Kafui Dey interviews Kwesi Arthur

From Redemption Valley to the World: A Conversation with Kwesi Arthur

Rapper, singer and songwriter Kwesi Arthur sits down with Kafui Dey fresh off the release of his latest project, Redemption Valley. Born and raised in Tema Community 9, he traces a journey from riding borrowed BMX bikes along dusty streets and gambling on Konami soccer tournaments to BET Hip Hop Awards ciphers and sold-out block parties. This is a conversation about childhood, fame, grief, the music business, and what it means to return to yourself.

Redemption Valley: The Title and What It Means

Redemption Valley is a real street in Tema Community 9, also the name of a primary school — Redemption Valley Number One. For Kwesi Arthur it is loaded with memory. It was one of the first roads his parents carried him down as a newborn from Tema General Hospital. It is the road that leads to the Community 9 cemetery — a path to death. It was the road they walked to play football. The road he took to pick up a car on the way to school at Naylor SDA. The road he took to buy medicine for his grandmother, to buy cocoa from the Community 8 market late at night, to simply move through the neighborhood that made him.

The word redemption carries equal weight. It speaks to a return — to himself, to his roots, to a fullness he feels he had lost in the noise of rising fame. It is, he says, a full circle moment.

The Songs

The project opens with the title track, produced by Mog, built around a central message: save yourself, because nobody is coming to save you. There is I'd Be Where I Wanted to Be, a song about realising — belatedly — that he was already living the dreams of his sixteen-year-old self. When he was coming into fame around 2018 to 2022, he was so deep in the work, the movement, the glitz, that he could not see he had already arrived where he had always wanted to be. The song is an act of gratitude he had to work backwards to feel.

There is Yawa Hosana, built around good energy and the sense that stars have aligned. And there is Immigrant, the oldest song on the project, started in a studio in Atlanta in 2022 — a meditation on the experience of Ghanaians living abroad, people he had come into contact with whose realities shifted his perspective entirely. He had grown up, like most people in Ghana, assuming that relatives abroad were flush with money. The song confronts that assumption directly: people are out there facing cultural shock, unsustainable jobs, bills, isolation. His own experience of being surveilled in stores because of his skin colour — something he had never experienced in Ghana — sharpened that understanding.

The Groundup Chale Situation

Earlier in the year, a public legal dispute with Groundup Chale made headlines. He is careful with what he says — it is all in court now — but the lesson he draws is clear and he offers it freely to other artists: take your time. Seek proper legal counsel before signing anything. He was young and hungry when he signed the agreement and did not fully understand what he was entering into. The emotional toll had already been processed long before it became public. Going public, he says, was about putting a stop to certain 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 a proper legal support structure around himself, and becoming more financially literate about the industry. His message to younger artists is simple: this is show business. The show is visible, but the business is what makes the show possible. You want to be secure not just now but ten and fifteen years from now.

Growing Up in Community 9

He was born with rickets. He remembers people always looking at him, always wanting to talk to him from an early age because of the way he walked. He remembers riding around Tema on borrowed BMX bikes, playing Konami soccer tournaments in the game centres — picking a team, randomising matchups, skipping to results, and wagering twenty pesewas or fifty pesewas on the outcome. He remembers playing small poles on Redemption Road, buying electricity from the ECG branch in Community 8, going to the market with a list from his mother or grandmother, making morkow on Sunday mornings while his mother was at church.

He is the second of four children — one elder brother, one younger brother, one sister. Being number two meant running most of the household errands. The elder brother was out. The younger ones were at home. It was always him who went to buy the prepaid, pay the water bills, go to the market. The market women knew him.

His father was an electrical engineer who repaired TV sets, radios and CD players. Equipment would come into the house for repair and sit there for a while — which meant music was always playing. Cassette players, CD players, the radio. He listened to Peace FM and Adom FM, watched TV3 and Metro TV. He heard Draina, Kojo Antwi, Lord Kenya, Obrafour, Phil Collins, all of it. He was absorbing without knowing he was absorbing.

Football First

His first career dream was football. He played right wing for Ayas, a coastal team in Tema Community 7, going through the youth leagues. The adults in his neighbourhood would call him to join their games. There were boys from his neighbourhood who ended up on Ghana's Under-20 World Cup winning squad in 2009. Yakubu, who played for the Black Stars, lived directly opposite his grandmother's house and once picked him up in a drop-top BMW — a moment that briefly made football feel very possible.

By senior high school at Tema Secondary, the pipeline to Europe had become clear enough that he could see it was not for him. He turned towards music.

Tamasco and the Studio on the Corner

He enjoyed Tema Secondary. He loved history — ancient Egyptians, old Ghana empires, the Eurobas, the old Akan kingdoms. He did music as a subject. He learned to time his arrivals to miss assembly, which he found too long and too punishing for minor infractions. He was accepted to study communication at the University of Ghana but could not access his WASSCE results because of some administrative issues at school. He could not take up the place. Economic circumstances closed the door further.

In that gap, he found XLC Studio in his neighbourhood. He approached the owner, Brabi, with a deal: he would manage the place, clean it, take care of clients, in exchange for access to record himself and learn production. Brabi accepted. For the next stretch of his life, the studio was his world. He recorded other people. He helped them with their lyrics. He assisted with vocals. He produced. He made small money from a percentage of every session that came through.

He recorded Eddie Khendi there before his breakthrough. Gemini Orleans came through. He recorded himself. He recorded what would become the seeds of everything that followed.

When things went wrong between him and his boss over some damage to equipment, he was let go. His mother, a hairdresser who had pivoted into trading, heard at church that there were job openings. He went for the interview. It went well. They were ready to take him. Then his old boss called and they reconciled. He called back the security company and told them he was not coming. One conversation in the other direction and everything would have been different.

Grind Day and the Moment Everything Changed

The first sign came from his own neighbourhood. He put out Dangote and people started calling him by it. His friends, his corner. Then his recordings started reaching high school and university students he had worked with, and they were coming back to tell him: chalie, your song I hear for school — it blow.

Grind Day — the song that brought him to national 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. He listened to it over and over and felt it was not right. So he sped up the tempo. The new beat gave him the melody. That was Grind Day. It was supposed to be a different song. It became a phenomenon.

The remix with Sarkodie and Medikal came through a connection that already existed — Sarkodie had been tweeting his links, showing support before most people were watching. Getting Sarkodie and Medikal on the song elevated it to a different level. A BET Hip-Hop Awards nomination followed. Then the cipher. He had downloaded ciphers on his phone as a fan. Being part of one was, he says, a full circle moment.

Fame: The Gift and the Curse

Life outside Ghana is anonymous. He can go to a grocery store. Take a walk. Move like a regular person. In Ghana he is followed in shopping centres, stopped for pictures when he is late for appointments, 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. He does not miss the anonymity so much as the specific texture of it: going to the beach with his boys, no eyes, just the sea.

The curse of fame is being seen as less than human. Every right thing and every wrong thing gets amplified and broadcast to a mass audience. He understands it. He has also learned, the hard way, that responding to certain people online makes them real — it gives them an audience they did not have before and catapults them into visibility. He now ignores most of it. He checks followers first. No profile picture, no engagement.

Returning to Himself

Over the past two years he has been doing the inner work. Walking — long distances, alone, thinking. Meditating. Learning to sit with emotions rather than push them aside until they build up and explode in the wrong direction. He has had moments where he was listening to music and started crying, and understood those were emotions that had been stored for years, finally getting out.

He grew up in an environment where expressing emotion was seen as weakness. He says that is completely false. He is trying to deal with what he feels in the moment — notice whether he is sad, mad, or glad, and respond to that rather than suppress it. He cooks now too, when he is away. He describes it as being with himself.

The Sound

He describes his music as human. Real life. Inspired by Tema. High Life. Rap and hip-hop and experimental. His playlist on any given day is ten songs he is listening to religiously — Ara the J, Lana Del Rey, a Jay-Z song, something by Odo. He listens to jazz when the mood takes him — Coltrane, Miles Davis. Classical music sometimes. African percussion. He is drawn to sound as therapy: sound makes you happy, sound makes you sad, sound makes you move.

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 loves how tightly the story is constructed, how contemporary it still feels. He is watching for The Odyssey.

On Nkrumah, Leadership, and the Gen Z Generation

His 2020 project Live from Nkrumah was a deliberate act of naming. He 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 that are still functioning sixty years later — are evidence of thinking on a scale no Ghanaian leader has matched since. He wants more thinkers like him.

On current African leadership, the first thing that comes to mind is corruption. He sees political power as a get-rich scheme for too few people, with no meaningful trickle-down to ordinary citizens. He sees the young people gravitating toward figures like Captain Ibrahim Traoré of Burkina Faso not as a sign that they want military rule but as a sign that they want leaders who actually work for the people. He gets his hope from Gen Z — their directness, their refusal to mask what they see — and hopes they are not gradually beaten out of it by a system that absorbs and neutralises exactly that kind of energy.