DAKAR, Senegal — In a classroom at the House of Urban Culture, hidden in the narrow streets of Dakar, Senegal, Aminata Thiam claps her hands in time to a rhythm she created on her computer.
“You just have to find the loop you’re looking for. Cut it out, duplicate the sample and then add your effects,” she says.
She teaches beat making to five young women, each attentively working on their own beats on the computers in front of them.
Thiam, 31, is a beatmaker, one of the few women in Senegal who call themselves that. Their discipline is the art of “making beats, making rhythms,” says Thiam. She follows a line from American DJs such as Afrika Bambaataa and DJ Kool Herc, seen as one of the founders of hip-hop, to contemporary beat makers.
Those DJs in the 1970s and 1980s made beats using synthesizers or by isolating specific beats in a song and playing them in a loop by switching between two record players. “Now when we talk about beatmaking, we’re talking about being able to do it with a computer,” says Thiam, crediting technology – including the advent of software – with democratizing the art.
The House of Urban Culture sees a rotating crew of everyone who is part of Senegal’s burgeoning hip-hop scene: rappers, slam poets, skaters and even graffiti artists whose works adorn the walls. The center, which opened in 2018, hosts rap concerts and beatbox festivals and offers free training in everything from DJing to photography, in an effort to turn young people’s interest in hip-hop into a profession.
Thiam’s stage name is ‘Myamy the Ay Girl’, a mixture of English and Wolof meaning ‘the girl who can’. She first came into contact with beatmaking ten years ago while studying in Dakar, where a beatmaker had installed a studio at her university. She later trained with a program called Hip Hop Akademy, which now partners with the House of Urban Culture. Her current class here is open only to women — a necessity, she says, if there is to be any kind of equality in the field.
“Not just for music, but for audiovisual work, for film,” she says, emphasizing that knowing how to make music on a computer doesn’t just apply to hip-hop.
While widespread access to computers has made beat making more accessible, the dependence on technology has also created a barrier that prevents many of its students from continuing their work after the course ends.
“In one household you might see that almost all the men have a computer, but the women only have a telephone,” she says. According to the 2020 GSM Association Mobile Gender Gap Report, women in Senegal’s urban areas have almost the same access to the internet as men, but much less financial autonomy: only 26% of women have bought their own smartphone, compared to 68% of men .
Djeneba Sylla, 21, is a singer who wanted to take Thiam’s class to learn to make her own music.
“I don’t have a computer at the moment. But I hope to have it by the end of the class,” says Sylla. Thiam has started a campaign to raise money for her students.
The issue of accessibility looms large in much of the work of the House of Urban Culture in Senegal. Amadou Fall Ba was the center’s coordinator for ten years and is now working with the city of Dakar on an initiative to create more public spaces for young people with the aim of making hip hop more accessible.
He says hip-hop came to Senegal through the country’s middle class, “people who had TVs, who could watch the private channels, who could watch what was happening in the US.” It eventually made its way to the masses, and he says that now 80% of the stars in Senegal’s larger urban culture scene come from working-class neighborhoods.
However, women are still seriously underrepresented, he says.
“The mentality has changed a bit, but we are still in a conservative country. A young woman of 25 or 30 years old who is not married, there is a strong social pressure on her,” he described.
During Thiam’s beatmaking class, the room is silent and each student gets lost in a different world behind noise-canceling headphones. After six weeks of lessons, the students can now produce their own beats. They mainly produce modern hip-hop beats, albeit less refined than what Thiam can throw together in a few minutes in the studio.
As they continued to work, Thiam stepped outside into the courtyard to talk about her own history. She says there are only three women working as beatmakers in Senegal. They often produce beats for Senegalese rappers, but also earn an income as sound engineers for concerts and stage productions. She hopes that the more women are active in the arts, the more other women will be inspired to get started.
“If we train women who are able to go far in this industry, it will encourage other women to join us,” she said.
She added that in Senegal’s music scene, women are often encouraged to sing or join a choir, something considered acceptably feminine.
“I always loved music, but I didn’t want to be a singer,” she said. “I wanted to do something different.”
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