The African HipHop Movement: Y'en a Marre's Political Model

In the African post‐colonial context plagued by corruption and authoritarianism, Senegal's relative success and stability is noteworthy. Nevertheless, its democratic ranking, as measured by international NGOs, fluctuates. The Senegalese Spring: Y'en a Marre, HipHop, and Democracy in Senegal, the book manuscript I am developing from my dissertation, is an ethnographic exploration of one of the continent's foundational HipHop communities that details the concrete ways HipHop culture functions as a crucial sphere of civic engagement and transnational affiliation committed to the innovative transformation of governance in Africa. U.S. and global HipHop studies recognize the political potential of HipHop culture, but in Senegal this potential is being realized on an unprecedented scale. Senegalese youth have used HipHop to forge a multifaceted movement that swayed two presidential elections, in 2000 and again in 2012, and expand the scope of political discourse to include the concerns of a large formerly excluded segment of the population. Y'en a Marre is widely celebrated in journalistic and academic accounts as a youth movement that successfully changed a presidency. But despite this broad coverage and general praise, Y'en a Marre's politics have not been closely examined. Both critique and praise of the movement have proceeded based on face‐value evaluations of the movement's discourse that takes its politics to be self‐evident. However, I argue that Y'en a Marre's political language was more a strategic deployment of reigning respectable discourses of social engagement than a coherent account of its actual politics. This presentation will provide a close reading of Y'en a Marre's discourse together with its activism to excavate the implicit ideological commitments underpinning the movement. In doing so I uncover the movement's radical democratic tendencies. I will show that by rejecting overtures to join the new regime in the wake of Wade's defeat, Y'en a Marre transcends the business as usual model. Instead, they have embarked on an ambitious program of grassroots democracy. Rejecting the top down models of their postcolonial Pan‐African heroes, Y'en a Marre aims for change from below. While seemingly unintelligible along the lines of traditional politics which critics understand as ultimately about installing a president in accordance with partisan interests, Y'en a Marre claims to be pushing for something different. Y'en a Marre both discursively promote and actively model grassroots democracy. This is most evidenced in their bottom up approach to projects as funneled and facilitated through the “trickle‐up” model of Y'en a Marre's regional and semi‐autonomous local organizations (which they call “Minds”). The minimal doctrine, structure, or restrictions imposed by the central committee (the “Hardcore”) allows the Minds to be flexible, innovative, and communally responsive. Their commitment to involving “the people in the destiny of the country,” as proclaimed in the declaration of March 19th 2011, continues to motivate their projects into 2016. Whether it will ultimately be transformative remains to be seen, but in the most optimistic light Y'en a Marre is working on developing a bottom up approach to democratic reform, creating innovative new structures and promoting proactive participation by the most marginalized masses to increase accountability.