Policy Paper
Strengthening cultural infrastructure for African hip-hop: lessons from the twenty-five-year circulation of Hali Halisi
Authors: AK, Editor, London, UK & J4 (Thomas Gesthuizen), Amsterdam, Netherlands
1. Introduction
Hali Halisi, Swahili for “the real situation,” is a thirty-minute documentary filmed in June 1999 in Dar es Salaam and Zanzibar. Directed by Martin Meulenberg, with research by Thomas Gesthuizen and produced by the Dutch Madunia Foundation in association with the Scherpenzeel Media Foundation, the film documents how Tanzanian youth used rap as a medium for social and political expression, featuring Mr II (Sugu), Deplowmatz, Gangwe Mobb, and X Plastaz, among others.¹
Its circulation over the twenty-five years since production – from local television to international festival competition to major U.S. research archives – makes visible both the strength of African hip-hop as a cultural form and the absence of the institutional systems that would normally develop alongside a movement of this scale. This paper uses the film’s reception history to identify those gaps and propose steps to close them.
2. Screening history
The film first reached Tanzanian audiences in 2001, screening at the Zanzibar International Film Festival (ZIFF) and broadcasting on ITV, with clips shared through the web portal Aka.com.² Internationally, it screened at the Vancouver International Hip Hop Film Festival in 2004, then won Best Short Documentary at New York’s H2O (Hip Hop Odyssey) Film Festival on 7 November 2004. In April 2006 it appeared in the Hip-Hop 4 Reel series at Filmfest DC in Washington DC, programmed alongside La Fabri-K: The Cuban Hip Hop Factory (dir. Lisandro Perez-Rey, 2004) as part of a comparative international programme on hip-hop as political and social medium.³
In January 2026, the film was screened at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in Harlem as part of the “Black on Screen: Mapping the Transnational Hip-Hop Revolution” programme, sourced from the Hip-Hop Education Center Collection held in the Moving Image and Recorded Sound Division.⁴ The screening was paired with a public talkback convened by Martha Diaz, founder of the Hip-Hop Education Center, alongside Schomburg curatorial staff. The film remains publicly available on YouTube and continues to be used in academic and curatorial contexts.
By 2026, Hali Halisi had screened in Zanzibar, Vancouver, New York, Washington DC, and Harlem; broadcast nationally in Tanzania; won a competitive international award; and been incorporated into one of the leading research archives for Black cultural history in the United States. A non-commercial thirty-minute documentary does not ordinarily accumulate that record.
3. The infrastructure gap
The long institutional life of Hali Halisi makes a structural condition visible. African hip-hop developed sophisticated transnational networks and substantial artistic output through personal connections, shared cultural reference, and organic cross-border exchange. What did not develop at comparable pace were the systems that normally accompany a cultural movement of this scale:
- Systematic archiving of recordings, interviews, and ephemera from across the continent’s scenes
- Documented histories that practitioners can draw on and contribute to
- Institutional frameworks capable of operating across funding cycles and personnel changes
This pattern is not specific to Tanzania or to the period documented by the film. It recurs across African popular music more broadly. Practitioner-led efforts do exist. The African Hip Hop Foundation holds twenty hours of raw Hali Halisi footage and functions as custodian of the production archive. These initiatives have persisted through individual commitment rather than through structural support, which makes their continuation contingent in ways that comparable archives in other contexts are not.
The consequence is that momentum built in one generation of practitioners does not transfer reliably to the next. Cultural knowledge resets. Collaborative relationships forged over years disappear when key individuals move on. The creative output continues; the record of it does not accumulate at the same rate.
4. Policy recommendations
Governments, cultural ministries, international funders, and regional bodies should consider the following:
- Establish national and regional archives for popular music and youth culture. Physical and digital holdings should be developed with practitioner involvement in collection and curation, rather than designed by external institutions and filled retrospectively.
- Fund knowledge transfer across generations. Fellowship and mentorship programmes connecting veteran artists, documentarians, and cultural workers with emerging practitioners are among the most direct mechanisms for preserving skills and historical knowledge that do not otherwise get written down.
- Move from project grants to core institutional funding. Short-term project funding suits discrete outputs. It does not suit the maintenance of archives, the running of educational programmes, or the kind of relationship-building that sustains cultural institutions across time. Multi-year core funding for independent institutions focused on African popular music heritage addresses a gap that project grants cannot fill.
- Include popular music archiving in national cultural strategies. Cultural infrastructure for popular music and youth culture is rarely written explicitly into national cultural policy. Making it a named component of creative economy plans creates the mandate and the budget line that enables institutions to function.
Support South-South and diaspora partnerships. The Schomburg Center’s acquisition and programming of Hali Halisi demonstrates what becomes possible when African cultural material reaches well-resourced research institutions. Facilitating partnerships between African institutions and centres with technical and archival capacity accelerates what individual practitioner-led efforts cannot achieve alone.
5. Conclusion
Hali Halisi was made as a snapshot of Tanzanian hip-hop in 1999. Its twenty-five-year journey is evidence of the reach and resilience of African hip-hop as a cultural form, and of a structural gap that reach alone does not close. Without investment in the archives, institutions, and knowledge-transfer systems that allow a culture’s gains to accumulate rather than reset, successive generations of practitioners inherit the creative vitality of what came before without access to its history. The film’s own survival, through individual commitment, practitioner-led preservation, and eventual incorporation into major research institutions, is the argument for why that investment is needed, and what it can produce.
Notes
¹ Martin Meulenberg, dir., Hali Halisi: Rap as an Alternative Medium in Tanzania (The Netherlands/Tanzania, filmed June 1999; released c. 2000), 30 min. Produced by the Madunia Foundation in association with Scherpenzeel Media Foundation; research by Thomas Gesthuizen. Features Mr II (Sugu), Deplowmatz, Gangwe Mobb, X Plastaz, and others.
² Zanzibar International Film Festival (ZIFF), 2001. Broadcast: ITV (Independent Television), Tanzania, 2001. Clips shared via Aka.com web portal, 2001.
³ Vancouver International Hip Hop Film Festival, Canada, 2004. H2O (Hip Hop Odyssey) International Hip Hop Film Festival, Symphony Space, New York, 2004; Best Short Documentary award, 7 November 2004. Filmfest DC, 20th Annual Washington, DC International Film Festival, April 2006; screenings April 27 and April 29, Regal Cinemas. Full catalogue: https://www.filmfestdc.org/PDFs/catalog2006.pdf
⁴ Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, “Black on Screen: Mapping the Transnational Hip-Hop Revolution,” 13 January 2026. Hali Halisi sourced from the Hip-Hop Education Center Collection, Moving Image and Recorded Sound Division. Screened alongside La Fabri-K: The Cuban Hip-Hop Factory (dir. Lisandro Perez-Rey, 2004). Available at: https://www.newsbreak.com/event/6955f1ca0ce011ae466dab75-black-on-screen-mapping-the-transnational-hip-hop-revolution
The African Hip Hop Foundation holds twenty hours of raw production material from the film. The documentary is publicly available on YouTube.
Published on Africanhiphop.com, 19 May 2026
