Kicking Up Dust

Rapper K'naan. Photo Steve Carty.

Last year, the streets of Toronto spoke a juicy rumour about adopted son K’naan Warsame, the Dusty Foot Philosopher, a Somali-born rapper and poet who is primed for liftoff at this weekend’s Live 8 concert in Barrie, Ont. The gossip went as follows:

K-os, the reigning champion of Canadian hip hop, was supposedly irked by a trip that K’naan took to Kenya to film a video for Soobax, a battle cry against the warlords who rule his homeland. For this reason, K-os made K’naan, who is Muslim, the unnamed villain of his hit song B-Boy Stance. “They took cameras to Africa for pictures to rhyme / Over; Oh, yes, the great pretenders,” K-os rapped, “Religious entertainers who want to be life savers.” Those coded lyrics, the streets suggested, ignited a private war of words between the two MCs.

Whether or not the rumour was true, K’naan felt compelled to take his side of the beef public this winter, on a blistering mixtape track titled Revolutionary Avocado: “I don’t want to have to do this / ...I’m trying to be a peaceful poet / But the warrior in me just can’t, can’t sit back,” the 28-year-old rhymer professed, before cold-cocking the champ to the mat: “You the all-knowing with a beer bottle / Wishing you was Plato and me Aristotle? / ...Suburban negro turned hip-hop hero / Is there a reason he really hates me, though?”

K’naan still wonders what set K-os off. “He made me out to be some kind of colonialist, but he didn’t take into account that [Africa] is where I’m from. That’s my people; I’m representing their struggle. So I thought he was out of line,” K’naan says now, tucking into a takeout fish dinner at a downtown Toronto park. “But he’s a great artist, great musician. I hope these things come to pass; I don’t have any more to say about or to him.”

If K-os were targeting almost any other rap rival, B-Boy’s stance would make sense: hip hop’s roots grow from African rhythms, but the ocean between here and there widens with the release of every new album about ghetto fantasylands and cartoon violence. Countless Western MCs make their living telling lies that glorify the lawless carnage that’s only too real in places like Somalia.

K’naan, though, comes from what might be the most dangerous neighbourhood on the planet, a part of Mogadishu known as the River of Blood. His music celebrates his people and his country – and condemns the death orgy that caused their collapse. “It’s tough to boast when you know the real deal, when you understand violence in its true nature,” he says. “Home for me has meant the moments between tragedy and beauty.” K’naan shot Soobax among crowds of exiled Somalis in Mombasa and Nairobi's Eastleigh (or "Little Somalia") district, because the likelihood of his murder in Mogadishu was too great to chance. “People [in Somalia] know who I am,” he says. “The hungry guy who loves what I’m doing will take my life just the same – then there’s another guy who’s not hungry but hates me for what I’m doing. In both instances it’s tough to go back.” Put another way, K’naan is the last rapper alive who should have to apologize for exploiting Africa.

Photo Steve Carty.

Somalia’s intermittent civil wars began in 1977. K’naan’s father, Abdi, moved from Mogadishu when his children were very young: K’naan has an older brother, Liban, and younger sister, Sagal. “Many people who were intellectuals in our community had to leave the country when things began falling apart. My father was one of them,” K’naan says. Abdi settled in New York City and became a cab driver; soon after, he began mailing hip-hop records home to Mogadishu. K’naan spoke only Somali at the time, but taught himself to parrot America’s rap gods. “I learned their rhythm, their diction, their mannerisms, their fierceness — all of it,” he says, splitting a banana to eat with his fish. “None of the kids in my neighbourhood understood English, but we knew what hip hop was. I’d rhyme a Rakim verse, ‘I came in the door, I said it before…,’ just like he would.” Seven years would pass before he knew what door meant.

“Seven, eight — you’re a pretty established human being when you’re that age in Somalia. Everyone is expected to be a linguist, even little children,” K’naan says. “For us, language is what informs the universe. Your articulation is your manhood.”

In earlier interviews, K’naan has described the violence that razed Somalia as “a fire coming into your house, and you not having a place to exit.” He fired his first gun at age eight. At 11, K’naan and his three best friends fled from gunmen in a deadly footrace through Mogadishu. He escaped; the other boys were shot and killed. Near that time, Liban was arrested for blowing up a federal court building. It took the intervention of the children’s aunt, Magool, one of East Africa’s best-known singers, to spare him from a firing squad. (Artistic talent runs in the family: K’naan’s grandfather, Haji Mohamed, is a gifted poet.)

K’naan’s mother, Marian Mohamed, then made daily visits to Mogadishu’s U.S. embassy, pleading for exit visas. A staffer relented on the day the embassy closed in January 1991, stamping their required paperwork. The family boarded the last commercial flight to leave Mogadishu before turf battles closed the airport.

“God protected me so much, in so many different circumstances and instances. The biggest protection I received was not that I didn’t get shot — but that I didn’t shoot anybody, I didn’t kill anyone,” K’naan says. “That’s huge. If you kill somebody, you carry their burden. I’m very fortunate. I have friends who’ve had to [kill] — family too.”

K’naan and his family stayed in Harlem for a few months, then continued on to Rexdale, Ont., a rough-necked suburb of eastern Toronto. (Marian still lives in Rexdale; she's featured in K'naan's newest video, for the song Strugglin'. Abdi has moved back to Somalia, though he travels the world as often as he’s able.) K’naan began writing rap verses the instant he learned English. He quit school in Grade 10, restless. Travelling alone, he lived, briefly, in Washington, D.C., Minnesota, Ohio, England and Switzerland. He returned to Toronto after two years’ time, although he says he will never feel settled here: “[In Somalia], we would walk without shoes all the time. We understand that the earth is where we’re from, the earth is where we’ll return to. I’ve been wearing shoes since I left home. It’s as small as that, but it’s as significant as that.”

The Dusty Foot Philosopher. Courtesy Track & Field/Sony BMG Canada.

The Dusty Foot Philosopher, K’naan’s full-length debut, is the type of record you give to people who say they hate hip hop, then dare them to resist its charms. The opening song, Wash It Down, is crafted entirely from “words and water, the most important things in the universe.” K’naan raps, gently, over a backbeat made by slapping plastic sheets laid on pools of water; to know the song’s power, open a thesaurus to “beauty” and read every entry. Blues for the Horn, hidden at the end of the album, is a stirring lament for Somalia that K’naan recorded five years ago; a baleful horn chases him across the track, its lyrics a long list of questions asking what has become of his home.

In places between Dusty Foot’s beginning and end, K’naan’s voice sounds eerily close to Eminem’s — the Detroit superstar has been his most common comparison, though their worlds could not be farther apart. The album hits hardest when K’naan reminds listeners of the differences: where Eminem would rhyme about handguns, K’naan talks about rocket-propelled grenades. His horror stories are real; the violence in his past is bigger than that of his American peers. “We got no police, ambulance or fire fighters / We start riots by burning car tires…” he raps on a song called What’s Hardcore? “I’ma spit these verses because I feel annoyed / And I’m not going to quit until I fill the void / If I rhymed about home and got descriptive / I’d make 50 Cent look like Limp Bizkit.”

Dusty Foot is one step on a life’s path. Another is performing at Live 8, where K’naan will be a true rarity: he is one of too few African artists involved in Bob Geldof’s global benefit to raise awareness of African poverty. Regardless, he aims to make the most of the opportunity. “K’naan means the traveller; Warsame means one who carries the words of peace,” he says. “Where I come from, you have to live up to your names.”

The Dusty Foot Philosopher is available in music stores now.

Matthew McKinnon writes about the arts for CBC.ca.

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