"I am not Afro anything": Afrobeats and the Philosophy of Language

by Olukemi Lijadu

Oldschool Afrobeats Mix: Kem Kem for Jupiter Magazine
"The history and utility of black music […] enable us to trace something of the means through which the unity of ethics and politics has been reproduced as a form of folk knowledge. This subculture often appears to be the intuitive expression of some racial essence but is in fact an elementary historical acquisition produced from the viscera of an alternative body of cultural and political expression that considers the world critically from the point of view of its emancipatory transformation." —Paul Gilroy¹

Let's go back to my girlhood, well before Afrobeats was on a global stage. I am ensconced between the two wooden speakers on either side of our living room. It is sometime in the late '90s and my father slips a CD into the stereo system. We sit, bathed in anticipation as it loads. The distant sounds of cars racing, the chorus of Lagos generators sputtering to provide electricity, and the nightly serenade of grasshoppers and crickets flood in from the outside. Then here it is in our room, in our ears— the song. I cannot remember what it was called, I was too young, but I remember the feeling it roused in my soul, something between happiness and sadness. Music does this—it pushes against language that seeks to classify and categorise. Genre is just part of the lexicon we use to attempt to make sense of it. In actuality, music resists such projects of "sense," and alchemises, instead, the complexity of our experience into sine waves that vibrate through us and with us in all our messy glory. To focus on categorisation is to miss the point, to classify as genre is just one pathway into the infinity that is music.

In the first track of Morayo, we encounter a field recording from the funeral service held to honour the mother of the proverbial prince of Afrobeats. The album, a sonic memorial to Wizkid's matriarch, opens with the crooning voice of Fuji music legend Kwam 1 hailing the bereaved artist and addressing the Nigerian music industry:

Wizkid! Nigerian entertainment industry Gbogbo wa, lo n ki ẹ o Motunde, bi ṣe n de

Wizkid! Nigerian entertainment industry We are all greeting you I have come in my usual way

Though seemingly innocuous, this opening alludes to the tense relationship Wizkid is working through with the industry itself as well as its attendant technology of categorization: "genre." Come March of 2024, in the wake of his loss² and before the album was released, the artist declared that he wanted nothing to do with the genre of Afrobeats: a provocative counterpoint to the crescendo of a resounding "Afrobeats to the world!" agenda. Our starboy took to his Instagram story with a thin cursive font, a solid black background, and a disavowal of the genre that "made" him, with a series of images saying a metaphorical to hell with Afrobeats! In this series of statements, he wrote definitively that he is not an Afrobeats artist, in fact…

Screenshot of an Instagram story post made by Wizkid (@wizkidayo) showing the following text: "I am not Afro anything bitch!" in white cursive font on a black background.
Wizkid was not alone. It might be easy to ignore a solo, but when a chorus rises we must recognise that it is following a tune. In the same year another one of the continent's most prolific artists, Flavour N'abania, similarly proclaimed that he is not an Afrobeats artist. Feeding the chorus further, Simi, the heralded Afrobeats darling, and Ghana's King Promise each expressed that Afrobeats has morphed into a genre marker that muffles and stifles the breadth and depth of musicians' talent in the country. Understandably, much of the Nigerian public and Afrobeats devotees writ large were hurt, disappointed, and offended, but to dismiss these evocations as mere tantrums or delusions of grandeur is to overlook the long and contentious history that Nigerian/African/black artists have had with the notion of genre in music.

Let us linger for a brief but imperative moment to mark a delineation between the often confused terms: Afrobeats and her ancestor Afrobeat. The latter is a sound that emerged in the '70s as a product of transatlantic migrations and cross-pollination and is most associated with the immortal Fela Kuti. Afrobeat collaged a riveting combination of funk, highlife, and jazz. Colloquially, Afrobeats refers to the contemporary African genre that emerged in Nigeria in the early 2000s and has re-emerged as a hypernym in recent times, a sort of catch-all term for music emerging from the continent. Again, Afrobeat is the ancestor of Afrobeats, but they are not the same.

The term Afrobeats was an afterthought; for much of the early 2000s there was no explicit term for it. The music of early Afrobeats artists such as Plantashun Boiz, P-Square, Blackmagic, and Weird MC is what we would simply call Nigerian rap, hip hop, R&B, or even just Nigerian music. The term "Afrobeats" was coined by UK-based Ghanaian DJ Abrantee and popularized in 2011 through the circulation of his radio broadcast on London-based station Choice FM, which he called The Afrobeats Show. He played the exciting new music coming out of Ghana and Nigeria but because he was playing this music on the radio, a name was needed for these sonic forms coming out of West Africa; and it stuck. Since then a litany of subgenres such as afro-pop, afro-fusion, afro-sexy,³ and alté have emerged. Many have argued that the term Afrobeats continued to emerge explicitly as a marketing tactic, particularly used to describe this emergent genre to Western audiences.⁴

When looking across the Atlantic, we can contextualise Wizkid's frustrations amidst a long line of black artists pushing back against the notion of genre, which has had a contentious relationship with black cultural output more broadly. Artists time and time again have spoken out about feeling limited, stifled, and flattened by classification. Duke Ellington once said, "I don't write jazz. I write Negro folk music."⁵ In the film Miles Ahead (2015), Miles Davis remarked "don't call it "jazz," man. That's some made-up word. Trying to box somebody in."⁶ Then we land in 2020 when, following Tyler, The Creator's Grammy win for Best Rap Album, he shared: "whenever we—and I mean guys that look like me—do anything that's genre-bending or that's anything, they always put it in a rap or urban category [...] I don't like that 'urban' word, it's just a politically correct way to say the n-word to me." In the '70s, as African artists were breaking into the American sphere of listenership, they faced a different but similar dismissal. The varied sounds emerging from the continent—Fela Kuti's afrobeat, Mariam Makeba's jazz, and King Sunny Adé's juju music—were all bundled under the banner of world music, thereby denying the continent's musical output its inherent complexity. Traditionally and according to ethnomusicologists, genre is understood to be the organisation of music according to shared principles, either technical or thematic. But when it comes to black music, there is an added dimension, a racial component, which marshalls genres like "afrobeats" and "world music" as implicit racial classifiers. This is the dimension that the aforementioned artists, among others, are pushing against and it is a hermeneutical concern.

Ludwig Wittgenstein's treatise on the philosophy of language provides a framework through which we can explore the reflexive nature of a genre as it concerns black musical output and Afrobeats, specifically. Wittgenstein urges us to think about language not as a mere 1:1 relationship to reality, rather he argues that language is made of a game of associations. What person A associates with the term Afrobeats might be different from what person B associates with Afrobeats, which creates a chasm of understanding. So, though perhaps A and B might be engaged in a discussion wherein person A makes a statement referring to the genre with a particular meaning in mind, one that serves, for them, as a direct mirror to their experience of Afrobeats, person B is likely hearing and understanding something totally different.

I think of this in terms of the evolution of my relationship to the word "tribe" after moving from my hometown of Lagos, Nigeria to Buckinghamshire in the UK for school at the age of 14. Growing up in Lagos, I understood myself as a member of the tribes of my mother and father: Yoruba and Edo. Within the context of my upbringing, a tribe referred to the network of people from all walks of life with whom I shared a deep historical and cultural framework. I was proud of my tribe(s). When I think of Yoruba people, I think of my grandmother, Mary Otolorin Lijadu—who is the most dynamic woman I know—and her vast portfolio of stories of Ijapa⁷ and his antics, or the fact that I cannot see an elder without my knees dropping to curtsy. Thinking about Edo people I think of my grandfather, John Ediale, and all his ineffable dignity; how new cousins from his hometown would relentlessly pop up unannounced on their prodigal arrivals to the big city.

Curiously, upon arriving in the West, I realised that to say "tribe" would conjure up a totally different image in the minds of my less exposed British peers. Laughably, to say tribe intimated visions of black people holding sticks, chanting in circles. I then understood that there were two of what Wittgenstein terms language-games at play here. My language-game associated tribe merely with family, my village, my people. It cut across class backgrounds, the urban-rural divide, and united us through culture and history. The second language-game, enacted by my new classmates, was caught up in antiquated and racist Conrad-esque notions of the heart of darkness. Consequently, I made a decision to no longer use the word tribe when speaking to non-African people as we were not playing the same language-game. But to go to my people and disavow the word tribe, even though amongst ourselves we are speaking in the first language-game, would be to center the second language-game. Herein, I heed Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o's call that if we are to decolonise our minds, we must first decolonise our language.

We cannot allow the Western conception of structures of kinship, nor structures of musical genre, to dominate our understanding of them. Of course there is a human need to classify and understand things, but much of the frustrations of black artists throughout history is not towards genres themselves, but rather towards how they are wielded and operate within a racist marketplace. Fundamentally, we must diagnose "genre" as it is deployed in the contemporary moment, as a market-based approach.

The problem with the genre-fication of Afrobeats is that it suggests a homogeneous sound and ethnic loyalty incongruous with the fluid and dynamic nature of music and musical exchange. This is further complicated by the popular imagination of Africa on a global stage, where anything to do with Africa is somehow seen as homogenous. A unified, and thus narrow, definition of Afrobeats is easier to sell, as it plays into existing limited conceptions of Africa and Africans, whereas a vast and multifarious conception of the genre is not as easy to market. Consequently artists who want to be recognised for their range rebuke an association with it. But no genre begins like that.

This is where Wizkid may be said to have erred in his formulation. There is something to be said for an artist who expresses frustration at feeling they have outgrown the sounds of their genesis. However, in his distancing from the market-based, limiting language-game of Afrobeats, he distances himself from those who see it in terms of the expansive⁸ and exciting language-game of Afrobeats. In the early 2000s, I remember seeing a young Wizkid and cherishing how he represented us youth in Nigeria, influenced by the sounds that we heard on Channel O and MTV Base, but informed by our surroundings. That's how Afrobeats began. Before a category, it just was and what it was, was true.

I made a pair of diagrams through which to think about these two different but very real understandings of Afrobeats as a genre. I read and I continue to read Wizkid's pronouncements in the context of the rigid language-game, that is Afrobeats as defined by the "genre-market."⁹ But I hope that we can return to an understanding of Afrobeats as expansive, generative, and ours.


Language game diagrams courtesy of Olukemi Lijadu: two purple, spherical forms which illustrate the differences between understanding the Afrobeats genre as 'rigid' vs 'expansive'.
Plantashun Boiz, M.I, Blackmagic, 9ice, Naeto C, Brymo, Sasha P, Weird MC, Dagrin: the Afrobeats I grew up on are something to be proud of. ¹⁰ They were non-stop on the radio and hawkers sold copies of their CDs on the streets of Lagos. This was real culture:

I move from Shitta, enter Christ Avenue (Gen, gen) When I get nothing but the vibes and my crew (Oh, no)

(Track 16, "Pray," Morayo)
I was sixteen years old in 2011, when I bought a copy of Wizkid's debut album Superstar from a street hawker. I remember seeing this young boy—he could have been my cousin—with shades on, a snapback, and a button-down plaid shirt. We didn't have to see his full outfit to know he was wearing skinny jeans, we all were, and Wizkid was that guy. Superstar was a remarkable sonification of what Paul Gilroy would identify as a Black Atlantic musical product: pidgin and Yoruba over snares and 808s.

Afrobeats is exactly about that moment when Wizkid, at the genesis of this genre, had "nothing but the vibes and my crew." To discard the genre entirely according to the silly and shortsighted way Afrobeats is consumed like many African products is to deny its profound and varied roots. No genre of music worth listening to begins in the market, it begins in the streets, it begins in real life. So for Wizkid to, and on a global stage, dismiss what was/is real based on how it has been distorted by the market and upsurge in interest in African music as a mere commodity could have negative ramifications for the culture—but I get it.

Wizkid is doing the thing that many black artists do when they resist the term Black. Inadvertently, though, through fighting against what they see as a "limitation" and rejecting the term, they are reifying a misled idea that it is inherently constricting, when in reality names like black or Afrobeats, as we wear them, have always encapsulated universes unto themselves. My plea (see the diagrams again) is that we do not centre the rigid and myopic understanding of Afrobeats as a commodity and, rather, that we see and define Afrobeats as a genre as expansively as possible, dynamic and ever-evolving and growing. From Tems's R&B lilt to Rema's fluid layering of Arabic vocal patterns over West African polyrhythms, Afrobeats is boundless and we must continue to define it as such. If an artist seeks to distance themselves from Afrobeats they must make it clear which language-game they are playing or else they reify the market-based approach, which makes the foreign, external, and fundamentally extractive interpretation of the genre become the dominant one. Concurrently, audiences can and should sympathise with the frustrations of artists who seek to create without boundaries and with recognition of their infinitude.

So yes, Wizkid, Afrobeats should not stand in the way of your expansiveness. Language is limited, but that is what we have, and as Africans and people who witnessed the genesis of the genre, we have the power to set the terms of engagement. Wizkid, what will you do with that responsibility?

1. Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (London and New York: Verso, 1993), 15, quoted in Adiva Lawrence, "Afro Modern: Journeys Through the Black Atlantic," Afterall ArtSchool: Black Atlantic Museum, 2023. Accessed February 7, 2025. ↩


2. Writer (and my cousin) Danielle Agbor reminded me of the fact that there is a trend of artists having spirited outbursts following the passing of their mothers. Let's remember two controversies: Kanye West's "Imma let you finish" at the VMAs in 2009 and writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's 2021 treatise, both outbursts in the wake of losing their mothers.↩


3. This is a term coined by contemporary rap musician Brazy. ↩


4. Dotun Ayobade, "Introduction: Afrobeats' Lower Frequencies," The Black Scholar 54, no. 3 (2024): 1¯10, https://doi.org/10.1080/00064246.2024.2370204. ↩


5. Kevin Gaines, "Duke Ellington, Black, Brown and Beige, and the Cultural Politics of Race," Music and the Racial Imagination (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000). ↩


6. Miles Ahead, directed by Don Cheadle (Sony Pictures Classics, 2015), 1:40:00. ↩


7. Ijapa is the name of a mischievous tortoise, a central character in popular Yoruba folktales told to children, and told to me by my grandmother. ↩


8. Rema encapsulates this perspective wonderfully in an interview with MTV at the 2025 Grammys: https://x.com/hypetribeng/status/1886209943956500662. ↩


9. Dave Laing's interesting market-based analysis of genre (2009) as discussed in: Genevieve Allotey-Pappoe, "Genre or Hypernym: Deconstructing Afrobeats in the Global Music Industry," Journal of Popular Music Studies 36, no. 4 (2024): 25¯39,. https://doi.org/10.1525/jpms.2024.36.4.25. ↩


10. What is Afrobeats? is a mix curated by me under my DJ moniker Kem Kem, far from exhaustive it is an audio sketch of the genre's origins/old school Afrobeats that emerged in the early 2000s. In this mix, I set it off with Wizkid's "Oluwa Lo Ni," released in 2011 on his debut album. This first song is a hybrid English/Yoruba song clearly influenced by US West Coast hip hop groups from the skinny jeans era such as the New Boyz and Cali Swag District. An illustrative track, it exemplifies the sonic integration of influences as Wizkid narrates his burgeoning career which began in Ojuelegba, Lagos. Symbolically, the mix concludes with the elusive Blackmagic's "Repete" (2013). Many thanks to those who responded to a question on my Instagram story asking what songs define Afrobeats for them, much of those contributions populate this mix. ↩

Photo by Jay Izzard.

Olukemi Lijadu is a visual and sound artist who works with the moving image, philosophy and music. Lijadu DJs under the moniker Kem Kem. She uses the power of cinema to take viewers on audio-visual journeys of reconnection across the Atlantic. Lijadu approaches music as a living archive of communal memory and lost connections - critical given the fractured history of the Black diaspora worldwide. With heritage from Nigeria, the Caribbean and Brazil, the impetus of her artistic practice is both personal and political. Her academic training as a philosopher deeply informs her experimental approach to her expansive practice- she holds a bachelors and masters degree in philosophy from Stanford University, where she focused on African philosophy. Solo and group exhibitions have been V.O Curations, ICA London, Marian Ibrahim Gallery Chicago, and Manifold Deluxe at Frieze Cork Street London. She was selected as a 2024 Villa Albertine resident where she explored the connections between Chicago House and West African music. She is currently a Speciwomen resident in NY where she continues to deveop her research.