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here by: Kwanele Sosibo
“You are dealing with heaven, while you are
walking through hell. When I say heaven, I don’t mean up in the clouds,
because heaven is no higher than your head and hell is no lower than
your feet.”
For a while, during our adolescence in the nineties, it felt like
hip-hop could answer all of life’s questions for us. While it evolved
spontaneously, it was nurtured by healthy doses of street corner
intellect and convergent esoterica to such an extent that relating to
hip-hop has often felt like relating to an all-knowing, all-powerful
being.
I had these thoughts dancing in my mind when I visited an old
acquaintance in a Craighall complex the other day. I remembered once,
almost ten years ago, riding wild in the streets of Joburg trying to
decipher his copy of Ghostface Killah’s woozy classic
Supreme Clientele.
Ghostface, a proclaimed adherent of the Five Percent Nation’s beliefs
(they believe that Allah is the physical black man – Arm, Leg, Leg, Arm,
Head), took language to extreme heights by melding the “supreme
alphabet” (a coded language based on ascribing meaning to each letter of
the alphabet) to his already heady, psychedelic street poems. That
album pretty much cemented his place as one of the culture’s premier
lyricists, even though much of his subject matter tread worn ground.
Today, Mfundisi Dlungu is a self-employed architect. When we do
reminisce about hip-hop’s importance, it is with the distance and
objectivity of hindsight, and arguments about who is the “freshest” are
underscored by an existential urgency.
Seated on opposite ends of a work desk in his lounge, Dlungu – an
athletic figure in a pale yellow shirt, cream jeans and white
cross-trainers – cues tracks on his iPad as we chew the fat on our
favourite subject. “What made me check for it [hip-hop] was that they
were saying that Islam was a religion for the black man, and not
Christianity,” says Dlungu. Emerging from the kitchen, he places drinks
on wooden coasters and continues. “But when I checked both of these
religions, neither belonged to us. So how could we, as Africans, lay
claim to something that is not ours?”
Dlungu, a “Christian by default” who never goes to church, adds that
it was the mixed messages that led him to doubt hip-hop as a catalyst to
spiritual awakening. “Even these cats who were representing that Five
Percent thing, they were still about drinking 40 ounces [a measure of
beer]. How are you gonna be a Muslim if you’re drinking and fucking
whores?” he asks rhetorically. “There wasn’t consistency in what they
were saying. In terms of spirituality, the only thing I found in hip-hop
was “keeping it real”. Do you! That was the only thing more than the
religious part of it because that was a mess…”
Today, the idea of keeping it real is something of a laughing stock
in hip-hop. It is an antiquated concept based on keeping your subject
matter congruous with your daily reality. Nevertheless, it did bestow on
Dlungu a strong template for forming his own identity. Today, he still
speaks in “golden era” hip-hop slang laced with expletives but without
the requisite accent as he dissects the culture’s sinister materialism.
“Who can relate to holding money and just throwing it out there, unless
you are a stupid motherfucker,” he says in reference to a standard
image in mainstream hip-hop videos. “Even if I was to make my money I
still couldn’t relate to that. You can relate to Shaq saying ‘my
biological didn’t bother’. It just inspired me to be an individual.”
