Hip Hop And Religion

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?”

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