The same shareable culture of syncretism that attracted the youth to these sites facilitated a transition from English raps to Twi raps by the competitors. The competitors were representing their schools and rap competitions became an extension of inter-school sports festivals. Students, past students and friends of the schools went to the rap sessions with the same competitive spirit
69 they approached the inter-school competition with and the winner could be carried shoulder high by his fans throughout the streets of Kumasi.
The competitors started having their own challenges and this was where the need for mental strength, presented earlier as a cultural interpretive cue, came in. They were now not allowed to sing songs by other artistes. Rapping in English came with its own challenges because the audience were expecting the rapper to represent his school in good English and whenever the rapper became a bit infelicitous with his language, you could hear from the rival audience, “webu”, meaning he had broken the neck of the language. The rival audience group would do everything to disturb the confidence of the one on stage to prepare a favourable ground for their representative. Again, in a city known for its links with traditional roots, the English language used on such an occasion to some of the students was an opportunity to express themselves as elites. The exercise was therefore a really thrilling one. Amidst these contestations and heckling from hostile audience members when the English language fell on the wrong side of pronunciation or grammar, the spirit of mental strength, inherited from the PNDC regime of Rawlings (Shillington, 1992) bubbled to the surface. The idea of the embattled artiste’s ability to weather the storm by facing his critics without being shaken added a lot of energy to such occasions. For example, Ras Kwesi revealed that when faced with such challenges, Shimole, one of the best contestants, would babble something like “The a to the b to the c to the d to the e” to tumultuous applause from the entire audience, including those who wanted to intimidate him. Shimole was advertising good performance here because there was a conceptual congruence between his performance and the performance situation and the embedded interpretive cue that created the performer-audience affinity was the show of mental strength; being tough. Ras Kwesi added that Shimole would continue to use such phrases repeatedly but he did it in a manner that would make one think that he had written a long rap. Such phrases too were devoid of
70 grammatical technicalities so his adversaries could have nothing against him any more. That was what hiplife was all about: being tough.
Other challenges included the fact that the rappers were beginning to sound too imitative. This, in addition to American English syntax, pronunciation and accent problems of the rappers started undermining what non aficionados would have described as excellent performance. American English rap, according to Wofjay, started losing its appeal and what made matters worse was the fact that it was becoming more and more difficult to select who was the best rapper. Meanwhile according to Okyeame Kwame, who was very active in such competitions, there was one rapper
from Takoradi who would add humour to his performance, singing “medze nkwasesŒm maaba,
nkwaseasŒm maaba…” (I have come to fool around), and he had a huge following. At this time, the
English competitions were becoming boring and the number of patrons was dwindling. The contribution of the competitor from Takoradi signalled to the organizers that Akan rap had the potential of pulling back the audience who were growing less enthusiastic. And as indicated earlier they and the DJs, notable among whom was Bombata, introduced it as a means of increasing the competitiveness of the competition and restoring in the audience the kind of enthusiasm they had at the beginning of the competitions. This was in 1991. Apart from appearance, composure and rap attitude, Twi rap became a major marking scheme for the judges and if you wanted to stay in the competition, you had better developed Akan rap which because of the locality had become mainly Twi rap. Again, the use of Twi, against the background of hip hop beat was another interpretive cue of modernity – the mixture of old and new. Most of the judges had sixth form education and had mastery in the English language. Some had even done Literature in English and Ghanaian language at the sixth form level and as indicated by Loving C in an interview, they were very interested in clarity in diction and poetic devices. Indeed, the judges’ marking scheme was based on the oral
71 structures of Ashanti traditional court poetry, as testified by Shipley in Living the hiplife. Their names - for example, Akyeame (the linguists), Nananom (the elders), Akatakyie (the nobles), all signifiers of expertise in the Akan court spoken language - indicated their affiliation to court poetry and constituted another cultural interpretive cue33.
This experiment yielded more than the desired expectation for apart from increasing the dwindling number of patrons to these competitions, it made the youth in Kumasi discover a kind of culture they could call their own, a situation very similar to the development of Azonto dance at the time of research. The concept of having an art they could call their own was yet another cultural interpretive cue. 34The Twi rap identity, later to be christened hiplife by Reggie Rockstone, constituted a space in which the complexity and the fluidity of youth’s contemporary urban experiential realities could be expressed. With the hip hop base thus broadened in Kumasi, Reggie’s initiative was hugely welcome to the rappers in Kumasi because they quickly moved onto the national platform and displayed the art they had been harnessing locally.35 This was why most of the early superstars of hiplife were from Kumasi.