James McBride is a Distinguished Writer in Residence at New York University as well as a successful author and musician. McBride has worked as a staff writer for the Washington Post, People Magazine, and the Boston Globe and has had articles published in Essence, Rolling Stone, and the New York Times. His novel The Color of Water (2004) appeared on the New York Times bestseller list for over two years. His compositions for musical theater have earned him the Stephen Sondheim Award and the Richard Rodgers Foundation Horizon Award. In this selection from “Hip-Hop Planet,” first published in National Geographic in April 2007, McBride traces the cultural roots of hip-hop music.

AS YOU READ: Identify the relationship between hip-hop and African culture.

1

You breathe in and breathe out a few times and you are there. Eight hours and a wake-up shake on the flight from New York, and you are on the tarmac in Dakar, Senegal. Welcome to Africa. The assignment: Find the roots of hip-hop. The music goes full circle. The music comes home to Africa. That whole bit. Instead it was the old reporter’s joke: You go out to cover a story and the story covers you. The stench of poverty in my nostrils was so strong it pulled me to earth like a hundred-pound ring in my nose. Dakar’s Sandaga market is full of “local color” — unless you live there. It was packed and filthy, stalls full of new merchandise surrounded by shattered pieces of life everywhere, broken pipes, bicycle handlebars, fruit flies, soda bottles, beggars, dogs, cell phones. A teenage beggar, his body malformed by polio, crawled by on hands and feet, like a spider. He said, “Hey brother, help me.” When I looked into his eyes, they were a bottomless ocean.

2

The Hotel Teranga is a fortress, packed behind a concrete wall where beggars gather at the front gate. The French tourists march past them, the women in high heels and stonewashed jeans. They sidle° through downtown Dakar like royalty, haggling in the market, swimming in the hotel pool with their children, a scene that resembles Birmingham, Alabama, in the 1950s — the blacks serving, the whites partying. Five hundred yards (460 meters) away, Africans eat off the sidewalk and sell peanuts for a pittance.° There is a restlessness, a deep sense of something gone wrong in the air.

3

The French can’t smell it, even though they’ve had a mouthful back home. A good amount of the torching of Paris suburbs in October 2005 was courtesy of the children of immigrants from former French African colonies, exhausted from being bottled up in housing projects for generations with no job prospects. They telegraphed the punch in their music — France is the second largest hip-hop market in the world — but the message was ignored. Around the globe, rap music has become a universal expression of outrage, its macho pose borrowed from commercial hip-hop in the U.S.

4

In Dakar, where every kid is a microphone and turntable away from squalor,° and American rapper Tupac Shakur’s° picture hangs in market stalls of folks who don’t understand English, rap is king. There are hundreds of rap groups in Senegal today. French television crews troop in and out of Dakar’s nightclubs filming the kora harp lute and tama talking drum° with regularity. But beneath the drumming and the dance lessons and the jingling sound of tourist change, there is a quiet rage, a desperate fury among the Senegalese, some of whom seem to bear an intense dislike of their former colonial rulers. “We know all about French history,” says Abdou Ba, a Senegalese producer and musician. “We know about their kings, their castles, their art, their music. We know everything about them. But they don’t know much about us.”

5

Assane N’Diaye, 19, loves hip-hop music. Before he left his Senegalese village to work as a DJ in Dakar, he was a fisherman, just like his father, like his father’s father before him. Tall, lean, with a muscular build and a handsome chocolate face, Assane became a popular DJ, but the equipment he used was borrowed, and when his friend took it back, success eluded him. He has returned home to Toubab Dialaw, about 25 miles (40 kilometers) south of Dakar, a village marked by a huge boulder, perhaps 40 feet (12 meters) high, facing the Atlantic Ocean.

6

About a century and a half ago, a local ruler led a group of people fleeing slave traders to this place. He was told by a white trader to come here, to Toubab Dialaw. When he arrived, the slavers followed. A battle ensued. The ruler fought bravely but was killed. The villagers buried him by the sea and marked his grave with a small stone, and over the years it is said to have sprouted like a tree planted by God. It became a huge, arching boulder that stares out to sea, protecting the village behind it. When the fishermen went deep out to sea, the boulder was like a lighthouse that marked the way home. The Great Rock of Toubab Dialaw is said to hold a magic spirit, a spirit that Assane N’Diaye believes in.

7

In the shadow of the Great Rock, Assane has built a small restaurant, Chez Las, decorated with hundreds of seashells. It is where he lives his hip-hop dream. At night, he and his brother and cousin stand by the Great Rock and face the sea. They meditate. They pray. Then they write rap lyrics that are worlds away from the bling-bling culture° of today’s commercial hip-hoppers. They write about their lives as village fishermen, the scarcity of catch forcing them to fish in deeper and deeper waters, the hardship of fishing for 8, 10, 14 days at a time in an open pirogue° in rainy season, the high fee they pay to rent the boat, and the paltry price their catches fetch on the market. They write about the humiliation of poverty, watching their town sprout up around them with rich Dakarians and richer French. And they write about the relatives who leave in the morning and never return, surrendered to the sea, sharks, and God.

8

The dream, of course, is to make a record. They have their own demo, their own logo, and their own name, Salam T. D. (for Toubab Dialaw). But rap music represents a deeper dream: a better life. “We want money to help our parents,” Assane says over dinner. “We watch our mothers boil water to cook and have nothing to put in the pot.”

9

He fingers his food lightly. “Rap doesn’t belong to American culture,” he says. “It belongs here. It has always existed here, because of our pain and our hardships and our suffering.”

10

On this cool evening in a restaurant above their village, these young men, clad in baseball caps and T-shirts, appear no different from their African-American counterparts, with one exception. After a dinner of chicken and rice, Assane says something in Wolof to the others. Silently and without ceremony, they take every bit of the leftover dinner — the half-eaten bread, rice, pieces of chicken, the chicken bones — and dump them into a plastic bag to give to the children in the village. They silently rise from the table and proceed outside. The last I see of them, their regal figures are outlined in the dim light of the doorway, heading out to the darkened village, holding on to that bag as though it held money.

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