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Hip-hop Gets Serious
Loading ...Sister Fa turned to music to protest at injustices towards women in her home country of Senegal. She explains why she was born to be a rebel.
Sister Fa remembers the time she returned home late from one of her early hip-hop shows in Senegal. She was living with her uncle, who, like many men in her culture, took a dim view of her chosen career path. “They called me the worst woman in the house who wouldn’t do anything and would go outside and dress like a man,” she frowns. “It was quite hard.
In Senegal, the woman’s place is in the kitchen, to stay at home, to cook food, to wash clothes. Promoters don’t take female rappers seriously because they don’t want to invest in their careers. They say that after they’re married they’ll have children and just stay at home. Then the families – they always complain.”
This whiff of sexism only helped to motivate the 27-year-old, who embodies the effortless sass of B-girl with revolutionary ambitions – and she admits that her decision to join hip-hop’s mannish culture was a radical one. “I was born a rebel because there’s so much injustice in my country,” says the budding star, born Fatou Mandiang Diatta, and who now lives in Germany.
“I wanted to talk about the conditions of the women in Senegal – they work a lot and they suffer, just to give something to their children to eat. But no one was really interested in talking about these things. For me, hip-hop was the music I could use to complain and bring out all of this energy I had inside and to talk about all of these injustices so people can be aware of what’s happening in this country. It was only hip-hop that I could use to educate and to talk about all of these problems.”
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