Trinity International Hip Hop Festival Part Two: FangAfrika Movie Screening

After Angela Steele's presentation, there was a long break in the festival schedule. So I drove across town to the Mark Twain hostel and made sure I still had a room, then returned to Trinity in time for the screening of FangAfrika. FANGAFRIKA: La Voix des Sans-voix (The voice of the voiceless) is a documentary about the emerging West African hip-hop scene made by French filmmakers Guillaume Mouille and Renaud Lioult. The film was shown with English subtitles, and it follows various artists around West Africa leading up to the Ouagadougou hip-hop festival, which brings together Africa's best hip-hop stars once a year for a week long celebration of hip-hop culture.


Both directors of the film were on hand with Senegal artist Baay Musa for a question and answer session after the screening, and I had my camera set up to capture it. However, there were no microphones in use, so my camera couldn't pick up their voices as they spoke, but I did take away a few insights from the movie and the discussion. What struck me as the most fascinating about hip-hop in Africa were the reasons that artists chose hip-hop over other forms of music. To rap, all you need is a beat and a voice, the genre doesn't require expensive musical instruments or amplifiers. The closing credits of the movie exemplify this fact, as they show a group of West Africans sitting around a fire with a gourd. One man tapped out a rhythm lightly on the gourd, and each person took their turn laying lyrics on top of it. This scene demonstrated, more than any other scene in the movie, how the accessibility of hip-hop has broadened its appeal to anyone with access to a pad of paper and a pen.

There was one point in the discussion that also caught my attention. One of the chief organizers of the Trinity festival, alumni Magee McIlvaine, told the filmmakers how the design for the Trinity posters was inspired by the design of the posters for the Ouaga festival. The directors began to laugh, and they told Magee that they were actually the ones responsible for the design of the Ouaga posters. This demonstrated several things to me: First, globalization has allowed tight knit communities to form without regards to time or space, meaning that the Trinity organizers were very familiar with the Ouaga festival and its promotion. Second, and perhaps more importantly, it seems that like with Joshua Asen in Morocco, the motivating actors in these grass-roots movements do not come from the places they are trying to represent. Even though the Ouaga film festival is a celebration of West African hip-hop culture, it is only made possible with the influence of Americans and Europeans. Like with I Love Hip Hop in Morocco, after this film, I found myself wondering how honest FangAfrika's romantic depiction of African hip-hop really was.