by Alan MacLeod
Through its myriad of agencies, the United States government has recruited and groomed rappers from around the world to further its political interests. Washington has spent tens of millions of dollars funding, training, and promoting artists who foment public discontent, organize protests, and lead color revolutions in nations in its crosshairs.
In Bangladesh and Senegal, U.S.-funded rappers led political movements that toppled governments. Washington-backed musicians were the face of a failed counter-revolution in Cuba, and will likely be called upon again by the Trump administration. And artists in dozens of countries worldwide (including the U.S. itself) are paid to promote American government interests.
This is the story of how the U.S. government uses hip hop, a medium of struggle pioneered by Black artists in New York, as a tool for regime change.
Part 2 - Senegal: the revolution will be organized
If Bangladesh was the perfect insurrection, Senegal was the blueprint. Western media called it the “Rap Revolution.” In 2012, enormous protests against President Abdoulaye Wade broke out. The 85-year-old leader was seeking a controversial third term in office, and was attempting to bring his son, Karim, into high office – a move many critics saw as Wade trying to establish a family dynasty.
The demonstrations were led by a rap collective called “Y’En a Marre” (Enough is Enough). Y’En a Marre capitalized on public discontent over corruption, blackouts, and economic stagnation, inflaming tensions and encouraged people out on the streets.
One rapper in particular had been sowing the seeds for action for quite some time. In 2010, Cheikh Oumar Touré, known by his stage name, Thiat, released the song with his group, the Keurgui Crew called “Coup 2 Guele” (Diatribe), in which he and his partner, Kilifeu, excoriated Wade and called for a revolution.
“Old man, your seven year presidential reign has been expensive,” “You cheated during the last elections,” “This lusty regime has wasted all our money,” he raps. “Let’s fight this buffoon who is stealing all our money” he tells his countrymen, while concluding that the people of Senegal must “act on our words in the same way we resisted Hitler and De Gaulle.”
Surprisingly, the Kergui Crew immediately released an English version of the song, suggesting their intended audience was not purely Senegalese. Thiat was elevated to stardom in the West, where he received a great deal of positive press, long before the protests even began.
Coup 2 Guele became the soundtrack to the struggle, and Wade was decisively beaten at the ballot box, as Western media applauded this innovative form of activism. Thiat and Y’En a Marre became known worldwide as “the rappers who took down a dictator.”
Many expected Thiat to formally enter electoral politics. Instead, however, one of his first major post-revolution moves was to announce that he had been appointed a Reagan-Fascell Democracy Fellow at the National Endowment for Democracy (NED).
The NED was explicitly set up as a front group of the Central Intelligence Agency.
In the wake of a series of public scandals that seriously hurt the agency’s credibility, the Reagan administration established the NED in 1983. It proceeded to act as a front group for the CIA, carrying out many of its most controversial regime change operations abroad, in an effort to give the U.S. some level of plausible deniability. The endowment interfered in the 1996 Russian elections to ensure U.S. puppet Boris Yeltsin remained in power. Six years later, it bankrolled a briefly successful coup against Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez. It has also funded and supported insurrections in Ukraine, Hong Kong, and Belarus, among other countries.
Although it is funded and staffed by the U.S. government and its officials, the NED is technically a private entity, meaning it is not subject to the same transparency laws and public scrutiny as a body like the CIA.
In their more candid moments, NED leaders are unequivocal about the organization’s role. “It would be terrible for democratic groups around the world to be seen as subsidized by the CIA,” Carl Gershman, NED president from 1984 to 2021, said, explaining why his organization was set up. NED co-founder Allen Weinstein agreed: “A lot of what we do today was done covertly 25 years ago by the CIA,” he told The Washington Post.
USAID – an official government body – has functioned in much the same way, acting as a CIA front group, spying on both enemy and friendly countries, and organizing countless coups around the world. When the Trump administration cut funding to USAID last year, it inadvertently exposed a global network of over 6,000 journalists and nearly 1,000 “independent” media outlets that suddenly faced immediate bankruptcy. In 2025, USAID and its activities were formally subsumed into the State Department.
It was this context that explains why so many were shocked when Thiat made his announcement, and led some to wonder how much the United States was involved in the seemingly spontaneous, grassroots uprising.
Certainly, the NED had been agitating in Senegal for years. In 2006, it funded a project whose public goal was to “strengthen understanding and advocacy for democracy among the urban middle class and youth in Senegal.” The NED’s local partners, it stated, would “lead a civic education campaign on democracy consisting of a series of published investigative reports on Senegal’s democratic development and training seminars for young people, civic organizations, and political parties.
Another 2009 NED project, entitled “Partners for Democratic Change” promised to “create a platform for dialogue between civil and military actors in Senegal,” suggesting that Washington was eager for its chosen activists to have closer ties to the military.
The Reagan-Fascell Fellowship gave Thiat an international platform, and allowed him to travel worldwide. The fellowship, the NED itself noted, provided him the time and resources to compose a new album.
Thiat, however, appears to dismiss any criticism or claims of U.S. involvement in Senegal. In a recent interview, he stated that, “We are showing that we can change everything without the intervention of other countries and without military interventions. And without the West, of course.” “Most African presidents are puppets of the West,” concluded the NED-funded activist.
Washington continues to fund hip hop artists in Senegal. In 2018, the NED’s sister organization, USAID, collaborated with political rapper, Last Under to produce an album, while in 2023, it partnered with Sister LB to release a track to promote “transparency and accountability” in the country’s extractive industries.
And if there is one Senegalese rapper that receives more effusive Western press coverage than Thiat, it is Babacar Niang, better known as Matador. “You can learn everything you need to know about the main challenges facing Africa today by talking to just two people in Senegal: the rapper and the weatherman” wrote Thomas Friedman in the pages of The New York Times, describing Matador as a “pioneer,” and the “voice of the voiceless,” and featuring him in his documentary, “Years of Living Dangerously.”
Perhaps unsurprisingly, then, Matador is also closely connected to Washington. Africulturban, the multimedia center he cofounded, is directly funded by the U.S. Embassy in Dakar.
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