African Rebel Soldiers and Their Eerie Obsession With Tupac Shakur

He's not African, but Haitian 2pac is a leader of an armed Port-au-Prince gang called Chimères, recruited by Haiti's former president Jean-Bertrand Aristide

See also:
*Bruce Hornsby on Tupac: "The original 'Changes' was a lot dirtier, had a lot of the n-word."
*Shock G and Smif-n-Wessun Talk Tupac's Eating Habits: "I Never Seen Him Eat a Vegetable, Not Once In The Five Years I Knew Him"
*The Outlawz Speak on Tupac and His Ink, Dispute The Meaning of "Thug Life"
*We Walk Up To Random Angelenos and Ask: "What's Your Favorite Tupac Memory?"

"I only listen to 2Pac before going to shoot Gaddafi boys," said Hisham al Hady to a British journalist recently. Al Hady is a Libyan rebel battling the regime of Colonel Muammar Gadaffi, but he's not alone. Shakur's influence on African fighters extends far beyond the current civil strife in Libya, and goes much deeper than just pre-battle pump-ups.

Militias in the Democratic Republic of Congo adopted knock-off Tupac T-shirts as de facto uniforms in the late 1990s, as did members of that country's regular armed forces. By 2002, rebels in Côte d'Ivoire were similarly clad in Pac-adorned attire.

But it was during the latter stages of Sierra Leone's hellish civil war in the early aughts that the rapper was most visibly iconized by African warriors. That conflict's principal rebel army, the Revolutionary United Front, started donning Shakur shirts en-masse in 1998. They mimicked Shakur's hairstyle. They wrote things like "Death Row," "Missing in action," and "Only God can judge" on their rag-tag vehicles, and danced to his music between firefights.

"The rebels take [Tupac's lyrics] very seriously and try to apply the lyrics," a Sierra Leonean refugee explained two years later.

One of the war's most outlandish militant groups, the West Side Boys, took their very name from Tupac's rhetoric. (His classic 1996 diss "Hit 'Em Up" includes the lyric "West Side bad boy killers.") The famously inebriated Boys -- who were also fond of wearing women's wigs and flip-flops -- would even scrawl "2Pac" onto their assault rifles.

"[Tupac's] music articulated a set of experiences that a lot of people around the world, and particularly in Africa, have perceived as a kind of shared experience," says Jeremy Prestholdt, a professor of African history at UC San Diego. "Marginalization; poverty; angst; and a sense of powerlessness that can be converted into a sense of personal empowerment."

To those youth involved in African conflicts after his 1996 death, his resonance became increasingly exaggerated.

During the Sierra Leone conflict -- a war almost devoid of ideology -- Tupac's projection of a justified sense of revenge offered often-conscripted combatants some sort of meaning to the violence they were witnessing and perpetrating. In Shakur they perceived a sympathetic voice for their otherwise incomprehensible experiences and unjustifiable actions.

"Tupac offers a kind of psychological solace in the midst of this chaos," Prestholdt explains. "In a lot of different contexts, certainly not only Sierra Leone, Tupac offered this image of resilience, invincibility, bravado, and hyper-masculinity."

Shakur's murder in September of 1996 came at a critical point in Sierra Leone's civil war. The following May, the Revolutionary United Front and mutinous army soldiers sacked the country's capital, Freetown. Amidst this orgy of looting, rape and murder, many fighters looked to the rhymes of their now mythologized hip-hop hero for some vague comprehension of their situation.

Lyrics like "Witnessin' killins, leaving dead bodies in abandoned buildings," from "Me Against the World," suddenly seemed almost prophetic to some of the very young -- and habitually drugged -- gunmen. The Pac-worshipping West Side Boys emerged near Freetown in 1998.