In late-Spring 2026, Tenement Press / No University Press will publish Richard Prins' Brain Flavour: A Lyric History of Swahili Hip-Hop, a feature-length, experimental documentary essay that examines the history of Swahili Hip-Hop and underground Tanzanian music cultures via first-hand encounters, interviews, and first-time translations of groundbreaking and movement-making songs and lyrics from the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. See here for a further word on this release. Prins and Tenement have committed to contributing a fee to each of the artists featured in Brain Flavour in respect of the integrity of their work and the lyrics Prins has translated exclusively for inclusion in this volume.

An independent small press project—a house for homeless ideas—Tenement calls on readers to help scaffold a collective effort to raise funds in support of Tanzanian underground artists, Hip-Hop collectives and musicians and in our endeavour to promote their work worldwide. All supporters will be listed in the forthcoming publication of Prins' Brain Flavour and—whatever you can offer, the little to the large—will make all the difference.

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See here for further information on the artists, collectives, and musicians spotlit in this publication, including Kwanza Unit, LWP Majitu, Suma G, Ferooz, BDP / Big Dog Posse, Afande Sele and Nash MC / Maalim Nash. All funds donated will be divided equally and in full between the artists featured in Prins' project.

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A word from your author, Richard Prins:

"This is, perhaps, an unlikely story. Imports of foreign cultural items were restricted during Tanzania's socialist period, so very few Tanzanians even knew hip-hop existed until the 1990s, during a devastating period of economic liberalisation. But Tanzania's culture still retained the idealistic and humanistic values of the Ujamaa period, an experiment in agrarian socialism spearheaded by Julius Nyerere, the nation's stubborn and visionary first president. Where American rappers represented the oppressed underclass of a racially divided society, Ujamaa had resolved many of Tanzania's tribal divisions, creating arguably the most politically amiable society in sub-Saharan Africa. Where American rappers had to function in a cutthroat, capitalist music industry that was well-versed in converting racist assumptions into obscene amounts of cash, the Tanzanian government during Ujamaa had subsidised big bands and promoted community-oriented lyrics. American rappers were pressured to abandon hip-hop's social principles in favour of the stereotypes that would make their music more marketable to white teenagers in the suburbs. Swahili rappers felt a different pressure; they sought to prove their music's social value to their elders, because that was how the prior generation of musicians had found success.

X Plastaz, Maasai Hip Hop

(Outhere Records, 2004) /

Album artwork, detail.

The first Swahili rap song ever recorded was a remix of Vanilla Ice’s one-hit-wonder ‘Ice Ice Baby.’ (That probably sounds absurd, but let us remember that ‘Ice Ice Baby’ sampled ‘Under Pressure,’ which was itself composed by Zanzibar native Farrokh Bolsara, better known by his stage name, Freddie Mercury.) The genesis of Swahili hip-hop is actually an uncanny homecoming, and Brain Flavour tells a fragmented and provisional version of that homecoming and the dynamic body of work that followed.

My involvement in Tanzania's hip-hop scene began in 2007, when I received an impromptu invitation to perform on stage with the popular singer Ferooz Mrisho. I later worked for a Dar es Salaam-based entertainment company that organised hip-hop festivals, as well as summits for musicians and industry stakeholders. I have published several personal essays that touch on these experiences [see Prins’ ‘Down and Up in Dar es Salaam,’ as published in Witness and, thereafter, listed as “Notable” [The Best American Travel Writing 2020]. But these essays were never more than tangential to the music itself; they did not examine its sound, its meaning, or its history. While I recognised that as a shortcoming, I also recognised that the genre of Swahili hip-hop would not be done justice by a simple personal essay. If I wanted to write about it meaningfully, that would require a much larger undertaking.

Kwanza Unit, circa 1994.

(Left to Right: KBC, D Rob, Fresh-G,

Y-Thang, Eazy B, Chief Rhymson.)

For the last few years, I have devoted most of my creative efforts to translating Swahili literature—classical poetry, and an Africanfuturist novel—and, when I showed fellow translators my translations of Swahili hip-hop lyrics, they politely suggested that the static page might not provide sufficient context for readers to appreciate translated lyrics as literary objects. One colleague imagined pairing the translations with interviews of the lyricists.

Indeed, it was after interviewing Sloter of the rap group L.W.P. Majitu that I finally envisioned how I might write about Swahili hip-hop. His experience in the genre's early years helped me see how Tanzanian rappers were translating American hip-hop into a Swahili cultural context. Although they idolised and consciously emulated American artists such as Tupac Shakur and members of the Wu-Tang Clan, their country’s unique postcolonial political history placed them in a social ecosystem that was in many ways the polar opposite of their American counterparts. During the summer of 2024, I was fortunate enough to conduct in-person interviews with over thirty pioneering Swahili rappers and producers, a body of oral history that animates this book and seeks to honour the oral art form that inspired it."

(Prins, 2025.)

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