Ouaga Hip Hop Festival

The city is also the meeting place of everybody who loves African cinema. Since 1969, every two years, the FESPACO (Ouagadougou Pan-African Film & Television Festival) welcomes thousands of festival-goers and represents the not-to-be-missed festival for all African cinema lovers around the world. At the very beginning of this new millennium, Ouagadougou is once again solicited to be the leader of another cultural phenomenon , the International Hip Hop Culture Festival known as “Ouaga Hip Hop.”

Some New Yorkers were lucky enough to get a glimpse of this new festival at the screening of the documentary by Benny Malapa, “Ouaga Hip Hop 3” during the 11th edition of the New York African Film Festival in April 2004. The documentary captures the soul and the passion that goes into this great human, musical and cultural adventure that is Ouaga Hip Hop. At the source of this annual event is Ali Diallo, a young Burkinabé who can pride himself on a long and fruitful experience in the arts and culture in his country and in Europe. He is a theater actor, a producer and a director. It all started in 1997 when Ali, who was working on the promotion of the first album by Basic Soul (the precursor of rap in Burkina Faso), met a few young rappers who complained to him about the difficulty of finding a producer and a market. Creating a platform for these young hip hop artists became Ali’s mission. That same year, Ali founded “Umané Culture,” an organization based in Ouagadougou whose goals are to encourage and promote cultural contacts and exchanges; to facilitate the processes of professionalization and the blossoming of young hip hop artists. Thanks to national and international partnerships, Umané Culture and its dedicated staff brings its artistic, administrative and technical expertise to produce, co-produce and promote music shows in Burkina Faso and abroad.

The modest beginnings of this cultural and musical adventure (about 500 people attended the two-night festival in 2000) were due to the fact that the guests were mainly locals and the fact that Ali Diallo had a very small budget: he used his own personal funds to finance the first festival. In a recent e-mail, Ali told me, “One can not live without dreams, so one has to find ways to realize them.” Ali did put his money where his mouth is. We now can appreciate his dedication, his faith in his dreams, his passion to increase the diversity and the richness of these annual cultural meetings.

The festival is a two-part event over a two-week period every year in October. During the first ten days or so, Ouaga Hip Hop offers several workshops which cover different artistic disciplines related to hip hop such as hip hop dance, theater, graffiti, management, sound technology, writing, and studio recording techniques. There are no technical schools for sound technology in Burkina Faso and it costs a great deal of money to send young people to study these technologies abroad. Taking advantage of the festival to train technicians during workshops is the great idea behind the whole event, and Ali hopes that in the near future, they will be able to find technicians in Burkina instead of having to invite them from abroad.

The festival ends with a four-to-five-day period of performances and concerts, and in 2003, it showcased the talents of established rappers such as Yéleen, Basic Soul, Smokey (Burkina Faso), Tata Pound (Mali), Dhalaï K (Bénin), Kaïdan Gaskia (Niger), Daara-J, Pee Froiss, Djoloff (Sénégal), Lennox Lindsay (Trinidad & Tobago), IZM (France). African rap differentiates itself from its American counterpart in several respects. First of all, the use of African traditional musical instruments (balafon, cora) gives a singular sound that is immediately recognizable as coming from the African continent. A lot of African rappers mix musical genres, and their sound combines rap, ragga, reggae, soul and local sounds. But the true originality of African Hip Hop stands in its lyrics. While American rap tends to promote gansgta rap which glamorizes crimes and often disrespects women, African rap is mainly a militant form of expression, it carries political and social messages and denounces social injustices. African rappers were inspired by a musical style which originated in urban centers in the United States and imported it back to the continent. They re-appropriated hip hop by giving it a new lease of life, new words (a lot of these artists rap in their language: Wolof, Songhai, Moré, Bambara, Djoula, among many others), and other themes since these artists primarily concern themselves with issues related to their respective country, their continent, the environment, politics, their present and their future, injustices, human rights, their community, and the whole world. All of this for the pleasure of an ever-growing African public.

In the documentary “Ouaga Hip Hop 3,” one of the rappers of the Senegalese band expresses his desire to see more and more African rappers “copy” their own culture to make sure that the “old generations” can listen and relate to younger generations’ rap music and to make sure that there is no “cultural contradiction.” Has there ever been any cultural contradiction in African hip hop? Although African rap gets its inspiration from American hip hop as far rhythm, clothes, graffiti and body gestures are concerned, it is nevertheless rooted in the ancestral tradition of the griot who tells stories as well as history over music. The modern griots of the hip hop scene are questioning the world of today more than retelling the history of their people and they contribute to the creative and cultural richness of Africa. The new hip hop griots address the present in a direct manner while their traditional elders tells them who they are by recounting their past. These young artists want to be heard and their claims validated. In one of his songs, Wed Hyack (Senegal) pays tribute to Thomas Sankara [1] and to Patrice Lumumba [2], two symbols of hope of a better world. Kaidan Gaskia (Niger) rap on all socio-political and economical problems which –although not specific to Africa- are prevalent on the African continent such as AIDS, corrupted governments and politicians, poverty, social injustices, dictature, unemployment, etc. Smokey (a rapper and producer from Burkina) is not afraid of challenging and confronting the government in his songs and is an active participant of the hip hop scene by managing his own recording studio in Ouaga. It is with poetry, conviction, talent and humor that these African rappers take their mike as well as their own fate into their hands each time they come up on the stage that the Ouga Hip Hop Festival offers them every year under the auspices of Ali Diallo, the soul of this event.