The annual Encounters Documentary festival hit national cinemas from 4 to 14 June this 2026, showcasing impressive feature-length and short documentaries across Johannesburg, Pretoria and Cape Town.

Among the lineup of 58 documentaries from across the globe was Adrian Van Wyk and Chris Kets’ Notes from the Underground. Focusing on the underground hip hop cultures of Cape Town, Van Wyk and Kets weave a powerful narrative of displacement, oppression and the healing practice of hip hop, writes Lerato Botha.

Hip hop as social activism

Notes from the Underground briefly introduces its viewer to the forced displacement of (mostly) coloured people from the once-vibrant community of District Six to townships on the outskirts.

This displacement affected the community doubly; displacing individuals from their physical homes as well as forcefully removing them from their history. It is through this double oppression that some discovered hip hop as a means of reconciling with their displacement and drawing attention to their own struggles, that of their parents, and that of their ancestors.

The filmmaking style is unobtrusive, with little intervention from the filmmakers, offering a refreshing departure from the sit-down interview-style of documentary-making that has come to dominate the artform. Instead of having a story being told to you, the viewer is invited into the intimate conversations of its interviewees, from which each individual can derive their own meaning and understanding.

As we observe alongside the camera, we meet various members of the underground community who have all been touched by hip hop in one way or another, from schoolteachers to schoolchildren and the Rastafari. These individuals rap in English, Afrikaans, Afrikaaps (a dialectic variation of Afrikaans that features elements from indigenous South African languages), and isiXhosa.

The Afrikaans and Afrikaaps rappers emphasise a reclamation of the Afrikaans language as not merely that of the oppressor but of the people, while also reinforcing a connection to the indigenous Khoi people and the Khoi influence on some of the elements of their rap style.

As descendants of the displaced, and with many of the interviewees having witnessed the sheer brutality of apartheid for themselves, Notes from the Underground takes a unique look at how those who suffered most, use music as a form of resistance.

Hip hop as community

Second to the main narrative covering the activist potential of hip hop is the way in which hip hop draws from tradition. While much of what hip hop sounds like today may find its origins in the United States, the documentary’s interviewees speak to hip hop as a deeply spiritual and traditional practice too.

Many township rappers who rap in isiXhosa have adopted a style called ‘spaza’ rapping, originating in townships such as Gugulethu and Khayelitsha and said to have evolved from the way that our elders shared secrets and stories with one another. The style is focused on documenting day-to-day life in the community. In indigenous cultures, the sharing of stories and traditions is often done through word of mouth, and lyricists mimic this form of storytelling in their raps, making the music highly rooted in tradition.

izibongo, which refers to traditional praise poetry and oral storytelling, is considered to be another originating form of what we know today as rap. This along with the drawing from indigenous Khoi languages in the hip hop art form, unravels the significance of hip hop in community-making. Whilst the sound can be, and is, used for social criticism and activism, people are also using the art form to find themselves and better connect with their ancestral history and others like themselves.

The filmmaking emphasises this collision of hip hop and tradition, showing clips of b-boy break dancers dancing as chant sounds overlay each clip in an interplay between Western influence and African tradition. For the subjects of Notes from the Underground, hip hop is a means of discovery: of the self, of community, of one’s ancestral origins, and of an identity whose remnants emerge resilient despite systematic attempts to erase it.