Hip hop has been popular in Africa since the early 1980s due to widespread American influence. The first hip-hop group from Africa was Black Noise, a group from Cape Town, South Africa. They began as a graffiti and breakdance crew until they started emceeing around 1989. The government of South Africa's apartheid era tried to ban rap due to its part in the struggle for the freedom of all races. Later the government made hip-hop legal in 1993 by playing rap music on radio and rap videos on T.V.
In 1985 hip-hop reached Senegal, a French-speaking country in West Africa. Some of the first Senegalese rappers were M.C. Lida, M.C. Solaar, and Positive Black Soul, who mixed rap with Mbalax, a type of music that has been played in West Africa for centuries. During the late 1980s-early 1990s rap started to escalate all over Africa. Each region had a new type of style of hip-hop like South Africankwaito.
These are some of the African rappers that are known:
Africanrap in Belgium - definition of Africanrap in Belgium in Encyclopedia
Belgium, like France controlled African countries like the Democratic Republic of the Congo (formerly Zaire), Rwanda, and Burundi until the early 1960s.
In the Flemisch north Dutch speaking/rapping groups like 't Hof van Commerce, St Andries MC's and ABN were popular, rapping in their regional dialects.
Historically, Africans (in the Diaspora) have relied on individuals who are talented in the transmission of ideas or feelings in the oral tradition as sources of information and inspiration.
Both rap and blues praise the hero outsmarting the oppressive establishment, male sexual prowess and frequently catalogue internal as well as the external sources of social problems plaguing their communities of residence.
The African American working class and poor were concentrated in larger numbers first by their desire to be a community and second by deliberate social marginalization plans of city governments.