Contemporary hip-hop currents in Montreal are countless, in a city with a striking cultural history. Hip-hop today is represented by a diverse array of artists who lace words in the multiple languages common on Montreal’s city streets. One striking hip-hop artist in Montreal attracting growing attention is Preach Ankobia.

Preach Ankobia is a hip-hop artist offering profound and poetic words on contemporary realities of city life in Montreal; artistic work that touches the pulse of social struggles in the city and current affairs internationally.

As a hip-hop artist working with the Kalmunity Vibe Collective âe” a diverse network of conscience musicians, singers, poets and artists celebrated in Montreal âe” Preach Ankobia represents a strong signal on Montreal’s music scene, writing hip-hop songs that could become contemporary anthems for social justice struggles.

Ankobia’s journey began on Walkley Street in Montreal’s NDG neighborhood âe” Notre-Dame-de-Grâce âe” a street renowned for police violence and poverty until today, home to a diverse community facing a daily struggle against poverty, racism and state violence.

You can listen to a sample track of Ankobia’s here. He was interviewed by Stefan Christoff.

Stefan Christoff: Can you speak about how your experiences growing up in NDG, on Walkley Street, renowned in Montreal for police violence, informs your music?

Preach Ankobia: I spent my youth on a street called Walkley, which unfortunately in the eighties was a hub of different criminal activity, a lot of drugs went down. Remember encountering my first violent act at six-years-old.

Being a young child, at five or six years old and we had foot-patrol on Walkley, police patrol, I remember always having the police around. I also remember the relationship with those who were into shady activities; you know what I’m saying? Over time you learn from their stories, while in the neighborhood we all accepted each other for who we were at the time. Music was my thing, although we were all a community.

Forming a relationship with the streets was important as a youth. Today I work with an organization called Head and Hands, with their program Jeunesse 2000, where I work as a youth animator, creating programs and workshops for the youth, so that they have a comfortable and positive environment, which will assist us in building community.

Let’s talk the criminalization facing different communities, we could talk about Walkley Street or about Little Burgundy, about the consistent reality of police violence that informs so many experiences from a very young age. Does this inform your music at all?

Definitely. In talking about Little Burgundy or Walkley, or what police do to these streets, or how they have treated the members of these communities, we must first go back to people like Marcelus Francois [an unarmed black father of two shot dead by Montreal police in 1991].

A reality of police violence is something that has always been with me, you know, I was a young child when many of these incidents took place, some taking place while I was in my teenage years, but all in my community. Also many terrible things happened to close friends at the hands of the judicial system. It’s important to not just talk about the police violence you know, but also the entire judicial system.

It’s not correct to just talk about what the police did to our streets, it’s also important to talk about what the world has done to urban society, to the immigrants who came into this world, into North America, to try to make a way, then ended-up building North America.

Everything viable in North America today was built by immigrants, while we don’t receive the wealth or the resources, we are placed in these holes, leaving our children to have to claw their ways out of these ghettos, or neighborhoods, you know?

It is in this situation that criminal activity emerges, that then leads to the criminalization of our communities, hence the impacts of judicial system on us. Criminal activity is what many of us, or many of my friends, were forced to do in order to attain a more comfortable way of living, while many people get out of this and many people don’t, while some are [ironically] fortunate enough to land in jail and not be at the end of a bullet, you understand, not be in a coffin.

Let’s talk about identities, about Diaspora in Canada, where many carry hyphenated identities, despite common rhetoric on Canada as a multi-cultural country, we will never hear about a Canadian simply when hearing a news report about policing in immigrant community, we will hear about Filipino-Canadians or black-focused schools recently in Toronto.

Multiculturalism isn’t a reality. I don’t think that I have experienced a truly multicultural society in Canada. There are many things that this term doesn’t recognize. This term multiculturalism, doesn’t take into account the fact that we as black people have to get use to living in a white world.

Going back to St. Vincent, where my mother is from, a place that is black or Indian, that is of colour; the only time we see white people down there is as tourists. As far as St. Vincent, it’s important to say that for many of the islands, we are still left with remnants of colonization.

Raised in a Christian household, we went to church on occasion, read the bible, so I grew-up with the identity of white Jesus, grew-up with pictures of Pope Jean-Paul. While today we do have our own beliefs, our own religions, as each island maintains beliefs in religions like Voodoo, beliefs that are still strong today.

Words that you write, the lyrics that you write, deal with issues today in our world today. You have one song called ‘War Report,’ in which you talk about the harsh reality of our time, which is a time of war. Talk about this track.

War report is a very direct message. As I began to examine the events of September 11 many questions emerged. After 9/11 western powers start pointing to the Arabs, the Muslims, towards Iraq. In looking at this scenario, the game was clear, the maneuvering on the part of power was clear, which allowed me to asses our current situation past the point that it’s presented within the controlled media, on television.

From this point on, I started finding media sources like GNN [Guerrilla News Network], all of these underground news sources, full of articles and information that I started reading widely, assisting me in putting this current political puzzle together. Looking back to history, back to so many heinous crimes committed in war, you wonder why no one put a stop to it, but when you start digging you realize that there were people that tried to put a stop to war or to colonization.

People did stand-up against oppression, people like Malcolm X or the Black Panthers or the movement against the war in Vietnam and many other movements throughout the world. On television many current freedom movements are presented as terrorists, while people in reality are simply fighting for their rights, for their freedom.

Stefan Christoff

Stefan Christoff is a musician, community organizer and host of Free City Radio that airs weekly on multiple stations across Canada. X: @spirodon / Instagram: @spirochristoff