This paper is a gendered reading of the hip hop song "Kenyan Girl/Kenyan Boy" by the female emcee and singer Nazizi Hirji. Using Karlyn Kohr Campbell's conception of agency as ambiguous and promiscuous, the
paper is a postcolonial critique that reads the language of love used in the song as presenting heterosexual urban romance in symbolic terms that endorse different forms of intimacy. In relation to her male collaborator, Kevin Wyre (Kevin Waire) aka The Love Child, Nazizi disrupts conventional attitudes toward men and women through the use of the language of love in subversive contexts. The paper cautions against premature celebration of the liberatory status of African hip hop.