Dr. Quentin Williams – 29th January 2019

Senior Lecturer, Linguistics University of the Western Cape

I have known Emile Jansen, also known as Emile YX?, founder of the Hip Hop group Black Noise and community project Heal the Hood Project, for a number of years. He, like few other citizens in South Africa, have for decades taken on the momentous task of advancing institutional, linguistic, cultural and social justice in our country. He is an activist, an independent researcher with more than a penchant for critical debates of issues as varied as racial inequality, cultural hegemony and linguistic injustices, and a writer who have over thirty-six years critically expressed his opinions, thoughts and ideology concerning racial equity and issues of identity. He is also a pioneer of Hip Hop Culture, and specifically break dancing in South Africa.

Mr Jansen has published in a range of genres: writing plays, books of poetry and rhyme, rap music and most recently contributing crucially to academic debates on grassroots literacy and education, cultural sustaining pedagogies, and social activism published on international presses such as Routledge Press. He is best known for his role in the groundbreaking HipHoppera “AfriKaaps”, a theatre showcase that charts the creole history of Afrikaans. The initial impact of the play, unanticipated, and much also due to the tireless multilingual activism of Mr. Jansen and other members of Heal the Hood, we have been continuously enthralled by the practical methods by which both he and the latter community project have promoted and advanced an equitable form of multilingualism for South Africa. His activism and academic work on racial equality have been nothing sort of instructive, particularly because his efforts have guided the theoretical ambitions of sociolinguists like myself to help restore the lost agency and voice of historically racialized multilingual speakers. This is no easy task.

These efforts described above, on the part of the Heal the Hood project, has not gone unnoticed in the academy at large. The play and the consequent actions by Heal the

Hood have had a significant impact on debates about language, multilingualism and raciolinguistic injustice among academics and the wider public. Quite a few publications have also been produced from within South Africa, all analyzing and citing the transformative work that have developed from Mr Jansen´s efforts to interject into debates about raciolinguistic injustice.

In 2014, the Centre for Multilingualism and Diversities Research (CMDR) at the University of the Western Cape, Heal the Hood and Staticphlow (an online sharing platform) co-hosted the first Heal the Hood Hip Hop lecture series. In large part due to Mr Jansen´s ongoing efforts to advance Hip Hop activism as social justice, the lecture series is now in its fifth installment. On a shoestring budget, and together with H Samy Alim (UCLA, Los Angeles) and Adam Haupt (UCT), we have produced from the lecture series the first major book on Hip Hop in Africa, entitled, “Neva Again: Hip Hop Art, Activism and Education in Post Apartheid South Africa”, currently in press and to be published by HSRC Press in 2019 (open access).

Furthermore, this book will also be released with a free album by a Hip Hop community activist called #IntheKeyofB (which includes the extraordinary rap contributions from Mr Jansen).

It is without a doubt that one cannot overlook nor understate the immense racial justice contributions Mr Jansen has made these last decades past. He has worked tirelessly to help make a reality South Africa´s non-racial society. He has the awards to prove it.

Dr. Adam Haupt

Deputy Director of Staffing: Faculty of Humanities Centre for Film & Media Studies

I, hereby, highly recommend the work of Heal the Hood. The educational, cultural and media work that they do in underprivileged communities of colour in South Africa’s townships play an important role in stimulating creativity, nurturing production-based and technical abilities as well as developing critical literacy.

I became acquainted with the work of Emile Jansen and his non-profit organization in the late ’90safter just having completed an MA thesis on hip-hop and starting a career as a freelance arts journalist. In fact, I covered the launched of Heal the Hood for Mail & Guardian newspaper and went on to establish a good working relationship with the organisation both as journalist and a young scholar, who went on to complete a PhD thesis on hip-hop, media, intellectual property and technology in the mid-2000s. I have collaborated with Heal the Hood on a number of projects, including panel discussions, lectures, workshops and, more recently, I co-edited a book on hip hop with Emile Jansen, Dr Quentin Williams (University of the Western Cape) and Prof H. Samy Alim (UCLA). The book, Neva

Again: Hip Hop Art, Activism and Education in Post-apartheid South Africa (HSRC Press, 2019), is accompanied by an EP that features a range of artists from Cape Town’s Cape Flats, a poverty-stricken region.

A great deal of Heal the Hood’s work involves documenting their educational initiatives and sharing videos and audio on social media platforms for the benefit of the communities that they serve. They also spend a great amount of time teaching young people how to shoot videos, record audio and edit these media with the intention of empowering them to tell stories on their own terms. Therefore, they rely on digital media production tools extensively. It would be of great benefit to Heal the Hood and the young people that they serve to access affordable hardware and software.

Terence Barry

Executive Director of Generation Hip Hop Global

“I was personally introduced to Emile by Ndaba Mandela (Son of Nelson Mandela) who informed me that Emile was selected by South African media as A South African Hero for his work in Hip Hop Education”

Magee McIlvaine

Nomadic Wax Creative Director 2018

I’ve know and worked with Emile YX and the organization Heal the Hood for over 10 years now. I’ve hosted him and youth members of his organization in the US, conducting workshops around the country. He has also hosted me and other colleagues of mine in South Africa, where I’ve witnessed first hand the remarkable work that they do.

Emile and his team run a tiny, grassroots organization that has an incredibly large impact on their community in Cape Town and beyond. Through their curriculum, mentorship programs, trainings and workshops, I’ve witnessed young kids grow up completely within the extended Heal the Hood family. These kids (now adults) have been transformed by their experiences. Many are now professional artists themselves and able to tour the world on their own terms.

I’ve worked all across the world, with many different youth organizations, but Heal the Hood sticks out to me as one of the most impressive. It has a long track record of success and what they are able to accomplish despite long odds and many challenges is nothing short of incredible.

I fully endorse Emile YX and the organization Heal the Hood, and I encourage you to support them however you can.

H. Samy Alim
Department of Anthropology, University of California, Los Angeles
Center for Race, Ethnicity, and Language (CREAL), Director UCLA Hip Hop Initiative, Director

Dear Emile, This letter is confirmation of our support for the work being done within
Heal the Hood Project and the 15 schools that they are currently serving. We are
looking forward to the implementation of the Afrikaaps play, dictionary content and
your personal innovations into these classes. It is truly exciting times to see this
project take on a whole new level of community participation and consequent
pride building opportunities. The more I reflect upon it, the development of pre-primary
and primary Afrikaaps teaching aids will set into motion what the Afrikaaps song “Os
Maak It Legal” (“We Make It Legal”) was hinting towards. This will make the goal real,
as you say.
Looking forward to the tangible outcomes of these projects.