“Africa to the world” has become a popular rallying cry from the continent and its diaspora as the global appetite for its culture has grown rapidly. Many hope to further extend its reach. Yet, as African artisans connect and build upon one another's successes, they've come to center themselves. “Made in Africa” is a monthly column by “Rolling Stone” staff writer Mankaprr Conteh that celebrates and interrogates the lives, concerns, and innovations of African musicians from their vantage point.
In their latest projects, Oscar-winning actor Lupita Nyong'o and Afrobeats hitmaker Oxlade put their particular African nationalities in the background of a wider, diasporic vision. Last week, Nyong'o (best known for stunning roles in Black Panther, 12 Years a Slaveand (Us) debuted Mind Your Owna podcast that tells the stories of real Africans across the globe alongside her own. It's in the vein of the popular public radio show This American Lifewhich Nyong'o took to when she came to the US after growing up in her native Kenya and Mexico. I talked to her about it over Zoom, Nyong'o looking stately in a dark turtleneck and cardigan, her thin locks pulled back. She was in the middle of a press tour for her latest film, The Wild Robot.
“When I first moved to this country back in 2003, I was very homesick,” she told me of her new podcast's origins. “I had spent my life watching American TV and films, listening to American music and all that. But still, moving here, it felt alien to me. America isn't exactly like you see on those things. I was in a class, and a teacher mentioned This American Life. I started listening to that; it made me feel, I don't know — so much more welcomed in, because they're very intimate stories about ordinary Americans. It really expands your understanding of what it means to be American, one story at a time. I just thought, ”Wow, how nice would it be to just sit and listen to stories from the African perspective?”
The day after Mind Your Own debuted, Oxlade (best known for the lovely smash “Ku Lo Sa”) dropped his debut album. Rich with deep musicality and intention, the record is called Oxlade From Africa. That sees him plant his flag on wide terrain — not Oxlade From Surulere, Oxlade From Lagos, or even Oxlade From Nigeriabut Oxlade From Africa. Now, no African needs to be told that Africa — with 54 countries and several thousand ethnic groups and languages — is big as hell. In many ways, it is not one thing or one place; it does not have one perspective. Nyong'o also had this front of mind in the making of her podcast.
“One of the things that I was very clear about is that I didn't want to go to stories that were well known,” she said. “I think that when we hear from Africa, it's usually these hot-button issues. It's about political unrest, it's about corruption, it's about disease, famine — these negative things that then paint an unfair picture of what it is to live on the African continent. I didn't want to shy away from those things, but I wanted to find new angles and quirkier stories, more individual and rare, so that even the African listening to the podcast can experience an expansion of their own understanding of what it means to be African, because we are not the same.”
But all that unrest Nyong'o points to — the product of a history of calculated disenfranchisement all over the continent — is perhaps one of the reasons we're quick to unify under one banner, different as we are. Scholars like British Jamaican sociologist Stuart Hall and Black American cultural critic bell hooks have written about the way Black people globally have seen ourselves in monocultures as we've found ourselves on the same margins, thrust there as the antithesis of whiteness, as means to an end under capitalism, as less than human. Both Mind Your Own and Oxlade From Africa are the works of two artists pushing us to the center, holding space at once for what unites and divides us.
The first episode of Mind Your Own is largely about Yaw Atta-Owusu, a Ghanaian living in Germany when he serendipitously earns an opportunity to play drums from a man at the post office who happened to assume he was a musician. Atta-Owusu tells the man he was a drummer, though he had actually never touched a drum set before. Soon enough though, he becomes very good, and then puts much of his time and money into making music of his own, as Ata Kak. He produces his own album, Obaa Simawhere he raps in Twi and takes influence from house and highlife. Despite the hardships of getting his solo career off the ground, raising a young family with little income, and the tragedy of deportation hitting close to home, Atta-Owusu finds success in unexpected places.
Nyong'o prefaces his story with one of her own, about how her accent has become a hybrid, like Obaa Sima. When she began her acting career in the US, she worked to develop an American accent so convincing it could assure her work, but after she landed her breakout role in 12 Years a Slaveshe decided to revert to her Kenyan one. She was going to send a message that her African accent had value, too. Yet, the Kenyan accent as she knew it was gone. Her natural voice was not just Kenyan, but American, and a little British — a hybrid of the experiences she had accumulated.
Afrobeats has had a similar evolution — in the documentaries Afrobeats: The Backstory and Journey of the Beatsit's described as a hybrid in and of itself, influenced by hip-hop. But as Afrobeats has grown popular globally, artists with naturally diverse tastes have also been made to consider what will be popular in the West. Some worry that influence has become less passive — less from observing Western music, and more by the hand of the Western music industry itself.
This globalization is something people like journalist Joey Akan have expressed trepidation around. “Our artists don't live here, they routinely deny and reduce the culture for foreign acceptance, and treat home fans with disdain,” he wrote in an essay on and hype. Forever mine, rarely the location of any major infrastructure investment. We don't own our music. Our art isn't published and marketed from Nigerian offices. And our contracts don't have a drop of local in them. We sold our culture for money.”
Nyong'o — who listens to music constantly and uses it to develop the characters she plays — has an interesting take on these concerns, and on what we stand to gain and lose from globalization more broadly. “I am so happy to have access to African music from where I sit,” she told me. “That wasn't always the case, so it feels so good to walk into a club in Germany, hear Wizkid, and have people sing along, even if they don't know those Pidgin words. I have sung in languages I don't understand all my life. And so to have other people sing in languages from my continent, from people that look like me, it's validating. Suddenly, it's not exotic. You don't have to go to the ethnic aisle to get it. It's right there front and center.”
This validation, she says, is not without pause, though: “I think as Africans, the thing that we have to ask ourselves is 'Are we only valuable if the West sees us?' I don't want to believe that, but I also don't want to be naive to think that Western acknowledgment and acceptance of us is not important. At the end of the day, the industry is dictated by the West. I think it's important to acknowledge that, but not to pander to it.”
This is how she approached Mind Your Ownwhich she thinks of like dinner-party conversations between Africans and others. “I understand that the people who are going to pay for me to do Mind Your Own will be primarily American,” she says. “In fact, it was very hard for us to find advertisers on the African continent, because podcasting is so young [there] that its value to the commercial market is still skeptical. I know I want to have confidence in the fact that I trust my intentions. My agenda is primarily to speak to and serve the African diaspora.”
“I think we all just have to check ourselves as we do this, that we're not ending up in a neocolonialist situation where suddenly we are creating for the West, that our criteria for creativity is to serve anyone other than ourselves,” she continues. In another analogy, she compares that creative output to a meal: “If I'm serving my African dish here and you are interested in taking a bite and celebrating it, come on. But I don't want to change my food just so you buy it.”
THE SINGER OXLADE may have thought similarly, and to that end, his new album, Oxlade From Africa, sounds like a crossover record. Though Camila Cabello was tapped for a remix of “Ku Lo Sa” (à la the Justin Bieber version of “Essence”), the nearest the album reaches toward a Western pop star is Dave, the popular British Nigerian rapper. What's more, Oxlade primarily populated his debut with a spate of relative elders: Beloved but embattled Ugandan politician and musician Bobi Wine christens the album after it opens with tape from the devastating End SARS massacres of 2020, in which Oxlade's manager OjahBee (also featured on the album) was arrested. While protesting police brutality, OjahBee suffered a brain injury that Oxlade blamed on Nigerian police.
Elsewhere, Oxlade meshes seamlessly with Congolese singer of nearly 30 years Fally Ipupa, and Nigerian crooners Flavor and Wande Coal, both of whom have been in the game for roughly two decades. These are artists whose longevity has remained not on crossover, but on the ability to make canonical and distinctly African anthems that people of all ages have enjoyed. Even his embrace of Popcaan — the Jamaican DJ who has earned his stripes on the scene since the late aughts — shows a reverence for the long and constant exchange between Africa and the Caribbean. On his song “Katigori,” Oxlade sings of upholding the musical legacy before him, a charge to himself he tries to be taking seriously.
Oxlade From Africa does establish the singer as uniquely promising. He names his songs by her in his own language, phoneticizing English words in his Nigerian accent (the song “Ku Lo Sa” means “Closer,” “Kategori” is “Category,” “Ovami” is “Over Me,” “Ifa ,” is “If I”). He has a cheeky sense of humor, like when he wails, “Oh, my goodness, she she's a hoe,” as a devastated realization on “Intoxycated,” or insists, “I no be Gen Z,” on “Arabami.” He sings romantically about her confidence and purpose, pointing lovestruck ballads toward himself.
However, he also uses the album to honor who and what came before him, beating a path for him to follow. Similarly, with Mind Your Own, Nyong'o used her success as a fictional storyteller to create a platform for real Africans to also tell their stories. A 2022 study of global attitudes toward collectivism versus individualism found that Sub-Saharan Africans regarded themselves as other-oriented — driven to help people — more often than citizens of any other region. So, if there is one thing that is deeply African, it is, perhaps, this kind of communal reverence.
Loosies: Here's some of what Lupita Nyong'o has been loving lately.
Ayra Starr“Last Heartbreak Song”: “First of all, that's a brilliant name for a song, and it's my mantra right now.”
Wanja Wohoro“Splinters”: “She's also my sister-in-law, and I love her music.”
Lisa Oduor-Noah“Jahera”: “She sings in my mother tongue [Luo]and I love it. [This] a love song, and it just is so beautiful.”
