The feeling I get in KUMASI, I don't get anywhere else | Kafui Dey interviews Kojo Cue

"Rap is a diary for me. And maybe right behind it, an escape. But a diary most of all — because when I'm recording, there's nobody there. I record alone." — Kojo Cue

The Philosopher from Bantama: A Conversation with Kojo Cue

Rapper, storyteller, cultural commentator and respected lyricist Kojo Cue sits down with Kafui Dey for one of the most searching conversations in the series. Born Lynford Kennedy Amankwaa — named after British sprint champion Linford Christie by a father who had just arrived in London — he grew up across eleven primary schools, raised largely by a paternal grandmother in Bantama, Kumasi, before finding his voice in hip life, building a collective from the top floor of a market building, and eventually releasing Kenny: Bantama Story, an autobiographical album that begins with a son struggling to pay his bills and ends with the loss of premature twins. It is a conversation about grief, identity, fatherhood, faith, and what it means to make art from the places that shaped you.

A Name That Never Stayed Still

Before he was Kojo Cue, he was Augustine. Then Lynford — named by a father who had just come back from London and left again when his son was one. Then Jazzy, after Jay-Z. Then Jazzflow, then simply KOJ, then Kojo Cue. In JSS he was Prodigy. In Bantama he was Junior Bayano, after a Brazilian defender from France '98. At Bohome Estate they called him Tip, after the American rapper T.I. His cousin Rebel called him by yet another name.

The name that stuck — Kojo Cue — came from the Q collective, a creative movement he helped build in Kumasi around 2009. The idea was simple: Kumasi had enormous talent but fewer platforms than Accra, so a group of musicians, graphic designers, videographers and set designers came together to help each other reach a wider audience. The Q stood for queue — next in line. When he added the Q to his name on Twitter to distinguish himself from every other Kojo, people started calling him Kojo Cue. He had been struggling to find a name for years. That one fit.

Bantama: The Nerve Center

Bantama is home. Not just geographically — it is the vocabulary through which he understands everything else. He grew up in Odium, close to the Kotoko camp, watching players like Prince Oduoku and Tiko Tiko come and go, playing football with the son of a security guard who later played in the Armenian league. The studio that Q built was on the top floor of a building overlooking the Bantama high street, then moved to near Radio Mercury. Two junctions from KJC Studio, where Kaboom — one of the collective's members, named KJC after the legendary producer — later learned his craft as well.

He describes Bantama as a 24-hour economy. Electronics by day, pubs and food by night. A place where nobody he knew was growing up thinking about becoming a doctor. You learned a trade, you went to work in Magazine, or you went abroad. And then later, he realised, his role was to be another option — another version of what a kid from Bantama could become.

Eleven Schools and the Art of Becoming Adaptable

His mother had him at eighteen. His father left when he was one. What followed was years of being moved between aunties and grandmothers — paternal and maternal — across Kumasi. Adum Presby. New Era in Odium. Danyame SDA. CPC in Bantama. A Seventh Day in Bremai. Revival. Konfo. And back again. By the time he counted with his mother, it was eleven schools before secondary school.

Every move cost him something. Friends made in one school would disappear overnight. The qualities that made him cool in one environment made him a target in another. Revival valued intelligence and book clubs; Konfo valued being rowdy. He learned to read environments quickly, to match whatever energy was in front of him, to blend without dissolving. He describes himself now as a natural introvert who can perform extroversion convincingly and then needs to go and recharge. A chameleon. It was Bantama, he says, that gave him the foundation — his grandmother's house, his aunties, his cousins, the knowledge that if anyone came from outside to trouble one of them, everybody closed ranks first and argued among themselves later.

Grandma Kwatcha

His paternal grandmother, Kwatcha — now bearing a stool name — raised him alongside five or six other grandchildren in a single room divided by a partition. At night the couch was packed away and they slept on mats on the floor. When you got sick, you were promoted to the bed. His cousins would come back from school and try to catch him acting healthy. He would try to stretch the sick days as long as possible.

He stole coins from his aunties' food earnings — patiently waiting until the nights they were too tired to count before taking some — and spent the money at the cinema and on action figures. He was caught only when his uncle noticed him coming home with new toys and set a psychological trap, telling him they were going somewhere. He panicked and gave the game away. The punishment was a few lashes. His grandmother was lenient. His mother was not. His mother, he says with real affection and slight wariness, would literally fight you. Put her fists up. It stopped the night he held her hand, looked her in the face, put it down, and they started talking like adults.

Grandma Kwatcha died in 2002 when he was thirteen. He did not cry at the funeral. He cried two weeks later. What stays with him is a woman he watched walking down to the compound from the top of the hill — greeting people along the way, smiling, catching up — who then, the moment she came into full view of the gathering, began to wail. The transition was too short. He was thirteen and he found it strange. He found out later about professional mourners. He still thinks about it.

What he misses most is her voice. It has been long enough that he cannot remember it.

The Album: Kenny — Bantama Story

Kenny was supposed to be his middle name. His father named him after Lynford Christie but was absent when the time came to register him for BECE, so Kennedy was inserted by a teacher who told him there was no name like Kenny — it was just short for Kennedy. Kojo Cue has always felt the original version, spelled K-E-N-Y, was something he lost. The album is a reclamation. It is the autobiography at the centre of a larger musical universe he calls Ghana Man Times — a collection of albums documenting what it meant to grow up Ghanaian between certain years.

The first album in the universe, For My Brothers, documents the shared Ghanaian male experience broadly. Kenny is him specifically. The one that follows — Ghana Your Mother — will take on the social and political systems that shaped everything. On Kenny, his mother appears in her actual voice, recorded in the studio in a single session. She brought him fufu and kept asking when it would be done. She has since heard her voice playing from the family house in Adum while handing out food to fans at a pop-up show he held in front of the building on the cover art.

The album opens with Fruit of the Womb, in which a son is struggling to pay his debts while his mother's only real request is grandchildren. It closes with Gold Dust — the last song, the one that changed the direction of everything.

Gold Dust and Two Years of Darkness

In 2020, his wife had twins prematurely. They were alive for two weeks. Then they died.

He stopped making music for almost two years. He could not put it into music the way he normally would with things that hurt him. He went to therapy. He learned to cook — seriously and deliberately, watching Sweeter Jelly on YouTube, making jollof rice not for the end product but for the process, because it required his full concentration for two hours and two hours without thinking about it was time passing faster.

Therapy helped but reached its limit. He is someone who does not share easily. He records alone. He is uncomfortable when his music plays around people who know him, because it contains things he has not said out loud. The few things he has put out publicly are things he has already left behind enough to let go. About the twins, only a handful of people knew until the album came out. A man posted a picture of the two of them taken during that period and commented that he had always assumed the look on Kojo Cue's face was irritation about the photo. He had not known.

What the album finally did was name the grief publicly. And in naming it, he hopes it helps other Ghanaian men recognise their own unspoken pain — not as something to be proud of carrying, but as something that has a name and does not have to be held alone.

From Bantama to the Radio: How the Music Started

His cousin Rebel came home from secondary school with hip life cassettes. One of them had an Opambuo track. He wrote down the lyrics line by line, rewinding, replaying. Once he could mimic it, he knew this was something he could do. He started writing. He rapped in school hallways. At Kumasi Anglican — where Lord Kenya and CAS had also studied — performing for seniors was a survival tool during the two weeks when form one students wore white and were visible targets. The first time he rapped for a senior, he did a Cassidy verse. The senior told him that was Cassidy's verse — next time he wanted to hear something original. That was how he started writing his own material.

His first demo was bad. He knew it was bad. He bought a notebook with 70 leaves, filled it with raps, gave it to a friend, bought another one, filled that too, and only went back to record when he felt he had improved. The jump to taking music seriously came in his last year at Anglican, when his parents' relationship had completely broken down, his mother was not working, and university was not certain to be an option. Music looked like it could be a path. He started going to Pukalos Studio in Kumasi every day, skipping class, just being there.

The Internet Cafe, Sakawa, and the Road Back to Music

Between finishing secondary school in 2008 and starting at GIJ in 2010, there was a two-year gap. He was in Macro, living near Magazine, hanging around at internet cafes at night — because you had to work at night to reach the time zones of the Americans. He participated in romance scams. He is direct about it: not as something to be proud of, but as a case study in how easy it is for young men with no visible options to fall into certain things when everyone around them is doing it and some of them are buying cars. The thing that pulled him back was sitting in the cafe at night, playing his own music while waiting, and people telling him he was good enough to take it seriously. He retired from the cafes. He came back to music.

Corolla Music, Eel, and BBNZ

The song that changed everything was not planned. He had come to Accra to shoot a video for a different track. The shoot fell apart. The director asked if he had anything they could use the equipment for. He had a freestyle he had recorded as a voice note over the Migos Versace beat. They went to Puppy Studio, a beat was made on the spot, they recorded and shot parts of the video the same day. The audio went online. Corolla Music — about the first car most Accra hustlers bought when they came into money — went viral.

Eel heard it. He reached out. He said he wanted Kojo Cue on a song. And at the end of that conversation, he said: this music thing does not work without people behind you. If you are not signed to anyone, come to BBNZ. He signed in 2014, the same year he graduated from GIJ. The same year he finally put out The Shining — the project he had been promising since 2010, named after Stephen King, the one that was supposed to be the arrival.

BBNZ gave him a deep understanding of the music business and an entrepreneurial conviction that he could do it himself. It cost him momentum — certain disagreements slowed him down at windows he could not recover quickly.

Rain Labs and the Business of Music

During the COVID period, he and three friends noticed a gap in how Ghanaian music was engaging with global platforms and marketing. They formed Rain Labs. It has since grown into a full-service music company with distribution, sync licensing, and a partnership with Virgin Music Global. They currently service over 130 artists.

Ghana Man Times and What Comes Next

The project is a universe. For My Brothers was the general experience. Kenny is the autobiography. Ghana Your Mother will be the systemic — everything he has to say about the political and social structures that shaped the lives documented in the first two. He works with creative director Ivan Kafu Yofori to keep the vision on track, because without someone to hold the direction, he says, his mind moves to the next idea before the current one is finished.

He is not Pan-African in the way he once was. Watching Gaddafi killed took something out of him — the realisation that no matter what you build, the powers above can dismantle it in a moment. He is not religious but cannot call himself an atheist. Things have happened in his life that logic cannot explain. He believes in God but not in a God who needs worship to withhold punishment. He is working through what redemption means — for people who have done terrible things to some and extraordinary things to others, for those Bantama boys he grew up with whose talent was never matched by the support they deserved.

He believes Daddy Lumba is the greatest musician of all time. Not the greatest Ghanaian musician. The greatest musician of all time, full stop.