Adventures of an Afro-Gypsy: how to make hip-hop by way of Africa, America and Transylvania

Emmanuel Owusu-Bonsu was born in Ploiești, Romania at the tail end of the Cold War, his mother a Romanian and his father a Ghanaian engineering student. His story is just one example of the intersections between post-independence African states and east European socialist sponsors — in this case Kwame Nkrumah’s Ghana and Nicolae Ceaușescu’s Romania. After spending his youth in Accra, Owusu-Bonsu re-emerged as Wanlov the Kubolor: musician, campaigner and self-proclaimed “Afro-Gypsy”. He and fellow MC M3nsa make up the outrageously entertaining hiplife duo FOKN Bois, whose relentless play on cultural and linguistic identity has made them one of the most entertaining pop acts to emerge from modern Ghana.

Video for Jesus is Coming by FOKN Bois

You describe yourself as an “Afro-Gypsy”. What do you mean by that term, which could be considered problematic, given that your mother is not Roma?

“Gypsy” to me has never had the stigma or the negative connotation that it does for some people. For me gypsy has always meant travelling, music and family. When I was young in Romania, the apartment building opposite was pretty dilapidated, with a few Roma families living there. One of my very best friends, Nicoleta, lived on the ground floor: her family put a big hole in the wall so they could bring their horse in. I remember sitting on the floor in the living room leaning against the sleeping horse, watching TV or playing backgammon.

Video for Spr Mi Dat (Spare Me That) by Wanlov the Kubolor

For me that sounds very relevant to your mash-up of styles with FOKN Bois. One of the most entertaining things about you and M3nsa is the way in which you play with language, rapping in English, Pidgin and Twi [a native Ghanaian language]. When did you start playing with different voices like this?

With M3nsa it would happen in conversation before we developed the self-confidence to do it in music. In the late 90s we wanted to sound like the music our DJs were playing on the radio: Busta Rhymes, Talib Kweli, Snoop Dogg. It was even in our analogies and similes — “yellow like McDonalds”, or “white like snow” — none of those things are relatable if you’ve never had a TV! Then in the early 2000s, we started to make music for ourselves. When we realised that all those [American rappers] were making music for their communities, our whole horizon suddenly broadened. Now our minds are exploding with so many possibilities because we are thinking in our language.

Video for Never Go Change by Wanlov the Kubolor

What connects Ghana and Romania for you?

It’s crazy: when I was doing this album, I remember coming across all these similarities between Ghana and Romania that absolutely blew my mind. There are no other two countries in the world that have almost exactly the same land mass. The first President of Ghana, Kwame Nkrumah, died in Bucharest. The population is almost exactly the same. Then there are the similarities in cultural styles: the women who you pay to come and cry at funerals, that’s big business in Romania and in Ghana. They have the same instruments paralleled in different evolutions: the cimbalom [a Hungarian-Transylvanian dulcimer], and the Ghanaian xylophone; the Romanian violin, and the Ghanaian gongey, which is like a horsetail fiddle.