“From Africa to the World” is a common slogan on the continent and in its diaspora amid a surge in global interest in African culture. Many want to expand their influence even further. But as African artisans connect and build on each other’s success, they’re putting themselves at the center. “Made in Africa” is a monthly column by Rolling Stone staff writer Mankapuru Conteh that celebrates and interrogates the lives, interests, and innovations of African musicians from their perspective.
In their latest films, Oscar-winning actress Lupita Nyong’o and Afrobeats hitmaker Oxlade place their respective African nationalities in the context of a broader diasporic vision. Last week, Nyong’o (best known for her stellar roles in Black Panther, 12 Years a Slave, and Us) debuted Mind Your Own, a podcast that tells real African stories from around the world, along with her own. It’s in the vein of This American Life, the popular public radio show that Nyong’o started after coming to the U.S. after growing up in her native Kenya and Mexico. I spoke with her about it over Zoom. Nyong’o looked confident in her dark turtleneck and cardigan, her thinning hair slicked back. She was in the middle of a press tour for her latest film, Wild Robots.
“When I first moved to this country in 2003, I was super homesick,” she said of the beginnings of her new podcast. “I’d spent my whole life watching American TV and movies and listening to American music, but when I moved here it felt foreign to me. America is not what you see on those shows. My teacher mentioned ‘This American Life’ in class, and I started listening to it and felt so welcome because it’s such an intimate story about everyday Americans. It really gives you a deeper understanding of what it means to be an American, story by story. I just thought, ‘Wow, it would be great to just sit down and listen to a story from an African perspective.'”
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The day after Mind Your Own debuted, Oxlade (best known for the lovely smash hit “Ku Lo Sa”) released his debut album. Rich with deep musicality and intent, the record is called Oxlade From Africa. It means he’s planting his flag in a vast land. Not Oxlade From Surulere, not Oxlade From Lagos, not Oxlade From Nigeria, but Oxlade From Africa. It goes without saying to any African that Africa, with 54 countries and thousands of peoples and languages, is incredibly vast. In many ways, Africa is not one thing, one place, or one perspective. Nyong’o also had this in mind when creating the podcast.
“One thing I was very clear about was that I didn’t want to cover stories that are well known,” she said. “I think when you hear stories from Africa, it’s usually all these sensational issues – political unrest, corruption, disease, hunger – all these negative things that paint an unfair picture of what it means to live on the continent. I didn’t want to shy away from these things, but I wanted to find new perspectives, unusual stories, stories that are more personal and unusual, so that Africans listening to the podcast can also experience a broadening of their understanding of what it means to be African, because we’re not the same.”
But all the insecurities Nyong’o points out are products of a history of planned disenfranchisement across the continent, and maybe that’s one reason we’re so quick to unite under one flag, no matter how different we are. Scholars such as British Jamaican sociologist Stuart Hall and black American cultural critic bell hooks have written about how black people around the world have seen themselves in a monoculture; we’re on the periphery, thrust there as the opposite of white people, as a means to an end under capitalism, as less than human. Both Mind Your Own and Oxlade From Africa are the work of two artists who push us to the center while simultaneously giving space to both what unites us and what divides us.
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The first episode of Mind Your Own primarily follows the story of Yaw Atta Owusu, a Ghanaian living in Germany who gets a chance to play drums with a man at the post office who happens to think he’s a musician. Atta Owusu tells the man he’s a drummer, but has never actually touched a drum set. But he soon becomes very good at it, and then spends a lot of time and money making his own music as Atta Kak. He produces his own album, Obaa Sima, in which he raps in Twi, influenced by house and highlife. Despite getting his solo career off the ground, raising a young family on a tight income, and the tragedy of impending deportation, Atta Owusu finds success in an unexpected place.
Nyong’o prefaces her story by explaining how, like Obaa Shima, her accent has become a hybrid. When she began her acting career in the US, she worked hard to develop a convincing American accent that would secure her work, but after landing her breakout role in 12 Years a Slave, she decided to revert to her Kenyan accent, hoping to send the message that African accents have value. But the Kenyan accent she knew had disappeared. Her natural voice was not only Kenyan, but also American and slightly British, a hybrid of her accumulated experiences.
Afrobeats has undergone a similar evolution. In the documentaries Afrobeats: The Backstory and Journey of the Beats, it is portrayed as a hip-hop-influenced hybrid. But as Afrobeats has grown in popularity globally, artists with originally diverse tastes have been forced to consider what will be popular in the West. Some worry that Afrobeats’ influence is becoming passive, not from observing Western music, but from the influence of the Western music industry itself.
This globalization is what has people like journalist Joey Akan expressing anxiety. “Our artists don’t live here, they routinely deny and diminish their culture in order to be accepted by foreigners, and they belittle local fans,” he wrote in an essay for X. “And yet, Lagos has been reduced to a city of titillation and hype. Forever mine, and major infrastructure investments are rarely made. We don’t own our music, our art is not published or sold from offices in Nigeria, and our contracts have no local element whatsoever. We’ve sold out our culture for money.”
Nyong’o, who has always listened to music and used it to shape the characters she plays, has an interesting take on these concerns, and on what we gain and lose from globalization more broadly. “I’m very happy to have access to African music from where I am,” she told me. “It wasn’t always like this, but it feels so good to go into a club in Germany and hear Wizkid and people are singing along even though you don’t know pidgin. I’ve been singing my whole life in a language I don’t understand, so to hear people who look like me singing in the same continent’s language is validation. Suddenly it’s not exotic. I don’t have to go to the ethnic music shelf to get it. It’s right in front of me.”
But this recognition hasn’t come without hesitation, she says: “I think as Africans, the question we have to ask ourselves is, ‘Are we only valuable if the West recognises us?’ I don’t want to believe that, but I also don’t want to be naive to think that it’s not important for the West to recognise and accept us. At the end of the day, this industry is dominated by the West. I think it’s important to recognise that, but not to pander to it.”
This is how she approached Mind Your Own. She sees Mind Your Own as a kind of dinner party conversation between Africans and other people. “I understand that it’s mainly Americans who pay me to produce Mind Your Own,” she says. “In fact, it was very difficult to find advertisers on the African continent, because podcasting is still young (on the continent) and there is still skepticism about its value in the commercial market. I want to be confident in the fact that I believe in my intentions, which are to speak to and serve mainly African immigrants.”
“I think we all need to check ourselves as we do this, that we don’t suddenly get into a neocolonial situation where we’re creating for the West, that our standards of creativity are for somebody else but ourselves,” she continues. In another analogy, she likens the creative output to a meal: “If I serve African food here and you want to have a bite and enjoy it, go ahead. But I don’t want to change the food so you can buy it.”
Singer Oxlade may have thought the same way, which is why his new album, Oxlade From Africa, sounds like a crossover record. Though he tapped Camila Cabello for the remix of “Ku Lo Sa” (Justin Bieber’s version of “Essence”), the closest thing to a Western pop star on the album is popular British-Nigerian rapper Dave. Moreover, Oxlade mostly tapped older artists for his debut album. The beloved but embattled Ugandan politician and musician Bobi Wine gave the album its title after the album opens with a tape of the devastating post-SARS massacre in 2020, which saw the arrest of Oxlade’s manager, Ojabie (who also appears on the album). While protesting police brutality, Ojabie suffered brain damage, which Oxlade blames on the Nigerian police.
Oxlade also blends in well with Fally Ipupa, a Congolese singer who has been active for nearly 30 years, and Nigerian crooners Flavour and Wande Coal, both of whom have been in the industry for around 20 years. The longevity of these two artists is due not to crossover but to their ability to create authentic African anthems that can be enjoyed by people of all ages. His preference for Jamaican DJ Popcaan, who has been making a name for himself on the scene since the late 2000s, is also a tribute to the long and continuous exchange between Africa and the Caribbean. In the song “Katigori,” Oxlade sings about preserving the musical traditions he has inherited, showing how seriously he takes his calling.
Oxlade From Africa makes it clear that this singer is uniquely promising. He titles his songs in his own language and pronounces English words with a Nigerian accent (“Ku Lo Sa” is “Closer,” “Kategori” is “Category,” “Ovami” is “Over Me,” and “Ifa” is “If I”). He has a cheeky sense of humor, lamenting heartbreaking realizations (“Oh my God, she’s a bitch” on “Intoxycated” and asserting “I’m not Gen Z” on “Arabami.” He romanticizes about confidence and purpose, directing love-struck ballads at himself.
But throughout the album, he has also paid tribute to the people and things that came before him, paving the way for himself to follow. Similarly, with Mind Your Own, Nyong’o has used his success as a fictional storyteller to create a platform for real Africans to tell their own stories. A 2022 study of global attitudes towards collectivism and individualism found that sub-Saharan Africans consider themselves more other-oriented – people who try to help others – than residents of any other region. So if there’s anything deeply African, perhaps it’s this kind of communal respect.
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Loosies: Here are some of Lupita Nyong’o’s recent favorites.
Ira Starr, “The Last Heartbreak Song”: “First of all, that’s a great song title. And that’s my mantra right now.”
Wanja Woholo, “Sprinters”: “She’s also my sister-in-law and I love her music.”
Lisa Oduor Noah, “Jahera”: “She sings in my native language (Luo) and I love it. (It’s) a love song and it’s so beautiful.”
