Baqi and I flew for what felt like a week. Portland to SFO, to JFK, to Istanbul, to Kilimanjaro, then after finding out Baqi’s checked bag didn’t make it we went on to catch a taxi the village of Embaseni, 35 minutes from Arusha.
We stayed at the UAACC hosted by MamaC and Mzee Pete O’neal.
This is the 2nd year UAACC has hosted us in AHC.
We had a day to chill before the comrades from Soundz of the South arrived from Cape Town.
Then the official activities began.
We hooked up with Biggie and others from SUA (Save the Underground Artists) in town and saw their new office as well as got a run down of local developments within the Hip Hop factions locally and SUA’s own growing vision of self sustainability through Hip Hop.
One branch of the local scene is held down by Flex and his crew at the Stage ya Heshima venue and recording studio. Producers, emcees, beatmakers hone their craft here at open mics in a well ventilated concrete structure with colorful murals and burners, full peices, floor to ceiling.
This is the venue we will rock tomorrow.
Baqi and Anele from Cape Town stay along with Mama C and other local artists and hold down a panel on the relevance of Hip Hop and the gulf between commercial aspirations and Community Control.
While they did that Daz took Khusta and I to the radio station and we did interviews along with with emcee Ralph. We all freestyled and talked about the Caravan.
That was day 1.
Day two:
We went to Heshema, sat at the venue from beginning to end, ran an errand or two around bustling Arusha. This city is about 2 million according to a local.
I lost count of how many local emcees associated with the S.U.A. crew actually tore the stage to shreds that day. It was something to behold and a familiar feature of African Hip Hop slams. Muliple emcees rocking throughout the day as the audience grown in size and the light shifts and fades into evening as the sun arcs.
Khusta and I did our set together followed by Baqi.
The energy was intense, all audience members dancing, sweating, shouting, fully engaged!
Nairobi:
This is the second week of the Caravan and it was anticpated with some anxiety on Khusta and my part due to last year's challenges in Nairobi. Nairobi is big, bustling, fast paced and full of expensive transactions.
This year proved to have a new pitfall as local police threatened to put us (me really) in jail for not having a passport on my person as a colleauge took a photo of a building at night. It was the day the pope left and terrorist hype is always an issue here. That became the justification for extorting $40.00 form me so that we could get on wth our night out. Welcome to Nairobi.
The second night, Sturday, included a house party in a soon to be vacant mansion. There were a lot of children of diplomats and more muzungus (white people) than I've seen since we were in Portland 2 weeks ago.
We rocked our sets combined as we had done in Arusha, Baqi, Khusta and I. The party was organized by Bad Mambo Productions and was a combination of Techno, dub step, EDM, Jungle and so forth. When we rocked a 45 minute combined Hip Hop set in the middle, it was dope and the crowd loved it. Good times on our second night in the big city.
The next day we went to the Write Flow event in Kariabanghi South. K-South is a slum in the East Ends section of Nairobi. It was raining everyday we were there so the unpaved craters in the road filled with muddy water as matatus (public transit shuttles packed to the brim) broke down in a wet muddy gridlock. To me it was a marvelous chaos but to Nairobi, this is normal.
It took 45 minutes to reach K-South and the Write Flow event. This city is big.
Once there, Levie and Imor greeted us and we got to watch some of the finest emcees in the area perform. We also did a short set on a concrete court with a roofed area and open walls, surrounded by full graffiti peices on metal surfaces.
We met the brothers from K-Pac which means K-South Republicans, last year when their live band hosted us at the British Council in Nairobi for AHC 2014.
It was good to come see their community this time.
KPAC comrades built a library on a school bus in the ghetto.
Its evident in every community that hosts the Afrikan Hiphop Caravan that this kind of work is happening. It was only after this library was built that weekly Hip Hop slams emerged in the surrounding outdoor venue that was built. Young artists from the community have a positive place to learn, express themselves and grow. This is the spirit that moves the Caravan. This is what its really all about and its bigger than Hip Hop.
We stayed up all night recording and caught the 8am bus to Arusha.
Nairobi 2015 was a success. It will be better next year.
Back to Arusha to chill for a couple of days. We wanted to walk with the recordings we did this year, with the raw files for me to mix them and have them mastered here in the U.S. Every time I went to the studio to gather the files, there was a power outage. Looks like we'll again have to deal with the challenges of exchanging files through the internet.
Our flights from Arusha to Harare were hell. Made the flight from Kilimanjaro (30 minutes from Arusha by road) to Dar Es Salaam no problem.
In Dar we had a 12 hour lay over in a hot airport. It sucked. I'm not going to bore you with details but its not often easy to travel from country to country in Africa and getting across borders can be very stressful. It feels at times as if the difficulty of movement that the colonials placed on Africans has been maintained by the gate keepers and bureaucrats at the posts. Any post having to do with mobility, finance, documentation and the like can be an excercise in futility, stamina and not completely melting down under the stress of seemingly unecessary inefficiency. It is through these trials that one gets in touch with their reptile brain as anger and frustration surface and inevitably we question our own conditioning, baggage and expectations. We need a world without borders. For the sake of people who deserve freedom.
Harare has been hit hard by sanctions in the years since Zimbabawe's idependence and the subsequent nationalisation of formerly white owned farmland.
Infrastructure. Poverty. Despite economic challenges that effect the everyday life of people on the ground, Zim thrives culturally.
We had a number of great events here organized by Biko and his community partners. Jubilika Dance competition to raise HIV/AIDS awareness was heavily attended by youth. The dancing was some of the best B boying, B girling, poppoijng, crumping, freestyling anywhere. We rocked a young crowd here and they appreciated the consciousness of the music. We hung with Dizzy Don and his crew at the Lion Cheetah Park as we shot a video for a song we recorded on last year's Caravan. Late night performances with the Chi Town Dancehall crowd was an added bonus. Chi Town is a large Black suburban township.