In 2010, a friend played Kwesi Arthur the Drake album Thank Me Later in Tema. He was still in secondary school. He told his friend he thought he could do rap. The friend's reaction is not recorded. What followed was a decade of proving the point: from Tema to a BET Awards nomination in 2018, one of only a handful of Ghanaian artists to reach that stage.
Tema, Temasco and the funding gap
Emmanuel Kwesi Danso Arthur Junior was born on 18 December 1994 in Tema. He completed secondary school at Temasco, and when plans for further education stalled because of funding, he turned his full attention to music. In 2015, he connected with Ground Up Chale, a creative collective he would later lead, which gave structure to what had previously been informal: a group of young Tema artists working to get heard.
Grind Day and the Sarkodie remix
'Grind Day,' released in 2017, shifted the scale of the conversation around him. The track drew a remix from Sarkodie and Medikal, and in the Ghanaian music ecosystem, a Sarkodie co-sign carries weight that is difficult to overstate. The song travelled. The BET Awards Viewer's Choice Best International Act nomination arrived in 2018, placing him in the same conversation as artists from across the continent and confirming that an audience outside Ghana was paying attention.
Nkrumah Krom and the VGMA wins
His EP Live from Nkrumah Krom, named after Tema's Akan designation, built a body of work that balanced introspective writing with the trap-influenced production that Tema's hip-hop scene had been developing for years. Volume II of the EP gathered more than 2 million streams in its first week of release in 2019. The VGMA Rapper of the Year and Hip Hop Song of the Year awards followed, placing formal recognition on a career that had been earning informal recognition since Grind Day landed.
Ground Up Chale, the movement he founded, has grown into a platform for emerging artists across West Africa. The friend who played him Drake in 2010 set something in motion. It is still moving.
