Nneka: “I’m no longer at ease with the situation”

Fresh from winning a well-deserved MOBO Award for best African Artist, Nneka is performing at ULU on 4 November.  To celebrate this well-deserved accolade, we dug into our Vault to bring up this interview, done back in November ‘07.

[Win tickets to Nneka's gig on Wed 4 Nov]

Victim Of Truth is not an obvious title for a first album. But then, nothing in Nneka is obvious. Her light skin and curly hair betray a mixed heritage but her accent takes you right back to Nigeria where she grew up. Her small frame is equally deceptive and leaves you unprepared for a strong, powerful voice with which she talks about universal love, God and Africa. Nneka spits conscious lyrics over hip-hop, soul and dancehall beats as naturally as Beyonce shakes her booty. The comparisons with other, more high profile conscious sistas such as Lauryn Hill abound. Nneka couldn’t care less: ‘People need to put you in boxes to understand what you are. They put me in a box, with Erykah Badu, Neneh Cherry or whatever. But it’s all good, let them do it.’

This devil may care attitude is what makes Nneka so refreshing. She comes undone at gigs – at the ICA in September 07, SOAS in November 07 – her hair wrapped up in a wool hat. She strums her guitar, misses a few notes and explains that she has just started to learn. As perfectionist as she is, she makes no excuses for who she is.

One thing Nneka won’t be called, though, is ‘entertainer’. She is ‘a vessel of content’, her voice being merely an instrument to spread her message. ‘I’m not here to entertain’ she says to an eager crowd of students during a charity gig at the SOAS in November 2008. ‘I’m here to speak my mind because I am no longer at ease with the situation’. Though she has been living in Germany for the past 5 years, Nneka’s heart is in Nigeria, a country ravaged by oil wars. She went back to Nigeria to film the video for her single Africans, a reggae-influenced tune where she urges us to wake up to the situation.

In other tracks on her album, Nneka denounces corruption, materialism, hypocrisy. Her quest for the truth starts from within. The album, she says, is about her. ‘Many of us are very hypocritical. We just want the fame, the limelight, the attention…  That’s the lie I’m talking about. That’s why I am forced to speak out. I caught myself many times being a hypocrite. I decided to admit to myself that I was a hypocrite and confess to myself on that album.’ Asked if she was advised by record labels to lighten up the mood of her album, Nneka answers that it is the music she had to compromise on, not her lyrics. ‘I never had direct confrontation with the record company, except maybe on the music itself. They thought it was too underground for them. I compromised a little bit but not too much. . Or else I wouldn’t have an identity. I respect myself and my identity. I would not sell my soul, myself.’

* This article was originally published in November 2008. Nneka has since released a second album, the critically-acclaimed No Longer At Ease

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