THE HIPLIFE IN GHANA

West African Indigenization of Hip-Hop 

Halifu Osumare, Ph.D.

ABSTRACT

The Hiplife in Ghana: West African Indigenization of Hip-Hop explores one international site, Ghana, West Africa, where hip-hop music and culture has morphed over two decades into a whole new form of world music called hiplife.   The paper investigates hiplife music not merely as an adaptation of hip-hop, but as a revision of Ghana’s own century-old popular music known globally as highlife.  The recently published book, from which the paper is drawn, is theoretically situated in scholarship on the globalization of American hip-hop as having created a Global Hip-Hip Nation (GHHN).  I deconstruct the imitation-adaptation model of imported American pop culture, and in the process reveal various indigenization processes by local artists and consumers.  Ghanaian hiplife becomes an example of the emphasis on localization of hip-hop with its highlife rhythms, melodies, and the use of local languages.  Simultaneously, the paper illuminates many of hiplife’s well-known artists who are perched for international notoriety, along with close readings of selected hiplife lyrics.

Throughout hiplife’s five-phased indigenization process, a dynamic youth agency emerged that is transforming Ghanaian society.  The construct of youth as a marginal status in most societies is examined in relation to Africa’s traditional cultural focus on age deference.  Through Cultural Studies youth subculture theory, I investigate how hiplife music empowers Ghana’s youths, giving them an influential voice in various social, economic, and political spheres.  This theoretical perspective establishes hip-hop’s development in Ghana from the late 1980s imitative phase through the adaptive mid-1990s, to the current indigenizing phase since the early 2000s, all of which established a distinct youth empowerment movement that has changed the dynamics of the society, giving voice to a younger generation who previously had none, neither in Ghana’s socio-political sphere or the music industry. 

Hiplife in Ghana: West African Indigenization of Hp-Hop, published in September 2012 by Palgrave Macmillan.  The book demonstrates hiplife music’s socio-political activism that forms a counter-hegemonic story, illustrating how that which started as imported American popular youth music in Ghana was not consumed wholesale, but was instead transformed for its own local needs through the indigenization process. Hiplife is currently engaged in self-critique as it continues to shift within certain boundaries established by tradition and innovation---between the past (highlife) and the present (hip-hop).