Halifu Osumare’s Fulbright Grant, 2008-2009

Dr. Osumare spent August - December 2008 in Ghana, West Africa, teaching in the Department of Dance Studies and conducting research on the influence of hip-hop in the capital city of Accra. She became one of only 120 scholars chosen to represent the prestigious Fulbright Program of the U.S. State Department in Sub-Saharan Africa.

She taught a graduate seminar in Dance Anthropology and an undergraduate course in History of African American Dance. This allowed her to combine her knowledge and training in African American and African history along with dance studies. As a part of this aspect of the Fulbright, she gave two university-wide lectures for students and faculty: 1) “Dance Ethnology: A Marriage of Social Science & Dance” in October, 2008 for the Institute of African Studies, and 2) “Katherine Dunham Dance Technique: The Anthropological Model” in November 2008 for the Department of Dance Studies.

During the research part of the grant, Accra's vibrant "hiplife" movement was revealed to her. Hiplife is combination of hip-hop and West African high-life music and culture that started in the early 90s after Ghanaian youth had already gone through the imitation phase of American hip hop and were searching for their own unique expression. As artists experimented with rapping in Ghanaian indigenous languages such as Twi, Ewe, and Hausa, they also began using highlife melodies and Hiplife was born.

Reggie Rockstone, a Ghanaian reared in London and the U.S. been very instrumental in paving the way for this new generation to create a hiplife movement. More recently there has been an influx of young skilled people with a new fan base of kids who have just discovered and embraced hip life music like Obrafour, Lord Kenya, Okyeame Kwame, V.I.P, Tic-Tac, Tinny, and others.

The Hiplife movement in Ghana will be the subject of an upcoming book by Halifu Osumare in the near future.