
Women use the armor of gender to move through the dicult bind they oen
nd themselves in when making music. Along with gender-expansive people,
many in the Nairobi rap community argue that their performances are separate
from the tomboy/hypersexed trap that permeates the music. e armor of gender
operates as both limiting and capacious, allowing these rappers to adopt fraught
embodiments to explore their subjectivities and move toward notions of freedom.
Mwenda Ntarangwi hints at this in East African Hip Hop: Youth Culture and Glo-
balization when he writes that practitioners of all genders use hip hop to explore
their place in the culture and the world at large and that it “expresses ... the uid-
ity and performative nature of gender, revealing how normalized gender identi-
ties can be reconstituted to gain new meanings.”50 As Ntarangwi notes, the music
can also arm societally established gender, and thus, any uidity that exists
should not be confused with a free-range set of gender expressivities.51 Focusing
on mostly commercial artists like Wahu from Kenya and Zay B from Tanzania,
Ntarangwi observes that women artists primarily challenge their marginal posi-
tion in the culture in several ways, including by unsettling the commercialization
of their bodies and critiquing men’s dominance in hip hop. In underground music,
these elements are present. Women rappers also constantly navigate performances
of masculinity, which are always available tools for all rappers. ey oen “reorder
the existing gender normative values without changing the existing structures that
dene them,” as Ntarangwi observes, but this altering in hip hop occurs as these
artists work through and enact masculinity.52 ese masculinized sets of perfor-
mances are practiced and made into a “user-friendly” armor for all to implement,
even when real exclusion is evident within the culture.53
Rappers work through structural, ideological, and societal politics that
inform hip hop spaces. Women’s navigations reect what Mary Njeri Kin-
yanjui terms African feminist “reside knowledge,” referring to the everyday
ways that Kenyan women activate methods of solidarity, shared expertise, and
modes of survival. According to Kinyanjui, women in the kitchen or cook-
ing hut produce signicant feminist ways of knowing.54 is “anti-patriarchal
frame which does not position women as ‘add-ons’ to a masculine framework”
so aptly describes how women rappers create and apprehend sonic space as cen-
tral actors in the culture.55 She refers to how jua kali traders, peasant farmers,
and other working women develop systems of knowledge that confront the con-
straints that sexist capitalism delivers. Like the working-class women Kinyanjui
references, women rappers also advance musical interventions meant to defy the
cismen-dominated industry.
e “Looking Up” music video is particularly exceptional because it brings
together a large group of women Kenyan rappers and singers. In this video, two
singers provide the hook, Udita and Alisha Popat, while Sugar, L-Ness, Baby T,
and Taamic all take turns with verses. is song is a remix of a track by the collec-
tive Dandora Music. While the original song includes predominantly masculine
rappers, the artists in the remix sought to create a song centered around the skill-
set and perspectives of Nairobi’s “femcees,” a term women artists call themselves.
In a conversation about the video, L-Ness informed me that they chose to shoot
the track in the informal settlement of Kibera in an eort to not always focus
on Dandora.56
e video exemplies how women authorize themselves as rap’s knowledge
producers through embodied and sonic orature. Daphne A. Brooks names such
works “Afro-sonic feminist noise,” which are the ways in which a collage of com-
peting, refracting, and conducive vocalities by Black women are oen found in
musical and performative texts. Brooks calls us to consider how Black women’s
musicianship interfaces with sonic musicalities, sometimes in tension with each
other and other times in tandem, producing a fertile engagement with and fervent
disassociation from structures of power.57 A deluge of sounds builds throughout
“Looking Up” and collaborates with the disparate voices of the six performers,
working to create a type of sonic fullness that refuses women’s silencing. Along
with pronounced piano sounds and a subtle bassline, the song contains a violin
motif that creates themes of perseverance and urgency to which the lyrics add,
thus creating a conversation about women’s rm tenacity in the culture. While
it is polyphonic and clarion, there is no heavy bass sound. e presence of the
boom and rattle of basslines are regularly gendered as masculine, as Shanté Para-
digm Smalls notes, and while such characteristics can be found in other songs by
women, here such elements are absent.58 As each rapper and singer moves through
the text, they embody its aural intensity and perform an announcement of their
sustained presence within underground culture. eir performances are articula-
tions of their agentive subjectivity but also ones that must be fought over within
the thorny eld of masculinities that organizes rap.
e song begins with rapper Sugar emerging from a couch over railroad tracks
that cut through Kibera. Donning large gold rope chains and a red jumpsuit,
she walks down the middle of the tracks toward the camera. In her hip hop ver-
sion of Mary Njeri Kinyanjui’s reside knowledge, Sugar steps over debris and
through small, enamed piles of trash while her raps grant homage to her moth-
er’s resolve. rough smoke, Sugar rhythmically moves her arms and hands in
and away from her body through her verse, which creates a site for her lyrics and
veries her rap skill. She lays down bars with strength and certainty, exemplify-
ing how William Cobb describes hip hop ow: “[It] is not about what is being
said, so much as how one is saying it.”59 Ending with a customary nod to Kenya,
she raps, “--ow! To the death, killing ’em!” before passing the song on to her
ve collaborators.60
Sugar’s saunter toward the camera illuminates how motility and armored gen-
der converge. A styled gait allows rappers to establish ownership over the spaces
that they occupy, just like Judge, Mo Phat, and their crew’s movement through the
hood in “Rap kwa Mic.” In “Looking Up,” Sugar is the only rapper to perform this
strut; L-Ness sits and paints, Udita and Baby T are also seated, and Alisha Popat
sits, stands, and dances in place. e last artist, Taamic, rides a bike through the
neighborhood, but she hops o and heads toward a group of sitting children to
stand before them and spit her bars. e summations of these gestures symbol-
ize how women oen unconsciously navigate their feminized bodies within hip
hop’s gender performance. In the frames, the women use poses, stand, and interact
with others, yet none walk toward the camera as Sugar does. However implicit
and without specic intention, it is essential to highlight how these women art-
ists’ bodily enactments of relative immobility reect the gendered realities of the
underground and that moveability is oen an attribute of cismen. Furthermore,
the presentations of these women rappers as largely stationary reect how the city
does not enable the safe movement of Nairobians of marginalized genders. ese
performances articulate a political problem because while cismen can marshal
masculinized gestures to create hip hop more easily and to navigate their presence
in the city forthrightly, women are le wrestling on two fronts: how to be a woman in
the culture without being dismissed and how to participate in an authentic hip
hop Nairobiness. erefore, we must recognize how Sugar’s embodied reframing
of this normally masculine script aptly indicates how women use gendered codes
oen set against them to uphold their abilities as creative producers.
At times, one’s decisions to perform gendered armor may be directly personal
or situational. In other performances and videos, Sugar performs very feminine
attributes. She is an example of an artist who straddles the class demarcations of
the mainstream and underground worlds. In chapter , I mention Sugar’s appear-
ance in the song and music video “--Flow,” in which she teams with commercial
rapper Bamboo and sings the hook to that song. In “Looking Up,” however, she
is centered in the video as the rst rapper to appear. And unlike her tradition-
ally feminine positionality in her video with Bamboo, she wears a tracksuit and
Timberland boots, walks, and gestures insistently. Yet her collective movements
are not exactly the rm, masculine performances that rappers like L-Ness or Sue
Timon produce, as her embodiments adopt more feminine signiers. In an inter-
view with Pulse, a youth and entertainment magazine in e Standard newspaper,
she states that she was concealing a pregnancy at the time of lming. When asked
why she kept her pregnancy a secret, Sugar revealed that she wanted to continue
working on her music without being sidelined for her “condition” (her words)
because of some of the stereotypes that run in the music industry.
I wanted to run business as usual. ere was no missing studio recording sessions
and concerts for me. I was also afraid of the pregnancy going wrong. is is because
Brian and I suered a miscarriage before we were blessed with Sabira. e emotional
trauma was a bit too much to handle, therefore I wanted to keep [the pregnancy]
a secret.61
Sugar’s experience as a woman in an industry that can oen be hostile, as well
as the personal pain of a miscarriage, informed her performative inclinations in
the video. It makes sense that she thus dons baggy clothes as a protective shield
guarding her temporary secret. Her gestures add to her armor by protecting her
body from viewers who would notice her pregnancy and perhaps also safeguard
her from the internal pain of miscarriage. e way she stands and walks down the
railroad tracks, rapping and using her gestures to emphasize her lyrics, all serve to
celebrate her as a rapper and detract from her status as an expectant parent. For
better or worse, most would not associate her ow with pregnancy, and thus, she
successfully uses the performance to keep her personal life closed o from public
view. Considering this video, the one with Bamboo, and her comments on preg-
nancy, Sugar ultimately puts forward a marked adaptability of performed gender.
She thoroughly understands that dierent idioms of gender change her stance, and
as much as she operates within the constraining settings of the industry, she also
asserts personal and artistic decisions about her body.
Women embrace armored gender carefully and by not fully endorsing mascu-
linity, but rather by engaging in a tactful balancing act rooted in socially gendered
expectations. Many recognize that they must perform around modes of masculin-
ity for them to be taken seriously while also understanding that treading too close
would not be sexually desirable and would ultimately draw indignation. Msia
Clark remarks, “[African] female MCs can be labeled troublemakers (because of
hip hop’s confrontational nature), lesbians (because of hip hop’s masculine cul-
ture), and whores (when female artists do not express their sexuality in socially
approved ways).”62 us, being too masculine and too feminine both carry pejora-
tive associations, so women must sacrice something to be accepted. e tomboy
persona on one side and the hypersexual gure on the other are both hip hop’s
versions of the rogue urban woman who dees the contrived categories of gen-
der. Although an analogous dynamic is found in U.S. versions, the trap that this
binary produces is also particular to how postcolonial discourse relegates African
and Kenyan women’s corporeality, which is regularly absorbed into rap. In the
“Looking Up” video, despite the dierences in navigating femininity and mascu-
linity, none of the rappers buy into conventionally regarded femininities, such as
seductive vulnerabilities or heterosexual availability, nor do they advocate fully for
the tomboy.
Women practitioners oen measure their performance against the rather dis-
paraged tomboy. For Baby T, she has rejected more masculine or tomboy identi-
ties. She stated:
People think that all female artists are gangstas, tomboys, and bad girls. Not all of them
are so hard. Some of us are shy. Like basically, I’m shy, that’s why people call me Baby,
cuz ah, I don’t think we all have to go hard. And ah, [be] gangsta, and wear shorts
and baggy pants. People think that all female artists are gangsta.63 (emphasis mine)
In this discussion, Baby T nds it dicult to design her hip hop presence outside
the trap and therefore uses shyness. Although shyness can be rendered feminine,
she uses it to place herself outside of the music’s binary. She is not unlike other
women who try to articulate some other way to be a rapper aside from masculine
and femininely sexy and ultimately nd it challenging.
In the video, she is seated with Kibera’s informal settlement housing, which
appears in the background. She wears a hoodie, a ball cap, red lipstick, and over-
sized hoop earrings. As she raps, she moves her arms slightly in and away from
her body, with less emphasis than L-Ness or even Sugar. If masculinity is about
movability and the taking up of space, Baby T’s gestures only mildly make use of
such availabilities. Her words coincide with her physicality of creating a gendered
armor, albeit distanced from associations of tomboyishness and women gangstas.
Her performance is condent and armative, adding to the gravitas of the song.
She raps:
I know life ain’t easy, teenagers in the streets tryin to make a living /
Society mistreated by the leaders they believe in /
No work for the youth, kids dying, no food /
But I keep on looking up because the streets need hope /
We’ve been down for too long /
now we tryin to move on cuz /
shida za dunia, ka sabuni zuisha (the problems of the world, like soap,
will get nished) /
mi najivunia kwa hii maisha, yeah! Baby! (so, I am proud of myself in this
life, yeah! Baby!)64
Considering her performances, lyrics, and interview statements together, Baby T
articulates what Daphne Brooks describes as “black women’s sonic performances
and phonic expression[, which] are dialectically and dialogically engaged with
black women’s discursive and dramaturgical acts.”65 Baby T’s corporeality attends
to the compromise between what are two impracticable poles of masculinity and
femininity, creating a footing for her words about the unfair lives of poor youth.
Cisgender men also express uneasy sentiments about the tomboy and proclaim
that hip hop women should not feel boxed into what they regard as an imposed
assignment. Judge states, “If you’re a chick [they say] you have to be like ..., for
example, a tomboy ... . Naw. You can still be sexy, and you are doing hip hop.
You know?”66 Similarly, Agano argues that one does not have to be a tomboy to
make it, though many are. I asked him if this was acceptable, and he said, “Okay,
there is [sic] no rules there, but I think they can do what they are doing. I think
it’s cool. But not every girl should be like that though.”67 ese statements imply
that women do not have to be tomboys and should be free to choose their identi-
ties, deducing that the tomboy is unsuitable. Judge’s notion that women should be
able to be sexy seems to imply that women simply should be sexy in underground
spaces. Judge and Agano solidify the cultural mores, implying that for women, the
available genders are either one that resembles masculinity or something desirable
to normative masculinity. ere is an unresolvable exclusion that women face: that
rap skill level is read through a masculine sieve, but also that the nonheteronorma-
tive subjectivity of the tomboy is inherently pejorative because it does not fulll
cismen desires that are encouraged in hip hop’s heteronormative spaces.
L-Ness, of all the people I interviewed, most identied with the tomboy label,
though she stopped short of calling herself one. L-Ness believes that women
should not make themselves desirable to masculinity:
Most female hiphoppers are just tomboy. I don’t know, it just comes. ... But ah, the
other performers, they want to go an extra mile to be sexy. ey’ll want to appeal to
the men. You know? ere’s a dierence. If I’m rapping, I want to touch everybody.
But there is someone who will go on stage and start singing, and maybe they want
to appeal to the men. You know, they are dressing in something short. Even their
moves, they have to be sexy moves. ... It’s not necessary. Women shouldn’t be por-
trayed like that. If you look at many videos, you feel sorry for most of the models,
because it’s not just about that. ... But it’s just a westernization kind of thing.68
For L-Ness, this is an inauthentic method of rap subjectivity. Like Baby T, L-Ness
recognizes the bind, but unlike her, L-Ness’s way out is to avoid the conditions that
. Rapper Baby T in the “Looking Up” video. Screenshot by author. Source: Dandora-
Music, “Looking Up Rmx X Female Rappers (Ocial Music Video),” YouTube, November
, , https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wPoSkSuDqU&t=s.
make women objects of sexual attention. From an outsider’s perspective, these
women may all sound the same. However, they have unique and diering methods
of creating themselves as artists in this music video. How they navigate gender elu-
cidates the imperfections of the Nairobi underground. However, these comments
also allude to how variegated the artists’ performances and subjectivities are and
how dierently they choose to position their bodies within the culture.
e politics of the Nairobi hip hop tomboy feed into larger ideas about notions
of imitativeness and mimicry that circulate within Kenyan discourse and the
histories of sonic technologies. Alexander Weheliye reminds us of the historical
situatedness in which practices of mimicry in music-making occur: “Not surpris-
ingly, unmediated mimetic listening was most habitually ascribed to ‘others,’ such
as native subjects, women, and black people. e mimetic dimensions of recorded
sound were also highlighted in scenes depicting the ascription by ‘primitives’ of
paranormal powers to this machinery.”69 e notion that social others can only
hope to copy and imitate carries over into the gure of the tomboy. Although a
large part of disavowing the tomboy label is a refusal to be read as lesbian, queer,
or nonfeminine and thus disregarded, what is also at play is ciswomen artists’
refusal to be assessed as only parrots of their cismen counterparts. L-Ness, Baby
T, and Sugar eschew claims that their embodiments are inauthentic while stead-
fastly asserting that they articulate an imaginative and inventive method of rap-
ping. At the center of gender politics in Nairobi are anxieties that ciswomen artists
are inauthentic rappers because of their propensity to copy. A large part of the
social anxiety over hip hop is due to claims of copying the west and not having
the informed capacity to make cultural or musical choices that reect Kenyan cul-
ture. If mimicking is the worst characteristic of a non-U.S. rapper, to be a woman
or femme indicted for mimicry of their men colleagues is a judgment that aims to
cast women outside the bounds of the culture. e tomboy serves as the quintes-
sential imitator of both U.S. hip hop and Kenyan cismen practitioners, solidifying
the otherness of women artists. While cismen might only be accused of a single
U.S. imitativeness, women supposedly doubly mimic both men and U.S. rap at
large. is dual spotlight is the essential dilemma for many people of marginalized
genders whose actions are constantly up for review and attempted dismissal by
cultural gatekeepers. is intra–hip hop dynamic, then, in turn, serves to accuse
femme artists within the space as the “actual” imitators. In other words, it is not
Kenyan rap at large that is guilty of mimicry, nor are the men who dominate it; it
is women. Hence, anxieties over postcolonial subjects wanting to parody western
culture seep into the underground and surface as conversations about whether
women rappers have the capacity to express the complexities of an urban, global-
ized hip hop Kenyanness.
Women rappers combat this snare in two ways. First, their mere presence in
the culture disrupts the eld of hegemonic gender, and thus, they shi and recon-
gure spaces. While women rappers recognize that there may not be a way out
of masculinization, they problematize the music through their performative par-
ticipation. ey disrupt men-only spaces and masculine music practices, even if
nominally, and their performances and songs in concerts and videos force the
music into a more inclusionary politics. Women recognize that men gatekeep
the industry side, as men are the most likely to be producers, own studios, and
have labels. However, men MCs, as a collection of artists, perform embodiments
in hip hop culture through nonnormativity and rejecting social categories. Cis-
women performances compel artists to question gender through an interrogation
of society’s gures: the tomboy, the lesbian, and the promiscuous woman. Tanya
Saunders writes on Cuban underground music that regardless of one’s subjectivity,
“it is a queer act for a woman to enter into hip hop and make an intervention into
non-normative behaviors” and that “the female presence within hip hop is a queer
presence in and of itself.”70 Building from Saunders, Kenyan women’s embodied
performances queer the space of Nairobi rap and thus queer the performing body
that helps constitute the hip hop diaspora. ese rappers do not explicitly advo-
cate for queering spaces, but instead their embodiments unsettle a cismasculine
dogma. Such disturbance opens the door for the culture to question itself and
further decipher its values, impelling many men artists to conrm their support
for women rappers, even if that support comes with guidelines and policing. In
so doing, and however imperfect it might be, these artists of marginalized gen-
ders communicate embodied knowledge about how hip hop is a space to arm
the outcast while jettisoning the idea that they should be marginalized. Above all,
women’s performance practices make spaces that insist they have a place in the
music. e fact that women use normative standards to discuss gender means that
such interventions are never forthright but murky and imprecise.
Secondly, the women use this song to participate in the commonly mentioned
“hip hop is a way of life” axiom. is concept is a celebrated and globally embra-
ced ideal that asserts that dedicated practitioners recognize the music as a method
and set of practices for engaging with the world. Michael Jeries writes that prac-
titioners state that “hip hop is more than just art ... and the subjects insist that
hip hop is something they live, not just listen to,” concluding that it “is something
that allows people to tell the world who they are.”71 Usually, Kenyan artists espouse
the “way of life” adage to combat accusations of U.S. imitation by responding that
they cannot mimic this art form because it is how they live. e video contributes
to the “way of life” philosophy by framing the music as a quotidian exercise while
also staring down the idea that only men can live hip hop.
In the underground, the artists reclaim the culture for poor youths and exem-
plify that it can be performed in everyday settings, contesting mainstream rap’s
regular representations of wealth and excess. For example, during L-Ness’s part,
she raps with her standard speed and grit, which adds to the song’s sonic surges.
Although she remains sitting, her rhymes take up performative space, along with
how the sound saturates the video. She sits in front of a picture and paints, wearing
a grati-style half-mask respirator. Her body moves quickly and assertively,
implicating her viewers in listening to what she has to say by repeatedly pointing
directly at the camera. Even though she does not use spray cans, she sports the
mask, framing her painting as a part of grati art. Toward the end of the song, hip
hop is transformed into a class when the last rapper, Taamic, displays her lyrical
skill to an audience of children sitting in an outdoor classroom, eagerly absorbing
the knowledge she imparts. ough the chalkboard she stands by is not entirely
shown, enough is there to gather that her lyrics have been written onto it, trans-
forming her verses into actual lessons. By insisting that they have something to
contribute to the culture, these women demand that their music is how they live.
POLITICAL SERIOUSNESS IN “LOOKING UP”
In “Looking Up,” the rappers exhibit a critical claim to political seriousness and
utilize it to respond to their marginalization. Women’s usage of the “way of life”
adage and the intentional centering of their spatial and sonic presence are exam-
ples of political seriousness. is section explores the multiple other ways this
framing occurs in the video, including through social critiques and armations
of their work. ese women rappers demonstrate that despite being stymied by
gender constructions, they still retain creative control over how they represent
themselves as critics of Nairobi, which for them is a place containing layers of
social and economic dispossession.
e serious elements within the lyrics are extended through the various perfor-
mances in the video. e rappers’ words induce an earnest, normative “feel good”
logic. e verses and chorus are generally about never giving up, not succumb-
ing to poverty, and always remaining positive, all while the artists acknowledge
the precarity and vulnerability of poor people’s subject position. roughout the
video, people from various backgrounds, ages, genders, and races hold up a sign
with the words Looking Up. It is passed from one to another, including three white
people in succession, a young child in a school uniform, and another child living
on the streets. One woman carrying rewood on her back also has the sign axed
to the wood. e message leans toward promoting a hip hop bootstrap capitalism
as a response to poverty. At the beginning of the video, Udita sings, “Just keep on,
looking up / Keep on, keep on, looking up.” With these words, the song partici-
pates in the hood narratives of perseverance that have long pervaded underground
rap. By asserting that one’s good outlook on life will result in upward mobility,
the song’s political seriousness utilizes common neoliberal messaging of human
worth as dened through positive attitude and aect.
However, the embodied performances in the video rescue it from being solely
and unpleasantly aligned with a normalized economic ethic. Children in the video
skip with makeshi jump ropes, hula hoop with wire, and participate in collective
breakdance battles. e activities exist as similar practices, framing rap as a part
of the life of marginalized people in the hood. Applying “hip hop as a way of life,”
the video suggests that all these actions are the same. Furthermore, such imagery
mirrors those early days in the U.S. when practitioners used discarded records
to scratch on, made sound systems from whatever resources were available, and
eeced electricity from light poles. Hip hop theater scholar Daniel Banks calls
these practices making “something from something.”72 Rather than calling these
innovations “something from nothing,” as the adage goes, these children make
“something” and interrogate notions of what is considered outcast waste within
an economy that manufactures easily discarded and obsolete products in order
consistently to market what is new. Such a shi, regarding children making things
from other things, also allows viewers to see children as who they are: innovators
and inventors. is moment in the video thus is not just about seeing hip hop as a
normal part of children’s lives but also about seeing the children as actors in artis-
tic technology. Rap culture becomes a part of these inventions, an example of the
technology that rejects capitalism’s insistence on consuming goods and new prod-
ucts. ese scenes demonstrate how children’s fun, leisure, desires, and knowledge
production can exist outside of consumer culture in armative ways.
emes of deance and compromise with an economic status quo oen occur
in the same contexts. In “Looking Up,” this happens when Alisha Popat sings the
hook to a young boy: “You got the power, just use it / Make a dierence with what
you have / Don’t ever think that you’re not worth it,” and continues with “Believe
in you / Dream that dream.” e young child nods in armation, walks away, and
performs a basic freeze, which is a breakdance move in which a dancer boosts
themselves into a position and holds it, usually to the beat of the song that is play-
ing. e dancer then returns to a standing position or transitions to another move.
Here, the freeze occurs when the child does a handstand and bends his legs upside
down, holding his body in an L position before lowering back down. Lyrics like
Popat’s commonly relate to how one can accomplish goals related to acquiring
nancial means, education, and a career.
erefore, this moment could be read as hip hop’s investment in capitalism.
Popat is a Kenyan Indian with more racial and class privilege, and her instructions
could be seen as insultingly and patronizingly informing a young African person
with less access to resources to develop their potential agency. Before this specic
scene, the boy is shown attempting to breakdance and then falling to the ground.
Other taller (seemingly older) boys around him laugh and push him out of their
way so that they can have their turn dancing. e older youths have an easier
time hitting their moves than the smaller boy to whom Popat eventually speaks.
e faulty implication here, too, is that the older boys represent the obstacles this
young child faces in his life. A common discourse in Kenya puts forth the idea
that youths without privilege need good role models in a context where gangs
and other impoverished men are simply “bad examples” who encourage laziness,
crime, and dropping out of school. is classist argument, of course, erases the
larger systemic issues that all marginalized people encounter.
In addition to the problematic dynamic between Popat and the young child,
this scene also encodes dance as an act of resistance. e young boy’s breakdanc-
ing is a performance that seems to refuse the false logic of “work hard, get ahead.”
In this sense, breakdancing is a rejection of the status quo. In his deance, hip hop
embodiments become his answer to poverty. He and other abled children break-
dance on the dirt, which yields no immediate benet within a productive frame of
labor, meaning that the space is seized and created for the playful and the perfor-
mative. e children dance, smile, laugh, and move because they nd joy in doing
so. e excerpt illustrates that these embodiments oer a space to depart from
the mainstream discourse on individual economic wealth subsequent to hard
work, even when that discourse is found inside rap culture and, indeed, the song
itself. e dynamic between the youth and Popat is yet another instance where the
music can display the troublingly conformist and compellingly disruptive in
the same scene, which, in this case, is the commitment to capitalist philosophy
alongside its disruption of that same code.
Situating activities like Taamic’s teaching and L-Ness’s painting inside women’s
hip hop are instrumental to resisting the faulty perceptions that the music cannot
be an appropriate life for women. For instance, several cismen artists told me that
women have it hard as rappers because of their duties to raise families, which is
supposedly their primary responsibility. For them, men do not have to share in the
unpaid childrearing duties and can thus have time and space to make music. Rap-
per Ndugus laid the blame on society, family, and husbands/partners:
[Women] face a lot of challenges, like trying to convince people that this is what they
live by. Because in Kenya, when we were starting hip hop, our parents were like: ...
Will it really pay you? Will it help you feed your kids in the future? It’s also com-
plicated for females. Let’s say at night they need to go to shows. You also nd that
a female is a married woman, and she has kids to take care of. ey have a lot of
challenges.73 (emphasis mine)
Ndugus rearms the idea that women artists encounter the regular pressures to
make money from hip hop and that their primary responsibility is supposedly
to care for their families. In the video, instead of rejecting the label of women
as caretakers, they embrace it. e beginning of the song has Sugar producing a
gracious ode to her mother for her childrearing, and such practices also transpire
when Alicia Popat encourages the breakdancing child and when Taamic educates
the children in her outdoor class. is type of caretaking is usually not seen in
videos of artists who are men and can easily slide into the gendering of labor.
e women’s presentation of motherhood-like care alongside rap lyrics and break-
dancing suggests that these acts need not lie in juxtaposition. Rather, rappers can
be parents and custodians of children as well as be cared for, as Sugar demon-
strates with her gratitude toward her mother, all of which are exemplary of living
hip hop.
“Looking Up” represents how women artists push for radical inclusivity in
underground music, thus expanding who might be included in the “way of life”
philosophy. While many cisgender men vocalize their acceptance of women, they
oen imagine themselves as hip hop’s lookouts who determine who is accepted
and who is not. Alternatively, women’s ingenuities manage to intervene in and
push up against the fabric of Nairobi’s underground culture. For example, “Look-
ing Up” shows parts of the hood that are oen rendered too “abnormal,” even for
hip hop tales. In the middle of the song, a street child or boy, or chokoraa, holds
the Looking Up sign. Street boys have notorious reputations in Nairobi. To stave
o poverty and hunger, many buy shoe glue from street cobblers and inhale it.
It is common to see street children ax glue bottles between their teeth as they
walk, stand, or sit along busy roads and in lower-class neighborhoods. ey oen
beg for money from middle-class people who walk within the city limits and are
chased away by askari. When they are high, they can be aggressive and violent.
For the most part, the lack of social nets, intergenerational poverty, and systemic
disenfranchisement account for the pervasiveness of children who must live and
survive on the streets. In Kenya’s imaginary, the gure of the street child is the
dirty, abject, and outcast, located outside of the boundaries of parental concern
and societal welfare. Empathy for these young people is oen in short supply from
wealthier (even slightly well-o) Nairobians, and children who call the streets
their home are oen the focus of bile or apathy. In the past, there have been several
governmental attempts at reform. In , during Kibaki’s rule, the administration
reinstituted the National Youth Service, designed to provide education and job
training to young people, especially street children.74 is was welcome news in
Nairobi, and in other urban areas as well.During one trip, I noticed a marked
absence of street children in the city center. But by Kibaki’s second term, this pro-
gram ran ineectively and, at times, not at all. During the Kenyatta presidency,
two high-prole corruption scandals broke in and , and reports indicated
that huge amounts of funds were stolen from the program.75 Relatedly, the World
Bank–funded Kazi kwa Vijana (KKV) (work for the youth), headed by Raila
Odinga, was a youth training program implemented aer young unemployed men
were blamed for the postelection violence. e World Bank pulled funding
from KKV aer it determined a misallocation of funds.76 Many young people have
since visibly returned to the streets, and their problems remain.
In this video, the street child’s abject subject position does not preclude him
from possessing enough humanity to appear in and participate in the music’s nar-
rative. During his scene, while he holds the Looking Up sign, he clutches a glue
bottle in his mouth and gets high (or performs the act of doing so). rough his
intractable intoxication, he, too, is aorded the ability to grasp onto a hope that,
although unreasonably inequitable, most would see as unavailable to him. How-
ever, he stands alone in the video, like the other nonrapping adults who hold the
sign. is child appears slightly older than the other small children who play and
run throughout the video, breakdancing and hula-hooping. He is not aorded the
space to play or explore these freedoms, presumably because his life is solemn
and severe. If we consider Taamic’s teaching to be a form of gendered care, he is
excluded from that as well. e video situates him within the context of neolib-
eral, able-bodied adulthood, and he is positioned as someone who should take
responsibility for his economic mobility. ough he does not receive nurture nor
the opportunity to participate in leisure, as the other children do, his inclusion
in the video is fascinating, given the reviled status of chokoraa.
In another embracing of the abject, ying toilets are also referenced. is
occurs in the scene when L-Ness paints a large and colorful checkerboard of
abstract shapes. Like the other artists, L-Ness’s lyrics relate to the urgency of per-
sonal change and the basic understanding of class oppression. e following is a
portion of her raps:
Step up, stand up, rise up, sky’s your limit /
Badala ya kublend gizani light up a candle (Instead of blending in the dark,
light up a candle) /
Na look up kulingana na jinsi tunanyanzwa (And look up in regard to how
we are oppressed)77
In the upper le corner of her painting, the words Toilet with Wings appear in
large lettering. is statement is a reference to the phenomenon of “ying toilets”
in slum areas, where people who lack sanitation dispose of solid waste by wrap-
ping it in plastic bags and throwing it onto rooops.78 Here, she participates in the
many existing campaigns to end the practice, which can only be dissolved when
people’s lives change, including adding widespread sanitation infrastructures to
residential areas. Nevertheless, she inserts the most uncomfortable truths of the
hood experiences in this video.
Taking cues from L-Ness’s painting, “Looking Up” operates as a performative
bricolage that assembles those things that would not normally appear side by side:
images of trash, references to waste, outcast street children, white people, and
women rappers from a range of backgrounds. In much of this text, what is oen
repudiated exists alongside the artistic elements of the music. e performances of
the street boy and references to ying toilets articulate how these artists embrace
those things outside the bounds of what should be visible. ese women artists
do not present the hood in standard, oen hackneyed ways, that is, by convincing
viewers that the hood should be exhibited as a romanticized place of perseverance
for only strong-willed and abled men. Instead, the video elucidates the unsavory
and unspoken facts of people’s marginality. While many men artists claim to speak
for the dispossessed, these women artists have created a text that steps beyond the
rap canons and elucidates themes of the ghetto experience that have many times
been rendered too uncomfortable to explicate.
In this video, the rappers understand that hip hop is a place of possibility for
their expression and a site where they need to assert their agency as practitio-
ners. Most women MCs will defend the culture while deliberately marking out a
place for themselves. Woman hip hop artist and poet Amora made this point when
I asked her if women face undue obstacles in rap settings:
But that’s everything. When it comes to men and women. Men always have a higher
hand. Like if I give an example with Kenyan culture, back in the coastal region, they
believe that a boy child should be educated to a certain level, very higher [sic] than a
girl child. A girl child will reach like primary six, and that will be it.79 And ah, a boy
child should go to the university. A boy child should be the president. So, it’s not only
in hip hop. So everywhere, if you are a lady, you have to ght your way, yeah. You
have to walk the extra mile to get what you want. It’s not only in hip hop.80
Amora does not want the genre to bear the responsibility of societal sexism. Mar-
cyliena Morgan correspondingly writes: “Most successful female MCs recognize
that for them the only place where they can navigate race, class, gender, and sexu-
ality with relative freedom is the hiphop world. It is not an ideal space but rather
one populated by those searching for discourses that confront power.”81 Women
make use of these far-from-idyllic spaces even when the music and culture are
imbued with power inequalities that directly impact them. “Looking Up” and the
. Rapper L-Ness in the “Looking Up” video. Screenshot by author. Source: Dandora-
Music, “Looking Up Rmx X Female Rappers (Ocial Music Video),” YouTube, November
, , https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wPoSkSuDqU&t=s.
women that perform it accomplish an expansive list of feats by using armored
embodiments to activate knowledge while embracing the outcast, insisting that
hip hop is life for women, interrogating sexisms, mucking through the tomboy
gure, and oering a subtle challenge to wearisome neoliberal values. is cultiva-
tion of reside knowledge “preserves and transfers women’s logic, norms and val-
ues of nurturing, care, [and creates] solidarities and commons,” which, for women
rappers, allows them the space to make music.82 e probing and imperfect prac-
tice of play is the centripetal force underlying and actuating most of these inter-
ventions, and rappers of marginalized genders insist upon the space to explore and
create innovatively.
PLAY AND INTIMACY
Practitioners enact ludicity collectively with others. Tinkering with words,
embodiment, space, sound, and diaspora produces a shared politics about rap-
pers with similar musical and cultural goals. ese embodiments of play can be
the rehearsed intentional actions in front of a camera in making a video or the
unprompted and subtle performances at events. Hip hop corporeality, which is
both planned and banalized, intentional and impulsive, constructs a set of intensely
and aesthetically powerful practices. Artists create culture alongside each other in
intimate ways in attempts to locate themselves both inside and outside of econo-
mies of production and commerce. Jayna Brown notes the importance of intimacy
in the Congolese music spaces she studies: “I stress the importance of music’s con-
nection to physical response, the utopian articulations of the body we nd enacted
in dance. It is our bodies as much as our souls that we seek to reclaim, or recover,
despite the impossibility of restoration.”83 She writes of dance here, but this expla-
nation could easily be applied to any bodily movement alongside musical sound.
Moreover, the experiences referenced in this quote indicate contact with others
aurally and physically in methods that are profoundly meaningful. Working from
Brown, I want to stress that practitioners engage with each other to produce cor-
poreal interventions that are collective as well as individually aective. Nairobi
rap orature, which is ludic, masculinized, and serious, occurs in public spaces but
produces sites of closeness and familiarity that artists and fans depend upon for
evoking pleasure, subversiveness, and freeness.
Hip hop corporeality is in conversation with the city of Nairobi and wider soci-
ety, as well as in specic spaces. One of the crucial sites artists have used to try out
their shared embodiments and lyrical skills is the NGO Sarakasi Dome, where
events have been highly competitive ecosystems. Most artists within the space
toil amid adversity; only the few privileged and lucky move to the mainstream
and formulate careers. ere is a hustle-like work ethic at Sarakasi, and one must
be quick and always prepared to take advantage of oen eeting and precarious
events. Sarakasi is located just east of the city center and in the working-class area
of Ngara. Venues like this can serve either as the primary place where artists navi-
gate their careers or as transit stops where the fortunate ones move on to radio and
television airplay and receive endorsement deals. At these events, organizers, rap-
pers, grati artists, and other participants receive small stipends through fund-
ing from Sarakasi. ere are oen vendors selling jewelry and occasional aspiring
rappers selling CDs between performances and outside by the walls where grati
artists are sanctioned to paint. Most artists cycle in and out of spaces like Sarakasi,
using their learned skills to acquire other careers, perhaps remaining in the under-
ground or sometimes leaving altogether. ey will not readily admit that they have
le the scene if asked; they just stop making music and showing up to events. e
fact that not many artists leave the underground (or admit to departing), except
when they make more money and move into the mainstream, works to solidify the
sacredness of the underground.
Impermanence does not mean that rappers write o spots like Sarakasi or
withdraw their participation. It is the opposite; artists make space and exploit any
opportunities with the full knowledge that the events could be short-lived and
their contributions fugacious. Within this space of transience, rappers develop a
culture that is prepared, enduring, and potentially mobile, always ready to move to
dierent physical sites. In the midst of such conditions, the opacities of play exist,
and artists make do with what they have, which oen generates evocative and
nourishing interactions. During the open mic portion of the Hip Hop Fest in ,
I observed two young men standing in the back of the performing hall. e audi-
ence had their attention on the freestyling performer rapping to a predetermined
generic beat, and these two men stood together, one facing the other in proximity,
while he rapped to the beat. As he rapped, he moved his body back and forth, his
. Sarakasi Dome at the Hip Hop Fest, . Photo by author.
hands performing an angled gesturing while his head bobbed to the music. Since
it was an open mic, he could not have been rapping along with the performer’s
improvised lyrics. He, too, was freestyling, or perhaps he was rehearsing a song he
had written. e other listening man stood facing the stage and bobbed his head
to the music and his friend’s raps. Occasionally, the rapper would briey place
his hand on his friend’s shoulder, still rhyming. Neither of these two men ever
took the stage to rap themselves during this event, never assuming rap’s authorita-
tive position as the live onstage performer. Perhaps this rapper was working up
the nerve to perform during the open mic session; perhaps he was attempting to
prove his deness to secure a future gig, or maybe he was simply sharing the space
with another person.
ese participants exercised the ludic by hewing space out of an event that
already welcomed the spirit of artistic freedom. ey fashioned a moment of inti-
macy, even during the competitive spirit of the event at Sarakasi, which included
rap battles. Additionally, the two individuals took ownership of whatever musi-
cal spatiality was available. e rapper held the self-assurance to rene his acu-
ity somewhat publicly, and the listener stood supportively, moving slightly to
the voiced montage. is interaction illustrates that the hip hop live show can
operate as a portal for other types of performing, listening, and participating.
Such an instance of sonic closeness, where only the comrade gazing upon the
stage heard the rapper’s words and where the rapper made listening demands
upon the other, calls for our recognition. Inside of the on-stage freestyle was
another space of independence where this practitioner made art on their own
terms outside of any governing body, even the likeminded planners of the event,
. Sarakasi Dome at the Hip Hop Fest, . Photo by author.
demonstrating a brief example of what Jayna Brown calls the “repossession of
bodily freedoms.”84
Hip hop intimacies also occur in planned performances. During another visit
to Sarakasi that same year, I witnessed Sue Timon, who stood to the far le side
of the hall and bobbed her head back and forth to the music. Again, rappers free-
styled and tried out new songs during the open mic session, the Sarakasi Acrobats
performed, and a talented beatboxer showed o his skills to a crowd that was awed
by his abilities. Judge MC’d the event with impressive talent and an energy that
kept the crowd meaningfully engaged, even when some of the actual perform-
ers were either beginners or lackluster. e atmosphere shied when the group
Washamba Wenza took to the stage. Although the hall had lled up, it was not
exceptionally crowded, and people started moving and dancing more energeti-
cally. ere were about seventy-ve people in attendance, including the hip hop
heads, vendors, and a few shoppers and devotees meandering around outside. Sue
also became more enthusiastic, and even before the beat dropped, her body began
to move back and forth to the rhythm of her head sways. Her arms lay to her side
at one point, and she moved rhythmically to the raps, relying on her back-and-
forth head-bobbing to communicate her connection to Washamba’s performance.
As she moved, her body pivoted around with expressions of intensity, looking at
other audience members for armation of the collective experience. At one point,
Sue put her arm up and moved it up and down rhythmically to encourage and
pay respect to the performance. is is a familiar gesture in rap music culture, the
moving of one’s arm vertically as the rapper displays their lyrical abilities, and it
communicates the audience member’s knowledge of the song. e sound system
was not equipped to handle the acoustics, and the space swallowed the lyrics while
magnifying the music’s heavy bass. e muing of their wordplay did not stop
Sue, nor the other audience members, who simply rapped along to the song’s then
oen incomprehensible lines.
Sue is tall and slim, and her hair at the time was cut into a Mohawk sur-
rounded by a close fade. She was one of the few women in attendance. Washamba
transitioned to dierent songs, and Sue moved close to the stage to be right under
the duo, grooving to the beats and moving excitedly. e climax of the perfor-
mance occurred when Judge transitioned from MC to rapper when it was time
to perform “Shupavu,” a song that he collaborated on with Washamba Wenza,
who includes Flamez, Smallz Lethal, Kev Mamba, and later Frank West (I ana-
lyze this song in chapter ). A large crew of men rappers then gathered on the
stage, showing support by dancing and gesturing. Washamba rapped and moved
to the music, bending toward the crowd below them. Sue and others danced and
grooved to the beat, allying themselves with the message. e crew onstage
and the audience members right below them drew in close and built a sort of
cypher as the rappers spit into the mic, shooting their lyrics into the speakers and
beyond the huddled crew. eir stage energy was hardened and masculinized,
with the audience producing energetic and rhythmic responses to the rappers’
calls. Being one of only a handful of women did not faze Sue. Her presence dif-
fered vastly from the few others of marginalized genders and many other men who
stood by, conversing with each other or observing quietly without oering any
overt gestural presence.85 Sue’s shared experiences here, and with Flamez in their
music video “Ulimi” (discussed in chapter ), demonstrate how tough and play-
ful performances oen pull participants together in a shared space. Her moment
with other cismen practitioners exemplies the contradictory nature of gender in
the underground. In conversations with me, some men vocalize their uneasiness
about the role of masculine-performing women like Sue, while many have col-
laborated on work with such women.
e two men fans standing in the back of the hall sharing a close moment, as well
as Sue Timon’s participation in Washamba Wenza’s stage act, are exemplary of how
rappers insist on their subject positions by making or practicing hip hop through
embodiment even when they are not central in the rap performance. ese prac-
titioners participated in the culture’s exercise of gender by both disobeying and
arming the well-etched social codes within music-making processes through
performances that, though particular, are also constructed as unremarkable. e
ludic in these contexts involves making space through performance within a site
that is contested but also relatively welcoming. Embodiments that are playfully
dissident also comprise small and unconscious decisions about what rules rap-
pers will cleverly forsake, resist, and infringe upon. ese two stories about the
ludic serve as evidence of how Sarakasi participants realize themselves as prac-
titioners who are creating systems of knowability that are deeply dependent on
their commonalities with others. Both instances illustrate “underground hip hop’s
capacity to blur distinctions between musicians and fans” through the sharing of a
singular space.86
To return to Jayna Brown’s discussion, musical sites do not simply put aside
society’s ills; instead, they take them on and make a space that cohabits with soci-
ety’s aws in facilitating a sonically utopic vision. Her remarks about how music
spaces in the DRC are not far removed from authoritarianism, bloodshed, and
late capitalism are instructive for the Kenyan milieu because these Nairobi prac-
titioners are unable to reckon with large economic forces that impede their music
lives but nd space within Sarakasi’s walls for something dierent and new. Many
are disillusioned by intergenerational underemployment and lack of access to
the resources that some wealthier Kenyans take for granted. In turn, these rap-
pers facilitate spaces where those urgencies hover and occupy but do not sub-
sume them, employing the performative ludic and what Brown calls “bodily
utopias, the rehabilitation of the body as a site of joy and exultation.”87 Hip hop
culture uses ludicity to engage in the boundaries and borders present through-
out Kenyan society. e music creates critical commentary about the wealthy and
poor, women and men, the global and the local. e ludic orature of practitioners,
t with armored gender, engages with these dichotomies in both compliant and
resistant ways. ey exercise musical freeness through play and, in so doing, are
able to enunciate their critiques of society while ensuring that their bodily perfor-
mances remain dislodged from conformity, thus preventing them from wandering
too close to ocialdom. Even when this orature is short-lived and couched in the
inequities of Kenyan settings, rappers use this persuasive modality to participate
in expressive self-making.
Diaspora, Love, and Limits