COMMENTING ON THE ORIGIN OF RAP MUSIC IN THE USA AND ITS ROOTS

COMMENTING ON THE ORIGIN OF RAP MUSIC IN USA as having it roots in Scottish bars and not in AFRICA and Lady Wiyba Bin of Nso Kingdom.

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In Africa of the past and even hitherto Rap Music was like an open window of freedom of speech in a house where such was heavily censured.

We will dispute the above theory as slaves were not allowed to even learn the proper language (Europhone) of the slave masters (Whites), the only book they were grudgingly allowed to own was the Holy Bible. They were forced to keep their distance from their white masters and mistresses who regarded them as animals and were ever suspicious of them. A statement like this one below from Vernon Harcourt, M.P. in 1862 telling you of the relationship of the Negroes and the Whites in some of the cases is no coincidence or work of fiction: "It is provoking that  the Lancashire places should have gone so wrong. I take it to mean nothing else but hatred of the Irish, who like the niggers are most hated where they are best known." (Citing from The Life of Sir William Harcourt by A. G. Gardiner published in 1923 by Constable and Company Ltd. 

There was no open cordial relationship whereby they could be taught poetry, rap and other disciplines. The reasoning was that the language of the Caucasians was like a tool for liberation which if Africans mastered; they were going to use as a platform to stand on to demand their liberty. What most were allowed to master was smattering necessary for taking orders. Therefore to talk of Africans Americans having learned rap from Caucasians of the past without authentications is utterly unfounded and far-fetched. We will be interested in reading those isolated cases. Come to think of it, we have to authenticate our oration with nothing else but scientific facts. There is no question of sensationalized journalese of the type used by false politicians who wants to woo votes from unexposed bucolic folks.

In the past slaves were constantly transferred from one plantation or factory to another and very few were allowed to have steady families that you take for granted today. Slave masters deprived them of their languages (Africaphone) they brought from Africa as a way of breaking them down so that they could not secretly plan a revolts against them. They were raped of their African names and enforced Greco –Judea, Roman and Arabic names that meant nothing to them. However, one thing is clear, run-away slaves maroons kept their African traditions or singing and rapping and would sing their songs and rapped often as a way of transmitting coded messages incomprehensible to their masters and for entertainment. 

Those who could not run away as in those in the southern USA, when given the least time for recess and when away from their hawkish masters who treated them poorly, improvised and reminisced entertainments as back in mother Africa  by rapping. There were stories or poetry committed to memory.

What we adumbrate has nothing to do with fomenting hatred of the type we saw after the shooting by a white police officer of Michael Brown of Ferguson, Missouri last year (2014).  It is for our records. My family is blue black living in a sea of whites.  Any hatred of the modern whites or their hatred of blacks for their blue black color will take us no where but will create racial problems and heighten our idiocy and naivety. Remember that it was alleged in the days of slavery that one white was equal to eight Africans. (From their travel as exemplified by the photograph below, I may safely, laughing out loudly (lol) state four).  It tells you how low Africans were looked down upon. Was that true? We are looking into history now as African Americans fought hard with blood, sweat and tears to gain equality of races and they are marching forward with the first African American President Elect, Barack Obama who if given a modicum of chance could do phenomenal positive things for all irrespective of their scientific contributions in the world and colors of their skin. 

Comfortable mode of travelling into the interior of Africa After The South and East African Year Book and Guide for 1924.

Destructive past must be shelved so long as we have learned from it. We perceive a bright future, a beacon of hope of all races around one table is in the horizon.With persistent demonstration against deliberate or inadvertent shooting of African Americans, the message of equality and prayers to God to have mercy is loud and clear and one day we will have if we persist imploring amicably as Dr. Martin Luther King and Mahatma Gandhi advocated. Only a hardened person will not show remorse when a police man is killed by any person the police man is meant to protect or when a black unarmed African American child is killed by a police man. 

We recall in Great Britain where once upon a time the police was only armed with a whistle, a notebook and a truncheon. With all those alone, Great Britain was able to rule USA, including her empire. Why of a sudden do we believe that we can do better with guns when we had done well before without them?  In those days and as recently as in the 1980s, to strike or fire at a police man was rear and unheard of. If such was done it was considered a travesty and sacrilege and the defaulter was handled accordingly. If  there was an absolute need for shooting, say a mad man causing bodily harm, a special squat trained in the use of fire arms was summoned from the head office. In that case gun accidents were rare and far between. The police man was not and still should not be a bogeyman but a welcoming jolly good fellow that could knock and visit our dwellings at any time to ensure that we were all in peace and not in pieces. 

A police man polices because of us and often we live to tell our tales because of him. By virtue of his work, we should never turn our backs on him or he should never turn his back on us or some of our leaders.

Policemen in the capital city of Great Britain , London. Black and White British Police officers are no longer rare but they are there as a reflection of the multiracial new Britain.

Without being carried away by the interminable racist debacle often of our making,  prior to the blossoming of raps of recent in the West, rap music was and had been in Africa since time immemorial. Those readers who have done ethnomusicology will know that African history was essentially oral tradition. One of the ways to pass information from one generation to the next was via raps and sometimes folklore narration. It was therefore passed with ease and easily recapitulated by listeners since most of the composers injected in them natural rhyming schemes that were easily learned. We will see below that the Scots were no strangers to the Moors (Maurists), Africans who were employed in Scotland and even England to work in the courts of the earls, lords and royalties and would rap to entertain them.

Those of you from Nso Kingdom in Western Africa will recall the remarkable heroine, Lady Wiyba Bin. She was a royal composer, singer and rapper. Apart from that she was the first known single parent in that Kingdom. She decided that she would not marry as was in vogue and that was considered unique and rebellious. Apart from that Lady Bin never ever entered the four walls of a Western class room and was not fluent in English till she left this earth in the 1990s. She had never heard of American raps, yet she had been rapping since the fifties in her native Kingdom when Americans were exporting a different kind of music to Africa, country, classical and rock-and-roll music. Do you sincerely believe that she learned her marvelous chants and rapping from the Scottish bars in Scotland and translated into her vernacular, Lamnso? Rumors circulated by some readers who always want to get credit for all that sold, that rap started by the Scots in their bars. Can an Nsonite really buy this? If it did, from our allusion, the Scots learned from the Maurs who were Africans. Then they had better dwelt into its history rather than falsify it. 

You will recall that traditional African set up was not book-learned; even hitherto one way of passing information is by word of mouth. That is why the cell phone business that is not up to ten years old is perhaps the fastest growing industry after brewery and agriculture in that continent. When I look at the globe after publishing my articles, they are read in all corners of the world and not in Africa. What we have seen that Africans are perhaps innately oral and not book learned manifest itself. Or is it because they cannot afford Internet facilities? That is a different topic. 

For those of you who understand Lingala spoken in central Africa, Nso, Tiv, Hausa in North Nigeria and Niger, Yoruba, Igbo, and Shona, languages some colonialists derogatorily called dialects, griots (street singers) who sang the praises of very important personalities (VIPS), and criticize certain developments in the communities used raps in those languages. They covered their ears as they rapped current affairs, epic stories and so on. Where the local authorities did something that was disputed, elderly women rapped in the public to demonstrate their disapproval. There were no Wall Street Journal, The Times, Telegraph, Evening Standard of the Economist. It will be recalled that sporadic or organized demonstration you have in North America and other democratic states was out of question. Rap became a natural way of voicing out grievances. In a good number of autocratic states in Africa, the only voices trumpeting injustice are those of the musicians who are essentially rappers. Journalists are locked up, sent into exile or destroyed. In some cases musicians are the only ones who dare and many pay for it heavily be being incarcerated in dungeons by the government of the day. 

Having made these observations, I am not insinuating that there were never isolated demonstrations of Western type. Where it was absolutely necessary, people gathered and send an emissary to their regulatory societies in their capital cities and thus to the authorities of their kingdoms. There are cases of women marching in their birthday suits for miles to report maltreatment by men or certain rules that contradicted their traditional values they had guarded for centuries. Today, some dictators met these marches with brutal forces, shooting and rap is still the only media to report injustice, human rights.

With rapping one had all the freedom to criticize, suggested solutions and even obloquy and one was never prosecuted. In Africa Rap Music was like an open window of freedom of speech in a house where such was heavily censured or not permitted. Some of this was before Europeans came to Africa with evil or good intentions, slave trade and colonialism. Rap is still very strong in the traditional Africa set ups as some governments fight for their survival and not those of its people. Their governments are not for the people, therefore they are ever awry. They have to be by the people. 

We challenge readers to visit central Africa, western and the Horn of Africa with a tape to listing to traditional rap of those who are not educated in the Western sense of education accompanied by maddening drumming. Their sort of rapping is unique and you are going to connect with the rap as in down town clubs in Chicago, LA, NY, Georgia, Philadelphia, New Orleans, South London, Paris, etc. and in Europe. Rap is not confined to Africa, Europe and North America where there are social upheavals. It is now common in other Asian countries. Watch Bollywood, Indian films and you will have a strong influence from rappers from Africa and USA. You will know that Africans were also exported in the past to India and other SE Asian countries. They carried along their cultures synonymous to what you have in North America. 

To reiterate, it should be stated that the Scots learned from the Maurs (Africans) who were taken to Scotland to serve the gentries, lords, kings and queens before the dreadful episode in human history of Africa slave trade ever started. (For those interested readers who want to be in terms with me, I would suggest they read the biography of Francis Drake, the official pirate of Queen Elizabeth I.) These Maurs sometimes written Moors were already brought in to the UK, particularly by the Scottish sailors before the dreadful Queen Elizabeth I started her ban on miscegenation and stop the importation of Africans into the UK by falsely claiming that Africans who were essentially domestics and musicians were to pollute and debase the purity of the Anglo-Saxons. Was that true? That is a different story but I have brought this to put a period when Africans were respected as excellent musicians in Scotland and the Scots might have copied from these Maurs (Africans) rapping techniques. I am not saying that there were no poetry, lyricists from Scotland. The English poetry is enriched by Scottish writers. 

A typical Maur or Moor. This was an elite from today's region of Senegal or Mauritania as found in the national Gallery UK. He wrote and rapped.  His garb as in this portrait is still donned by natives of this region.

If one is linking the passing of rap by the Scots it had to be disputed for the following facts: If the Scots who immigrated to the USA and became slavers might have passed rapping to their slaves! Again that is disputed for some of the reasons we earlier underlined. As earlier said, we doubt this for “superior slave owners” were not even allowed to teach the slaves music or any other knowledge that would make them be respectable and get out of their alleged animalistic realm. For those still doubting this, see the outline on the breaking down of a slave by Willie Lynch in H.J. Harris book: IS AMERICA RACIST? 2008. Also, Africans were used to epic poetry as in Francis Babe's rendering: AFRICAN MUSIC: A PEOPLE'S ART (1975).

Many persons had even been trying to dispute the fact that African Americans did not teach European Caucasians rock and roll. The fact is that if African Americans were not there, there would not have been any rock and roll that we take its proliferation now for granted. The white music was essentially country music and classical  stuff that is often associated with the slaves from Africa who ended up in Persia that later on spread to Europe. That is a different story. Many a great Caucasians musicians as Eric Clapton, Bob Dylan, …do admit that they are indebted to Africans for the music they play, introduced in North America by African Americans, descendants of erstwhile African slaves. 

We should have peace at home

And all things would go right

If those who made the quarrels

Were the only ones to fight.

If rock-and-roll is innately African, why would you doubt that rap is not inherently African or came from Africa? Europeans wrote plays, poetry and recite poetry and acted plays.  Old literate as we have from Chaucer, Jonathan Swift, William Shakespeare, etc, support these facts, and then it was not a way of life as in Africa that was essentially not book-learned as in European communities where many noted events and incidents by committing them into memory. We do not suggest here that whites did not commit most of the events into memory. The above rhyming scheme was song in England and one did not need to write it before singing it so are plenty of songs football revelers chant when maddened by football excitement.  

You will remember that printed writing as we know today blossomed with the invention of what was then known as artificial writing by Johann Gutenberg (1394-1468). All had to be painstakingly written by calligraphers and not all could afford any book published in that format. Not many could afford to have governors to teach them and many were illiterates and had to memorize certain events or interesting poems and songs. Thus many relied on words of mouth for communication as in Africa too. This goes to support the fact that poetry and rapping were also born locally and not necessarily imported or copied from other communities.  Even when there was writing as in the days of Prime Minister Wilson Churchill (the 1930s-40s), he preferred to write his speeches way in advance of when they were be delivered in the House of Commons, cram them before reciting them. Many gave him credit for being a good orator but they did not know his trick of writing and cramming all to recite as if reading from a text book. He was usually caught off guard, with his pants down when asked to give extemporaneous speeches. 

The truth is that many a Caucasians have invented lots of things (so did many an Africans and other races too) and we give them credit for these achievements. These are undisputed facts. When it comes to rapping as rapped by African Americans it originated from Mother Africa. Let no one not try to take away this from Africans by uplifting spurious underpinnings. Watch out for those as Dr. J. Watson who in 2008 told lies to feel good when with his neurosis and nervousness as once stated by Adolf Hitlers without a shred of evidence, that the IQ of whites was higher than that of Africans and their descendants and other non-blue-eyed peoples. That is a different story that was hotly debated and his allegation refuted and filed. Whatever the case, let no one of whatever color try to bamboozle Africans in this century by falsely putting them down as was in the past without scientific proofs or concrete evidence. Scientifically, all human being are the same and there is no question of one being superior to the other. If the first man created or evolved, call it what you like in Africa, on whose dais would you stand on to state that the first tradition as rap came from outside Africans and not from Africans? Man is one and what an aborigine can do in Australia can be done by a Russian. There should be no doubt but there are certain things and Icelander will do better because of his unique climatic and geographical factors. I have admitted other inventions or traditions but when it comes to music and a plethora of musical instruments, no matter how “primitive”, a good number of them originated from Africa.