Music
Kwesi Arthur is not in a hurry anymore. The Tema-born rapper, singer and songwriter who announced himself to Ghana and the world with Grind Day in 2017 has learned, through years of hard experience, that the most important journey is the one that goes inward.
Kwesi Arthur is not in a hurry anymore. The Tema-born rapper, singer and songwriter who announced himself to Ghana and the world with Grind Day in 2017 has learned, through years of hard experience, that the most important journey is the one that goes inward. His latest project, Redemption Valley, is the evidence of that journey — and in a wide-ranging conversation with Kafui Dey, he traces everything from gambling on Konami soccer tournaments in Community 9 game centres to BET Hip Hop Awards ciphers, legal battles, and what it truly means to return to yourself.
What Is Redemption Valley?
Redemption Valley is a real street in Tema Community 9, and also the name of a primary school — Redemption Valley Number One. For Kwesi Arthur, it is one of the most loaded addresses in his life. It was one of the first roads his parents carried him down as a newborn from Tema General Hospital. It leads to the Community 9 cemetery — a path to death. It was the road they walked to play football. The road he took every morning to school at Naylor SDA. The road he walked to buy medicine for his grandmother, to pick up cocoa from the Community 8 market late at night, to simply move through the neighborhood that built him.
The word redemption carries equal weight. It speaks to a return — to himself, to his roots, to a wholeness he had lost somewhere in the noise of rising fame. Redemption Valley the album is, as Kwesi Arthur describes it, a full circle moment.
Growing Up in Tema Community 9
Kwesi Arthur was born with rickets. He remembers people always stopping to look at him from an early age, always wanting to talk to him because of the way he moved. He remembers riding borrowed BMX bikes around Tema, playing Konami soccer tournaments in the neighbourhood game centres — picking teams, randomising matchups, skipping to results, wagering twenty or fifty pesewas on the outcome. He remembers playing small-sided football on Redemption Road, buying electricity units from the ECG branch in Community 8, going to the market with a list from his mother or grandmother.
He is the second of four children. Being number two meant running most of the household errands. His father was an electrical engineer who repaired TV sets, radios and CD players — equipment would come in for repair and sit in the house for weeks, which meant music was always playing. He listened to Peace FM and Adom FM, watched TV3 and Metro TV. He absorbed Draina, Kojo Antwi, Lord Kenya, Obrafour, Phil Collins — all of it, without knowing he was absorbing it.
His first career dream was football. He played right wing for Ayas, a coastal team in Tema Community 7, moving through the youth leagues. Boys from his neighbourhood ended up on Ghana's Under-20 World Cup winning squad in 2009. The late Yakubu, who played for the Black Stars, lived directly opposite his grandmother's house. One afternoon he picked Kwesi Arthur up in a drop-top BMW — a moment that briefly made the dream feel very close. By senior high school at Tema Secondary, he could see the pipeline to Europe clearly enough to know it was not for him. He turned towards music.
The Studio, the Security Guard Job, and the Path to Music
After finishing WASSCE, Kwesi Arthur was accepted to study communication at the University of Ghana but could not access his results due to administrative issues. He could not take up the place. Economic circumstances made waiting another year difficult. In that gap, he found XLC Studio in his neighbourhood. He approached the owner with a deal: manage the place, clean it, take care of clients, in exchange for learning production and recording himself. The deal was accepted.
For the next stretch of his life, the studio was everything. He recorded other artists — including a young Eddie Khendi before his breakthrough, and Gemini Orleans. He assisted with vocals, helped with lyrics, produced. He made small money from a cut of every session that came through. When things went wrong between him and his boss over some damaged equipment, he was let go. His mother heard about a security guard position through church announcements. He went for the interview. It went well. Then his old boss called and they reconciled. He turned the security job down. One conversation in the other direction and everything changes.
Grind Day and the Breakthrough
The first sign that something was building came from his own neighbourhood. He put out a song called Dangote and people started calling him by it. Friends, people on the corner. Then recordings started reaching high school and university students he had worked with, who came back to tell him his music was being played in schools. It was building.
Grind Day — the song that brought Kwesi Arthur to national and then international attention — started as something else entirely. He wanted to make a song called Abed Pele. He took the idea to his long-time collaborator Queso, who made the beat. Listening to it over and over, he felt it was not right. He sped up the tempo. The new beat gave him the melody for Grind Day. It was supposed to be a different song. It became a cultural moment.
The remix featuring Sarkodie and Medikal came through a relationship that already existed — Sarkodie had been tweeting his links and showing support before most people were paying attention. Having Sarkodie and Medikal on the song elevated it to a different level entirely. A BET Hip-Hop Awards nomination followed shortly after. Then came the BET Hip-Hop Awards cipher — a segment Kwesi Arthur had been downloading on his phone as a fan. Being part of one was, in his own words, a full circle moment.
The Groundup Chale Dispute and What It Taught Him
Earlier in 2024, a public legal dispute with Groundup Chale made headlines across Ghana's music industry. Kwesi Arthur is measured with what he says — proceedings are still active — but the lesson he offers freely: take your time before signing anything. Seek proper legal counsel. He was young and hungry when he entered the agreement and did not fully understand what he was committing to. The emotional toll had been processed long before the story became public. Going public was about putting a stop to things happening behind the scenes, and about using his story as a lesson for other artists.
He has since used the experience to solidify his standing — sorting out publishing, building proper legal support, and becoming more literate about the business side of the industry. His message to younger Ghanaian artists is direct: this is show business. The show is visible but the business is what makes the show possible. You want to be economically secure not just now but ten and fifteen years from now.
Fame: The Gift and the Curse
Life outside Ghana is anonymous. He can go to a grocery store, take a long walk, move like a regular person. In Ghana he is followed in shopping centres, stopped for pictures when he is running late, filmed without permission. He has learned to manage it through communication — understanding where he is going, preparing for the energy of different spaces, being direct about what he needs.
The curse of fame, as he describes it, is being seen as less than fully human. Every right thing and every wrong thing gets amplified and broadcast to a mass audience. He has also learned, the hard way, that responding to trolls online makes them real — it gives them an audience they did not have before. He now ignores most of it. He checks follower counts first. No profile picture, no engagement.
Returning to Himself
Over the past two years Kwesi Arthur has been doing serious inner work. Long walks alone. Meditation. Learning to sit with emotions rather than push them aside until they build up and explode. He has had moments listening to music where he burst into tears and understood those were emotions stored for years, finally getting out.
He grew up in an environment where expressing emotion was framed as weakness. He says plainly that this is false. He is learning to notice what he feels in the moment — whether he is sad, mad or glad — and respond to it honestly rather than suppress it. It is this journey, as much as any song on the project, that gives Redemption Valley its emotional weight.
The Sound of Kwesi Arthur
He describes his music as human. Real life. Inspired by Tema. Rooted in high life, rap, hip-hop, and experimental sound. His playlist on any given day spans Ara the J, Lana Del Rey, Jay-Z, and something by Odo. He listens to jazz — Coltrane, Miles Davis — and classical music when the mood takes him. He listens to African percussion recordings. He is drawn to sound as therapy: sound makes you move, sound makes you feel, sound carries things words cannot.
He would love to score a film. The Godfather is one of his favourite movies — he has watched it multiple times and read the Mario Puzo novel. He is watching for the upcoming film adaptation of The Odyssey.
On Nkrumah, Leadership and Gen Z
His 2020 project Live from Nkrumah was a deliberate act of naming and homage. Kwesi Arthur believes Nkrumah had a vision for Africa and Ghana that was dismantled by imperial interests before it could fully take root. The structures he built — Tema itself, Tamasco, the institutions still functioning sixty years later — are evidence of a scale of thinking no subsequent leader has matched. Tema Secondary School, where Kwasi Arthur studied and developed his love of history, exists in part because of Nkrumah. He wants more thinkers in that mold.
On current African leadership, the first thing that comes to mind is corruption — political power as a get-rich scheme for the few, with nothing meaningful reaching ordinary citizens. He sees young people gravitating toward figures like Burkina Faso's Captain Ibrahim Traoré not as a demand for military rule but as a demand for leaders who actually work for the people. His hope lies with Gen Z — their directness, their refusal to mask what they see — and his fear is that the system will gradually beat that quality out of them, the way it has beaten it out of every generation before.
What Comes Next
Redemption Valley is out. The block party at Republic Bar in Accra — the first time he performed the project live in Ghana — blew him away. More is coming. He is tight-lipped on the details because he wants the anticipation to build, but he confirms: more songs, more exciting things. Watch out.
For the people from Community 9 who used to walk Redemption Road with him, buy bread in the morning, gamble on Konami tournaments and dream sideways dreams — this is for them. From Community 9 to the O2. The numbers tell the story.
