The Cape region of South Africa has long had a serious habit of protesting hip-hop music. Cape hip-hop culture has had much to protest about: Inequality, the dominance of one language, and racism. For rap crews like the deeply political 1990s crew, Prophets of da City (POC), the challenge was always to deliver an accurate picture of what their own and their people’s struggles were and how is their life and the lives of their people.
Since colonialism, monolingualism has been the best way to describe communication in South Africa. This has been linked to the procedure of racializing (mainly) black, Indian, and colored citizens along lines of race, language virtue, and loyalty to the state.
The reason for this was that multilingualism – the use of more than two languages – would confound and confuse daily human communication, especially the linguistic objectives of the apartheid state.
Prophets of da City became the first rap crew on the Cape hip-hop stage to sign a business contract with a significant South African record company, Teal Trutone. They came to dominate in the deeply damaging late 1980s as well as early 1990s as the count down to the end of the apartheid age was starting.
Early on, Prophets of da City discovered they had to construct a strategic linguistic conclusion – to rap with multilingual lyrics and music and avoid monolingual lyrics and music, which at the time because of the political climate under the apartheid government ruling would risk blocking out potential fans.
As Prophets of da City rapper Shaheen Ariefdien put it in an interview in the early 1990s with academic Adam Haupt:
Hip-hop brought the language of the ‘fewer thans’ and adopted it, strode it, and made it sexy to the point that there is an open dignity about what formed ‘our’ style… to speak local reworkings of hip-hop.
Prophets of da City adopted the multilingual rules of the “less thans”, the oppressed. They honored languages like Black South African English, Cape Flats English, Cape Coloured English, and particularly Kaaps, a black township type of Afrikaans.
Kaaps is a working-class tongue that arises from the same language origins but is very different from the largely white Algemeen Beskaafde Afrikaans which was the official language of the ruling class under apartheid.
At first, Prophets of da City’s rap music was set to Kaaps lyrics and a local sort of English, but later slowly extended to isiXhosa and Jamaican patois, along with various accents.
The multilingual practice in Cape hip-hop persists these days. Like Prophets of da City back in the 1990s, artists still oppose in different tongues, even in the same song. It was known when rappers added their voices to the current growing student protests and against the declines in democracy by the African National Congress government.
This music heritage goes overlooked by mainstream media although it’s shown a lot of awareness on social media. An example is “20 Years of Democracy/ Demockery” featuring Crosby, Teba, Spencer, Youngsta CPT, Trenton, Mthunzi, Leandro, Mkosi, Cream, Hipe, Sammy Sparks, Whosane, Clem Reuben, and Emile YX?.
This project got together a strong multilingual ensemble of voices and styles of communicating, expressing, and rapping. Add to that “Must Fall” by Emile YX? featuring Java, Linkris the Genius, Black Athena, Daddy Spencer, Crosby, and Khusta, and its obvious Cape hip-hop will keep the heritage alive for decades.