A taste of the hiplife

The BBC is presenting a series of radio shows from Ghana, where a fusion of hip-hop and West African highlife music is all the rage. Andrew Pettie reports from Accra

Ras Kwame, one of the three Radio 1 DJs now filling the slots vacated by John Peel, is at a dawn assembly, addressing more than 1,500 giggling Ghanaian schoolchildren. The last time he sat in the chapel of Achimota Secondary, he was a pupil at the school. Now Kwame has returned to Ghana to present a series of radio programmes that are being simultaneously broadcast from the capital, Accra, to Ghana and the UK.

"It's the kind of thing I visualised doing when I was growing up," he says. "But to be here actually doing it, playing these great Ghanaian records back to people in the UK, seeing my old teachers, speaking in front of my old school where I can still point to the seat I used to sit in - it's pretty surreal. Especially as when I first started DJing in Ghana, nobody thought I was any good."

Kwame is hosting a series of three radio shows alongside emerging UK rapper Sway DaSafo, who also has Ghanaian roots. It is often presumed that black British music is predominantly derived from and influenced by the Caribbean, but a surprising number of UK artists - including Dizzee Rascal, Ty, MC Skibadee, and Lethal B - are actually of West African descent.

Moving back and forth between the two continents certainly had a profound effect on Kwame. "Before my family left the UK to go back to Africa, I remember sitting in my pyjamas watching Slade on Top of the Pops. So Ghana, musically speaking, was a bit of a shock."

His nightly programmes certainly have a typically laid-back, West African feel. A makeshift studio has been hastily assembled in a back office at Accra's Joy FM; the satellite dish has to be hauled into position on the roof; the guests arrive late (or not at all), with Kwame cheerfully explaining to his British listeners that it's impossible to be late in Accra - you're just "running on Ghana time".

The music flips between the traditional African sounds of artists such as Fela Kuti and contemporary UK grime and garage tracks. The Ghanaian studio guests nod their heads and holler approval and a listener from the UK texts in enthusiastically, "I'm not bothered about niche markets or genres. It's just great to hear this show segueing between two equally passionate kinds of music."

In this spirit of Anglo-Ghanaian collaboration, the boisterous studio guests are all MCs and producers working at the vanguard of "hiplife" - an exhilarating combination of the traditional form of Ghanaian music known as highlife and the harder rhythms of US and UK hip-hop. Highlife - which emerged in the 1920s from a number of native musical styles - reached its popular zenith in the 1950s and '60s, when it became synonymous with Ghana's thrust for independence.

Since the mid-1990s, however, highlife has been revamped and reinterpreted by a new generation of Ghanaian rappers. And, although hiplife is indebted to mainstream hip-hop, there are subtle differences. As hiplife MC Tic Tac points out, instead of pared-down, electronic beats, hiplife borrows from "the rich rhythms of African music, fusing them with our own lyrics to let people around the world know what we're about.

"The performers are different, too. In America you've got a lot of laid-back rappers. The artists over here are more energetic. People want to see you sweat."

These distinctions, both musical and temperamental, were made abundantly clear to Sway when he performed at an open-air festival held in the centre of Accra. "It was completely insane. There were 4,000 people in the crowd in front of me - like a black Glastonbury. And, to begin with, the audience wasn't really sure what I was doing. I came on with a Union Jack bandana around my face; I think they thought I was a bank robber. Then during my set I started throwing out some CDs, but this nearly provoked a riot. The security guards were fending off kids with cattle prods."

Sway, who spends a frenetic afternoon recording with Tic Tac, talks enthusiastically about his West African connections. "It's now that we're really starting to take from each other," he says. "If you look at the UK hip-hop scene, and the Ghanaian hiplife scene, you can find artists like me somewhere in between. And that's a pretty cool place to be."

So has the BBC's cultural exchange been a success? Kwame's British audience certainly thinks so; he receives a deluge of appreciative messages from Ghanaians dotted around the UK: "Big shout out to you all from a Ghanaian brother in Leicester - I'm ex-Achimota too!"

And for Kwame, Radio 1's West African experience has been like a homecoming. "When I'm in the UK, I feel 100 per cent British. In Ghana I feel 100 per cent Ghanaian. But that must be a good thing, I guess - it makes me 200 per cent Ras Kwame!"

OneMusic with Ras Kwame is on Radio 1 on Wednesdays at 9pm. He is part of a series of programmes being broadcast from Africa on BBC 1Xtra until Saturday.