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Hip Hop in Namibia Boli Mootseng Solo Album (cd): 'Prime Suspect' (Tropical / Mob Music) For more on Boli, read the following which we lifted from 'Namibian' online paper of August 1998. Chillin' With The 'Prime Suspect' ERIC SHIRUMBU spent a 'lickle while' with the myth who is the musician who is the poet, who is the actor who is the cultural revolutionary who is ... BOLI MOOTSENG TV and radio show host, poet, actor and musician Boli Mootseng is "out on bail". At least, that is the title of Boli's first-ever CD, which he has just released under the guise of the 'Prime Suspect'. Those already familiar with Boli 'Sunday Afternoon' Mootseng will not be surprised to learn that his Prime Suspect CD - a six-track cocktail of four of his latest songs - is certainly in keeping with someone who slips the phrase "just chillin'" into every other sentence he utters. Richard Mokob 'Boli' Mootseng was given more than the standard dose of natural talent when born 28 years ago in Katutura. That talent remains largely unrefined by education and training, although Boli has somehow developed a creative sophistication rarely found in these parts. Something of a drifter, Boli moves through life as if driven by a breeze of his own making, "chillin'" here and there as he dabbles with this and that in his creative playground. There certainly is a child at the heart of Boli "baby-face" Mootseng. He loves to sing, he loves to write poetry, he loves to act, he loves to make videos, and he loves to play music and talk to people on his weekly NBC radio show. But he has yet to follow any one line particularly seriously. Born in Katutura on new year's eve 1970, Boli was dispatched to an all-boy Catholic school in Goas when his rebellious adolescence proved too much for his Windhoek primary school teachers. This sentence to strict scholarly isolation did little to reform Boli, and he returned to Windhoek some years later to attend Jacob Morenga school. But he never completed his studies. "I didn't complete matric - I got bored with school," Boli explains with little sign of regret. In 1988 - the year of the student uprising and the death throes of South African colonial rule - Boli joined the Bricks community project in Katutura, which at the time was probably the nearest thing Namibia had to a centre for liberation culture. It was while acting in a Bricks drama production called 'Boli' that Mootseng got the nick-name which has stuck with him ever since. In 1990 he left for Johannesburg to attend drama college, returning home two years later where he connected with the NBC, and co-presented the youth television programme 'Cool Running' with fellow cultural afficionado Lazarus Jacobs. But unlike Jacobs (now called Nghumbilemo ya Ndakomani), who has since been lured into the corporate world. Boli remains aloof, following his creative urges in a way that suggests he doesn't really want to grow up and become part of the "real world" of a steady job, medical aid and a pension. Not that Boli lacks ambition. He certainly wants to kick ass with his music, particularly when it comes to changing the myopic attitudes of his fellow Namibians. "It is like everyone is standing at the bus stop, waiting for a bus to take them somewhere," Boli explains. "Namibians have been consumers (of culture) since way back when. Since independence people have been in a position to produce (their own culture), but don't quite know how to go about it." Which is where the concept behind the new 'Out on Bail' CD comes in. Boli says he feels imprisoned by the attitudes of his compatriots who slavishly follow fashions from overseas, and look down on anything which does not conform to these trends. "Now I'm out on bail," he says with tongue-in-cheek defiance. "Now is my time to prove my story and tell you of my innocence." Don't be fooled. This is not the cliched rant of some snarling, angry young man bitter at the way life has treated him, but rather another trip of Boli's imagination. The posturing of the 'Out on Bail' CD cover - a pensive and visibly oppressed Boli in what could be a prison cell, next to stark black and white images of a back street alleyway with the gruesome outline of a dead person on the concrete - is just "a myth". In the songs he simply wants to tell "kiddies stories", he says. Boli's "lickle" songs are just that; child-like nursery rhymes with little reason, far removed from the gangsta imagery. Similarly, big, bulky Boli comes across as disarmingly mild-mannered when he chats about his music and his life, although the suggestive images inside the CD cover - showing how he wants "to make sweet lickle music for sweet lickle girls" - indicate that the line between Boli's myth and reality may at times become blurred. While Boli might want to change Namibia's cultural landscape, his campaign appears to be devoid of any urgency. An "alternative" music show for NBC television is in the pipeline, but he can't say when it will be screened. Boli is also planning to release a full-length album 'First Hearing' on his 30th birthday - the last day of the 20th century. Meanwhile, he is hoping to release another CD containing remakes of some of Namibia's ground-breaking contemporary songs, including Jackson Kaujeua's '!gnubu !nubus', Ras Sheehama's 'City Young Girl', 'Don't Look Back' by People's Choice, and Boli's own 'Sunday Afternoon'. But so far this project - to be released under the auspices of 'VX original' ("'VX' for 'vitamin X' because the people of this country need some vitamins to get them going") is still at the concept stage. The story behind 'Sunday Afternoon' - the song which has been sung, whistled and hummed in households throughout Namibia - is typical of Boli's rather laid-back approach to the cultural revolution. "My brother had a keyboard, and I borrowed it," Boli recalls, waving his hands theatrically while his mouth remains fixed in a limp grin. "It was a Sunday afternoon and I had in my mind this 70s song which my parents used to jive to...." He recorded the tune, and someone at a recording studio referred the song to music promoter Paul Joubert, who later released it on a compilation album of songs by Namibian artists. The song was never released as a single, but Boli performed it on NBC TV, after which the song received regular air play countrywide. But 'Sunday Afternoon' has never been released as a single, which may explain the pride with which Boli presents 'Out on Bail'. "This is the first time I have put out a CD of my own," he says, a little like a child showing off his new bicycle. The making of 'Out on Bail' was a similar tale of unplanned events and opportunities seized. Inspiration for 'Lickle While' - arguably the best track on the CD - materialised by chance in a Johannesburg living room where a girl was watching the American TV soap opera 'Days of our Lives' through a fish tank.... or something like that; when Boli's mind starts racing, it is hard to get him to put on the brakes! Boli talks and performs as if he has spent time in the USA, so it comes as some surprise to find out that he has never travelled out of southern Africa, and that America is the last place in the world he wants to go. "I can't go to a place where people discuss the President's penis in public!" All of a sudden Boli has become serious. "They have no respect. I can do anything I want, but I must make sure that I have respect for everyone I speak to or who I deal with. In colonial times we were made to feel that Africa was not our home, and you say I should go to America and try to be accepted by them! Why?" As a child of the '70s, Boli takes a contemporary view of history, and seems mildly frustrated by the tendency of the older generation to focus on the struggle days of the 1960s. He is too young to remember to Old Location, and grew up in Katutura's 's Gemengde Lokasie, where people from the smaller tribes and other fragments of pass-law detritus were lumped together by apartheid's master planners. Afrikaans was the lingua franqua of the multi-ethnic 'hood, which perhaps explains Boli's potjiekos approach to culture. He talks about "going back to the kraal" to learn more about his Tswana heritage, but for Boli, culture is a dynamic and progressive force moving forward; something he feels many Namibians are unable to accept. "We belong to a world that is moving, but Namibians don't want to do something about it," he says. "If you sing a rap song, then it is going to be accepted. But if you sing that rap song in your mother tongue, then you've committed murder." Society beware. Cultural assassin Boli is on the loose and he is murder suspect number one. This is someone whose musical inspirations are as diverse as Elton John and Wyclef Jean, and whose role models include Tupac Shakur and Fanuel Tjingaete. (Tjingaete is Namibia's Auditor-General - the other names are probably self-explanatory!) What is more, Boli insists he is "innocent until proven guilty", which may be a problem given that the Namibian public inevitably remains the ultimate judge of his work. Odds on an acquittal? Review: 'Out on Bail' - 'Prime Suspect' Boli Mootseng You may have heard him on the radio, and you've doubtless seen him on TV. Now you can hear him on CD. A increasingly leading light on the Namibian music scene, Boli Mootseng, has finally gone on record. Boli's first solo recording - 'Out on Bail' - is being unleashed on the unsuspecting Namibian public. The six-track single comprises of songs already familiar to those who regularly watch music videos on NBC; two versions each of the hip-hoppish 'Lickle Katharena' and 'Lickle Phunany', together with the mellow rap number Time Inc, and ballad 'Lickle While'. 'Out on Bail' adds a new dimension to Namibia's rather stagnant music scene, and builds on the foundation laid by Boli's catchy one-off pop song 'Sunday Afternoon'. Boli is very much a product of the TV generation, and the fact that most of Boli's newly-released songs have first appeared on television shows the guy's fascination with image. But don't judge this CD by its cover. The sleeve of 'Out on Bail' has all the trappings of a poor imitation of a third-rate American gangsta rap album - the crime, jail and death imagery coined by the Death Row music label, and since bludgeoned into overkill by every two-bit rap outfit on a make-a-quick-buck recording contract. However the sound which comes out of the speakers could not be further from the impression created by the sleeve. While 'Lickle Phunany' and 'Lickle Katharena' have obvious US influences - notably those of the Fugees and Boli's musical inspiration Wyclef Jean - both songs retain a distinct personality of their own. 'Lickle While', meantime, is a damn decent soul ballad, pure and simple, with smooth but rootsy harmonies spoilt only by Boli's flat, tobacco-stained vocals. The cover images may be a marketing ploy to catch the attention of rap-addicted young audiences, or else it may simply be down to Boli's image-loaded mind. Whatever the case, the songs on 'Out on Bail' match the cutting-edge creativity Boli 'Prime Suspect' displays on screen, and should earn its place alongside other "classics" to have emerged from Namibia's small but growing musical village.

Well... even those areas that we really didn't get to expose any signs of hip hop activity now suddenly appear to host their local scenes with albums coming out and getting reviews in local mags...