‘Makhanda Forever?’: Pirate internet infrastructure and the ephemeral hip hop archive in South Africa

Abstract

This article examines how hip hop heads in marginalized, Black, low-income neighbourhoods in a town in South Africa make use of ‘grey’ pirate internet infrastructure from the Global South to create distribution platforms for their music. In this ethnographic study, hip hop heads from the town of Makhanda, who cannot afford the bandwidth to use graphic-intensive sites such as ReverbNation or SoundCloud, come up with innovative ways to hack and extend the limitations of their own low-bandwidth internet distribution infrastructure. To do so they not only move media offline onto various digital devices in innovative ways but also use online solutions from the Global South developed for less-connected users like themselves. This includes the file-drop platform DataFileHost, the ‘Wap’ platform Wapka and various forms of translocal pavement internet involving WhatsApp distribution. As digital pioneers in their communities, these hip hop heads showcase innovation from below by cobbling together translocal digital spaces that incorporate grey pirate platforms. Since they exist outside of the public, algorithmically monitored channels of the internet, these spaces remain outside of the mainstream centralized global media flows and exemplify ‘pirate modernity’ in the Global South. They point to the deep infrastructural inequalities between and inside countries and the need for building a more inclusive internet where no-one is exiled to the low-bandwidth, mostly off internet outposts of the less-connected. While pirate platforms form part of an interim innovative solution to help connect communities, their ephemeral nature means that the music archives created by these hip hop communities remain precarious and under constant threat of being lost forever.