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“I am Maasai”: Interpreting ethnic parody in Bongo Flava

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 August 2010

Katrina Daly Thompson
Katrina Daly Thompson
Affiliation:
University of California, Los Angeles, Department of Applied Linguistics, BOX 951531, 3320 Rolfe Hall, Los Angeles, CA [email protected]
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Abstract

In the Tanzanian Bongo Flava youth music scene, Abel Motika is a popular artist who uses both verbal and visual markers of Kisongo Maasai ethnicity to style himself as “the Maasai rapper” with the stage name “Mr. Ebbo.” Through analysis of his 2002 song “Mi Mmasai” ‘I am Maasai’, this study investigates his ethnic stylizing in playful use of Maa pronunciation and an understudied Swahili language game known as kinyume ‘backwards style’. The study finds that while Ebbo strategically disrupts the sociolinguistic order that privileges Standard Swahili, the Maasai persona he projects is humorously stylized as unable both to speak Standard Swahili and to engage with the urban lifestyle associated with Tanzania's de-ethnicized Swahili modernity, thereby leaving dominant ideologies of language and ethnicity intact. Moreover, in arguing that Motika's stylization of ethnicity has a contradictory effect, both affirming a local ethnic identity and preserving the logic of ethnolinguistic stereotyping, the study critiques approaches to hip hop that privilige authorial intent and assume linguistic subversiveness. (Swahili, Maa, Bongo Flava, parody, ethnicity, rap, kinyume)*

Type
Articles
Information
Language in Society , Volume 39 , Issue 4 , September 2010 , pp. 493 - 520
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2010

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