This episode of The Hip Hop African Podcast features Dokta, a pioneering Senegalese graffiti artist, cultural organizer, and hip-hop activist whose work has been central to the development of African graffiti and street art since the late 1980s. Coming to hip-hop through graffiti, breakdancing, and MCing, Dokta represents an early generation of African hip-hop practitioners who understood the culture as a tool for education, community engagement, and social critique.

“I don’t make art just to make it beautiful. I make art to talk to the people.”

As a founding member of the Doxandem Squad and the creator of FESTIGRAFF, one of Africa’s most significant international graffiti festivals, Dokta has helped position African graffiti within global hip-hop networks while maintaining its grounding in local realities. In this conversation, he explains how graffiti in African contexts functions differently than in Europe or the United States—serving not only as visual culture, but as a form of public pedagogy that speaks directly to everyday social and political conditions.

“Graffiti is respect—respect for the community, and respect given back.”

Dokta discusses mentoring youth, resisting artistic imitation, and the responsibility of hip-hop artists to remain accountable to the communities they represent. His reflections offer valuable insight into African hip-hop as a lived practice, an archive of urban experience, and a form of knowledge production.