ABSTRACT
This chapter offers a considered analysis of hip-hop youth culture in Dakar, Sénégal, using research data collected around key questions of young people’s creativity and commitment to social change. The discussion avoids suggesting a hierarchy of ‘culture’, ‘subculture’ and ‘counter-culture’. ‘Culture’ here means every ‘cultural system’ that manifests itself by patterns, existence, code, knowledge and anthropo-cosmological sphere (Morin 1984: 348). So this defi nition includes the ‘subculture’ or the ‘counter-culture’ lived by bboys. The term ‘bboy’ comes from break boy, Bronx boy, bad boy . . . a bboy is a young man who practises hip-hop, while the term fl y-girl is used specifi cally for young women. As the word bboys suggests, the hip-hop movement in this part of Francophone West Africa is a primarily masculine domain. Even while female MCs (Master of Ceremonies) and posses of fl y-girls such as Alif, Black Sista, Sista Fa, Fatim strive to emerge, the presence of girls is still somehow marginalized in the Dakar hip-hop movement (Niang 2001: 79-80; Car-Rap-Id 2005: 1-6). In the discussion that follows, the aim is to allow the reader to grasp the complexity of the hip-hop phenomenon in Dakar. A major question examined below is whether hybrid hip-hop youth culture in Sénégal constitutes a social movement for change.
