ABSTRACT
Gambella, the capital town of Gambella Peoples’ Region in western Ethiopia, has a lively local music production scene. Despite poor access to the latest technology and frequent power outages in the area, local musicians record new tracks regularly and share the audio files with their community. Some of the most popular genres these artists use include global Black genres, mainly hip-hop, reggae and Afrobeats. This chapter explores how artists from Gambella and bordering South Sudan intentionally and unintentionally adapt these genres according to the local aesthetics, personal experiences and concerns of their communities. Lyrically, artists adapt these genres to speak to the immediate concerns of their community, most notably advising towards Ethiopian patriotism and unity among ethnic groups in Gambella and South Sudan between whom relations are tense. The transnational associations with global Black genres make them convenient vehicles through which artists can speak across tense ethnic lines. The author cautions how Western scholars should avoid mapping a political Black consciousness onto people from other parts of the world who have different lived experiences, as comments regarding Black musical genres and racial solidarity were quite rare at the time of her fieldwork (2016−2019). She shows that artists who have travelled to other African countries or the United States were more likely to talk about hip-hop in relation to Blackness than artists who have spent most of their lives in Gambella, and concludes that the significance and meanings of these music genres are multiple, contingent, and subject to change based on current circumstances.
