Appendix B - Zulu Nation & The Temple of Hiphop as New Social Movements

An Overview of Zulu Nation & The Temple of Hiphop

There is considerable agreement in both academic and journalistic writings that the Universal Zulu Nation was founded in 1973 in the South Bronx by world-renowned deejay, Hip-Hop pioneer, and community leader, Afrika Bambaataa (commonly referred to as the “Godfather of Hip-Hop”).²⁸  Apparently, Bambaataa saw in Hip-Hop the potential to bring people together of all walks of life through the shared experience of expressing the culture’s core artistic elements, as well as an effective method for disseminating the core values of Zulu Nation—peace, unity, love, and havin’ fun—to communities across the globe.²⁹   Accordingly, the earliest members of Zulu Nation—many of whom were pioneers of Hip-Hop’s elements—began traveling to various countries around the world to spread the artistic elements and accompanying ideologies of Hip-Hop culture.³⁰ Currently, the Universal Zulu Nation has hundreds of chapters throughout the world, with members representing diverse racial, ethnic, cultural, socioeconomic and religious backgrounds.³¹

The Temple of Hiphop, founded in 2001 by world-renowned emcee, Hip-Hop cultural icon, and spiritual teacher, KRS-One, is a “Hiphop preservation society that seeks to define and teach the accumulated wisdom of Hiphop to Hiphoppas.”³² By building its worldwide membership through lectures and international tours, articulating its belief system and objectives through the creation and dissemination of documents such as the Hip-Hop Declaration of Peace, and encouraging the sharing of knowledge and resources among its members through community development, networking and online discussion forums, The Temple of Hiphop is attempting to organize and mobilize a growing membership of passionate Hiphoppas.³³  Its constant emphasis on values such as peace, love, and knowledge, as well as its denouncement of conventional definitions of social identity, indicates that it derives much of its ideology from that of Zulu Nation.

Characteristics of New Social Movement Theory & Identity Seeking

Through a comprehensive analysis, Laraña, Johnston and Gusfield (1994) have articulated several fundamental characteristics of new social movements. A number of them which pertain to identity formation are present in the Universal Zulu Nation and The Temple of Hiphop.  I illustrate their relevance to our discussion in Table 1.

Table 1: Fundamental Characteristics of N.S.M.'s demonstrated by Zulu Nation and/or The Temple of Hiphop.

From table 1 (above), the aspect of Zulu Nation that is perhaps most relevant to this discussion—and one that is also evident in the ideology of The Temple of Hiphop—is a focus on identity seeking.  As Chang (2005) explains, Zulu Nation’s “revolution did not emanate from mass organizations struggling against systems and institutions, but in one’s personal transformation. Only then could one ‘overstand,’ that is, comprehend and confront the injustice of the world by manifesting one’s power” (106).  That Eyerman and Jamison (1998) articulate this same idea in their discussion of new “identity movements” in strong evidence that U.Z.N. and Temple of Hiphop do, in fact, constitute new social movements:

Questions of meaning, belief, value, and identity have seemingly become more important than the political pursuit of power and the achievement of practical economic improvements.  Many of the new social movements are actually practicing a new kind of cultural politics, where the main concern is to change values rather than to gain particular political results (17).

The Temple of Hiphop, Public Identity and Preserving Hip-Hop Culture

As Laraña et al. (1994) explain, for members of new social movements, “Both individual identity and collective identity are affected by… definitions imposed on movements by state agencies, counter-movements, and… the media” (18-19).  In the case of The Temple of Hiphop, it is undeniable that members’ individual and collective identities, as well as objectives, are continuously misrepresented by the skewed images of Hip-Hop culture that have been widely disseminated to the public by commercial mass media outlets.  As a Hiphop preservation society, the Temple of Hiphop has found that it must often counteract these portrayals because they threaten Hip-Hop’s public identity.  Thus, the organization has made one of its primary goals to “[decriminalize] Hiphop's public image through concerts, lectures, articles and interviews on television, radio, print media and Internet outlets.”⁵⁰

Eyerman and Jamison (1998) offer insight here in a discussion of how social movements contribute to processes of cultural transformation, particularly in relation to music:

On the one hand, social movements challenge dominant categories of artistic merit by making conscious – and problematic – the taken-for-granted frameworks of evaluation and judgment… On the other hand, social movements utilize media of artistic expression for communicating with the larger society and, by doing so, often serve to (re)politicize popular culture and entertainment (10).

The most clear example of the above phenomenon in Hip-Hop is the propensity of artists such as Asheru, Blackalicious, and Zion I (to name only a few) to articulate in their lyrics the ideology of Zulu Nation, as well as issues related to the misrepresentation of Hip-Hop culture by the profit-driven music and entertainment industries.⁵¹ 

Cultural Transformation, Mobilization of Tradition & Glocal Autonomy

Eyerman and Jamison’s (1998) approach to social movements in their book, Music and Social Movements, is particularly relevant to our discussion.  Specifically, the idea that elements of a movement’s artistic culture—music, dance, and visual art—can “lead to a reconstruction of processes of social interaction and collective identity formation” is applicable to the primary aims of Zulu Nation and Temple of Hiphop (10):

We are creating a new nation, a new civilization of people that is beyond race, beyond class, beyond religion… we don’t need to define ourselves based on all of that… As Hip-Hop, I’m not Black, White, none of it.  I’m Hip-Hop. I’m defined by my consciousness. I’m defined by the collective interest of my people.⁵²

This, it seems, is what Bambaataa intended to create with the formation of Zulu Nation:  

The goals of the Universal Zulu Nation [are:] To educate, develop and improve the present state of mind of adults and youth around the world. To spread our message of love, peace and unity amongst all races through our ways and actions. To preserve the culture of Hip-Hop and all art forms created from it and to use music as a medium for cultural exchange and understanding. To provide a safe haven to nurture the inherent genius of adults and youth around the world. To assist others in developing careers and opportunities as they express their God-given potential and talents.⁵³

Simultaneously emphasizing unity and local applications, Hip-Hop culture has spread as a glocal movement, often imbued with the ideology of Zulu Nation.  This is evidenced by a forum response to a new member’s request that The Temple of Hiphop extend its organizational influence to a community in Fresno, California.  One of the organization’s administrators, Jade (2005), articulates the importance of local autonomy in this movement:

Start actively organizing true HIPHOPPAS in your area… Start speaking to local organizations and clubs to see if they will donate the off peak time of their buildings to the purpose. Have gatherings of peeps experienced in all elements of HIP-HOP to make your purpose known in the HIP-HOP movement… The Teacha [KRS-One] does not want the True HIPHOPPAS to wait around for him to create the movement. KRS wants the True HIPHOPPAS to take control of our situations and make it happen. For we ARE the True HIPHOP movement and we MAKE it happen.⁵⁴

The Universal Zulu Nation and the Temple of Hiphop represent new social movements by exhibiting the fundamental characteristics of transcending social structures, creating new dimensions of identity, focusing on the personal relevance of their values, emphasizing a collective identity, and allowing local autonomy through decentralization.  Despite the paradoxical nature of its ideologies, and despite the mainstream dominance of commercial forces that continue to misconstrue Hip-Hop culture’s public image, this movement has continued to grow over the last thirty years.  Mobilizing its membership to fully realize the movement’s core value of unity, and increasing community development at the local level, seems to be the greatest challenge it faces in the years to come.

(REFERENCES INCLUDED IN EARLIER BIBLIOGRAPHY)