Burna Boy nabbed a feature on the 2020 list of Time’s “Next Generation Leaders”.
“The real Africa has not been shown. For a long time, the world has only seen videos of little kids and their ribs, asking for donations,” the "Ye" singer said in a chat with Time.
Burna Boy, whose career kicked off in 2012 has released numerous fan favourite hits that have earned him millions of streams and global recognition.
“I’m just a singer, I’m just here to sing according to what my eyes have seen. I’m not here to play any role, but if the most high decides that I must, then so be it” Burna boy said when asked what role he hopes he can play in the revolution.
“The real Africa has not been shown. For a long time, the world has only seen videos of little kids and their ribs, asking for donations,” Burna Boy says with a bitter laugh. The Nigerian superstar sits in a London studio, sporting a crisp marbled button-down and immaculately coiffed dreadlocks while serenely holding a cup of Hennessy and Coke, presenting a very different image indeed.
No one person can represent an entire continent. But sometimes it seems as though Burna Boy is expected to. At the 2020 Grammys,
the Beninese legend Angélique Kidjo dedicated her trophy for Best World
Music to her fellow nominee, saying he was “changing the way our
continent is perceived.” And Damini Ogulu, known as Burna Boy, isn’t
shying away from the responsibility. Since his career took off in 2012,
he has released a string of hits that have earned him hundreds of
millions of streams and a growing list of admirers, from Kidjo to
Beyoncé to Barack Obama. Last year, he sold out London’s Wembley SSE Arena.
Following January’s Grammys, the 29-year-old began writing songs for Twice as Tall, his fifth studio album, released in August to critical acclaim. The work spearheads a conception of Africa far more expansive than the tired stereotypes of starving children and more complex than the utopian reveries of Beyoncé’s Black Is King or Marvel’s Black Panther; it teems with mercenaries and protectors, Nigerian Afro-beats and British grime, terror and grace. “If I don’t live in or love my home,” Burna Boy asks over Zoom, “then who will?”
Burna Boy’s story sprawls beyond the geographical and cultural confines of his continent. He grew up in Port Harcourt, Nigeria, and went to university in the U.K. He listened to his idol, the Nigerian pioneer Fela Kuti (his grandfather was Kuti’s manager), and American hip-hop acts like Naughty by Nature. By his early 20s, he was a robust freestyler and a genre-crossing songwriter when songs like his jubilant “Like to Party” started garnering attention, first in Lagos and then the world.
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