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Tupac Shakur as Ogou Achade: Hip hop anger and postcolonial rancour read from the other side

In this essay, I offer a thought experiment by figuring Tupac Shakur as an icon of interrogation of the post-industrial condition from within the idiom of diasporic possession cult vision, ‘reading’ his polyvalence as manifestation of the African Ogou, Orisha of iron and anger, politics and its discontents, auguring urban desperation for underground meaning. The effort is one of challenge to Western pretension to tame trauma as tautology, by tattooing the drive to bifurcate morality into good and evil with an older and more indigenous sounding of oppression, privileging paradoxical complexity as a wiser ‘sign’ of human maturity and spiritual vitality.