The Canadian Society for Traditional Music / La Société canadienne pour les traditions musicales
Abstract
The Hip Hop Parliament is a youth-initiative comprised of underground hip hop MCs and artists that began in 2007 in Nairobi, Kenya. Representing itself as a collective conscious movement that has no boundaries and is open to participants from all over the world, the Hip Hop Parliament formed to offer youth a voice and a place from which to participate in the social, political, and cultural processes of Kenya. Drawing on hip hop culture and its mythologies of struggle, resistance, reclamation, and social consciousness, the Hip Hop Parliament released a Declaration as a means to present a unified front on a number of controversial issues concerning ethnicity, gender, respect for human life, reconciliation between communities, violence, youth culture, justice, peace, the use of SHENG as one of Kenya’s “official” languages, the importance of good leadership and the responsibility to provide security, education, and health care available to all citizens regardless of economic circumstance. Given this context, in this article the authors begin to explore the following questions: What is the significance of the Hip Hop Parliament and its declaration as a movement/ culture for youth in Kenya? How does hip hop, as an artistic form, work towards the expression of a contemporary Africa
