Kafui Dey Interviews M.anifest

Kwami Coleman — known to the world as M.anifest — settles into the conversation the way old friends do, easy and unhurried. He's still living inside the world of his last album, New Road and Guava Trees, released the previous year, and still finding ways to extend its life. A recent single with the rising artist Quatting, "Out the Mud," shot in Tamale's Red Clay Studio, has been getting attention, and he speaks about it with the quiet pride of someone who enjoys watching a younger generation come into its own.

But the real story, he says, is why the album needed to exist at all.

"I had a moment where I felt like — okay, what is the next chapter?" he explains. "And to reflect on the next chapter, sometimes you have to make a return to look back before you go further forward."

The title carries a double meaning. New Road is the literal street in Madina where he grew up — where both sets of grandparents lived a five-minute walk from each other, where he could move between homes and always land somewhere familiar. The guava tree was real too: a tree in the family house that he and his cousins used to climb and swing from. It isn't there anymore.

"I don't know if it died a mortal death," he says, "even though it's not a mortal."

He mourns, half-jokingly, the disappearance of fruit trees from Ghanaian homes — guava, cashew, almond, coconut, tangerine, avocado, all once ordinary features of a childhood yard, now replaced by juice boxes and street vendors slicing mangoes with surgical precision.

"I really do have fun memories of growing up in that regard," he says, "and a guava tree being one of those memories. I'm glad I reflected on it in my latest project."

Asked whether the guava tree symbolizes a kind of lost innocence — a purity that existed before streaming, before algorithms, before industry pressure — M.anifest pushes back gently.

"Purity is overrated," he says. "We like to dirty ourselves in this life."

"It's just different times. What we think is abundance is just a lot of things that are actually taken away from simple things in life."

He argues that every generation believes the one before it lived in simpler days — television felt invasive once, then normal; libraries gave way to the internet. Rather than purity, he prefers to talk about return — a historical perspective that lets people find their way back to what actually made them happy, whatever era they're in.

"I won't be surprised if twenty years from now, people are using more tech but spending less time on it," he says. "Because that's how life is. It's a cycle."

M.anifest's process, he explains, rarely begins with words. It begins with a feeling — "an emotional trigger... a dream of an idea" — that he has to actively cultivate rather than force. For New Road and Guava Trees, that meant leaving Ghana entirely. He spent three to four weeks in Seattle with a friend, then moved to Los Angeles, and within roughly five weeks, most of the album came together.

"If I was here doing my daily routine, the idea would just be — I'll be going to studio as I usually do," he says. "Instead of locking in, as we say these days."

He describes the process almost like architecture — first the idea germinates, then a title arrives (rarely the starting point), then colour, then cohesion. "If I make an album that is very melancholy, it's great — I shouldn't have an artwork that is so sunny," he says. "There has to be some cohesion around all of it."

"Art is divine. You practice the skill and the craft of it — but the soulful connection, the ideas — you're drawing from a divine world you don't even know how you're doing."

This, he says, is precisely what artificial intelligence can't replicate. "They mimic what's already there," he says of AI, "but they can't produce it from nothing."

M.anifest has long been described — almost exclusively — as one of the country's finest lyricists. He accepts the compliment but pushes back on its limits.

"My lyrical ability actually pales in comparison to the artistry of being able to put things together," he says. He points to his international collaborations — features with Burna Boy, work with Fatoumata Diawara, Tony Allen, Flea, and more recently Ezra Collective — as proof that outside Ghana, people engage with his full range of craft, not just his punchlines.

"People admire the building, but they don't see the architect's plan, the plumbing, everything that came together to make the building what it is."

He traces some of the national blind spot to a broader condescension toward hip-hop as an art form — a genre he insists has produced some of the most sophisticated storytelling and sonic architecture of the last several decades, regardless of how casually it's often consumed.

If there is a spine running through the conversation, it's family — and in particular, his late grandfather, the ethnomusicologist and composer Professor J.H. Kwabena Nketia, whom M.anifest calls, only half-jokingly, "a colossus."

He remembers a grandfather who never truly retired, who still travelled to his office at the University of Ghana, Legon, into his 90s, who published a book at 95, and who took a nap every single day of his life without fail. He remembers sneaking into his grandfather's cassette archive as a boy, hunting for blank tape to record his own material — sometimes recording over field recordings that could never be replaced.

"The world has lost something," he says, laughing. "But I think I am giving to the world."

More than the discipline, what stayed with him was his grandfather's total absence of pretension. "He didn't carry himself with any kind of pomposity," M.anifest says. "According people with equal respect — there's no respecter of persons because of materialism."

He credits a specific creative breakthrough — the polyrhythmic construction of his song "Invisible" — directly to his grandfather's provocation that hip-hop leans too heavily on a 4/4 pulse. The next day, in studio, he rebuilt the track from a different rhythmic foundation entirely.

"Of all the grandchildren, I'm probably the closest to what he did. One day, God willing, I'd like to take a major chunk of my own creative time to properly understand what extending his legacy actually means."

His mother, once a lawyer, left the profession to become a pastor — a decision M.anifest describes as one of the bravest things he's witnessed up close. From her, he says, he inherited a deep well of empathy. From his father — the well-known lawyer Kwaku Azar — he cites a certain progressiveness of thought, an unwillingness to simply agree for the sake of comfort, and an obsessive attention to detail.

His own name carries weight he didn't fully absorb until adulthood: he was born, he explains, on the very day his paternal grandfather was being buried.

"My father would have gone from the funeral grounds to the hospital. Life gone. Life arrived."

The old women in the family gave him a name meaning, in essence, "he has come back" — a symbolic thread that runs, almost eerily, through an album built entirely around the idea of return.

M.anifest studied economics at Macalester College in St. Paul, Minnesota — a pragmatic choice, he says, made by someone who didn't yet have the courage to commit fully to a creative path but wanted the flexibility to move toward one eventually.

Minneapolis-St. Paul sharpened something in him. He recalls, within his first week in the country, mistakenly overpaying a bus fare and nearly being reduced to tears over a lost twenty dollars. He recalls, more soberly, encountering a Ku Klux Klan rally that summer and realizing that what he had assumed was history was, in fact, still alive.

He was later stopped by police while walking, questioned for what an officer called "suspicious behaviour" — nothing more than trying to read a parking sign.

"America will not shy away from telling you: you think you're Ghanaian? No, you're Black. That's more important to us."

He describes developing what he calls a triple consciousness — Ghanaian, Black, and immigrant — each layer shaping how he was perceived and how he learned to move through the world. It is, he says, part of why storytelling about identity has become so central to his work: identity is never fixed, only relative to where you're standing.

New Road and Guava Trees was released through Mass Appeal Records, the New York label co-founded by Nas. The deal came together almost by accident — a friend in the industry flagged the project, and a lunch meeting in London with the label's CEO, arranged during a trip tied to the fifth anniversary of Burna Boy's African Giant, sealed it within minutes.

"Sometimes it's synergy," he says. "It's a body of work — a resume. What do they represent? Are they capable? And once again, it's just a business possibility that looks good."

He insists the partnership hasn't compromised his creative independence in any way — "nothing has changed... if anything, it's just an increase in possibility in terms of reach."

On the broader question of ownership — a live debate among artists everywhere — he offers a strikingly unsentimental take.

"The idea of ownership is overrated. If it takes your family into a generational thing — even at zero percent — it did what it needed to do. The music you made is spiritual, but the CDs are for sale."

M.anifest describes himself as a reluctant but genuine fan of TikTok — not for chasing virality, but for what he calls connection. He uses it, he says, for unscripted thoughts he wouldn't post anywhere else, and for discovering artists he'd otherwise never encounter, including a young Kumasi-based creator he stumbled across through the app.

He's clear-eyed about the platform's double edge, particularly for artists uncomfortable with constant self-performance.

"Right now you become the marketing tool. You're competing with content creators. The algorithm isn't saying, 'this is a musician' — it's saying, 'this is a content creator.'"

Still, he frames the platform as an equalizer for artists operating outside music's traditional centers — the US and parts of Europe — giving young, under-resourced creators a shot at reach that simply didn't exist before.

Asked about a since-quoted line of his — "don't fall complacent to the cheers of the easily impressed" — M.anifest describes it as one of the most dangerous traps of any creative career. Devoted fans, out of love, will sometimes celebrate work that falls short of an artist's real standard, and it becomes the artist's own responsibility to keep checking their output against a higher bar.

"It is our responsibility, having been given this kind of love and trust, to do self-checks and introspection — before you fall off the mountain and realize you're at rock bottom."

He's candid about a related idea he's spoken about publicly — "risk is wealth" — and about where he still plays it safe. Parenting, he admits, is the one place he leans conservative almost to a fault, catching himself becoming "hawkish" and having to consciously loosen his grip.

Some of his most significant career turns, he says, weren't planned at all. A Craigslist apartment listing in Minneapolis led him to his first manager. A near-skipped trip to Mexico with the collective Africa Express led to a full album recording and a lasting friendship. A chance encounter with the producer Drumroll — after someone mentioned he'd "just left the studio" — led to a decade-plus collaborative relationship spanning roughly twenty songs.

"I don't know about mistakes — but I can name at least five happy accidents."

One of the most vivid: a message from Zimbabwean-South African artist Comrade Fatso, who'd heard Immigrant Chronicles on repeat and proposed a live soundtrack collaboration for his film We Are All Blood. It took eight years to materialize, eventually staged live at the Trade Fair Centre pavilion in Accra — a single-take, fully improvised performance M.anifest calls one of the most extraordinary things he's ever done.

M.anifest speaks with evident warmth about the younger artists he's chosen to work with — Quatting chief among them, whose documentary of their studio sessions is due for release. What draws him in, he says, isn't just raw talent but a particular kind of difference — an artist slightly left of center, doing something the mainstream hasn't caught up to yet.

"If you love music and you love the art, you know what's sometimes special and different — and you're drawn to it."

Asked whether hunger matters more than talent, he resists the framing. Drive is close to a prerequisite, he says, but treating it as the entire game is short-sighted — plenty of hungry, talented artists burn out within a few years. Nurturing the craft itself, he argues, matters just as much as wanting it badly.

This year marks the tenth anniversary of Nowhere Cool, an album — and phrase — that has followed him ever since. He explains the line not as pessimism but as a kind of permission.

"It's supposed to empower you to think instead of always running from where the problem is. Maybe fix home, and then keep it."

Fame, for him, hasn't reshaped daily life much at all — no entourage, no bodyguard, no ostentation. "I don't think my energy screams 'look at me,'" he says. "I'm managing just fine. I'm grateful."

Pressed on what frustrates him about society, M.anifest lands on a pattern he finds both baffling and instructive: how often the people most harmed by broken systems are also their most fervent defenders — whether it's opposition to taxing wealth among those with none, or reflexive defense of political corruption by those it hurts most.

"There needs to be a mindset shift — and a lot of us, in different art forms and professions, probably need to contribute to it, including in ourselves."

Asked to complete the sentence "Ghana is—", he answers simply: a work in progress. He points to Rwanda as a case study in what functioning institutions can produce — not flawless governance, he's careful to note, but visible proof that individual failings can't create as much chaos when systems actually work. He recalls, with some irony, a Rwandan ambassador crediting Kwame Nkrumah-era Ghana as part of the inspiration for Rwanda's own planning.

A committed Arsenal supporter, M.anifest lights up discussing the club's first Premier League title in 22 years — a wait he compares, in mock seriousness, to a testing of faith. He'd publicly apologized on social media to the club after an old, frustrated tweet resurfaced.

"Supporting Arsenal was shared grief. Right now, it's shared joy."

He draws a broader comparison between football fandom and hip-hop rivalry, arguing the latter tends to run deeper and more personal — because musical taste, unlike a football badge, often stands in for identity itself.

Of all the roles he occupies, fatherhood — to a teenager now — sits closest to the center.

"It requires a bit of work, the same way my practice and profession does. You can't always be reactive. It has to be proactive parenting too."

He describes the teenage years as a final, critical window of influence before the wider world takes over, and admits it isn't simply joyful — it demands the same obsessive attention he brings to his music.

Asked whether he now considers himself operating from legacy, M.anifest is unequivocal: not yet. He describes his current chapter as pre-legacy — reflective, deliberate, "moving with wisdom, not with thirst and desperation."

"You have to create the legacy to become a legacy."

He points to artists like Pat Thomas, whose finest work — by many accounts — arrived in his seventies, as proof that age needn't mean irrelevance, only a different, more graceful register.

Rapid-fire, a few last answers: Medina over Minneapolis. A global hit over an Arsenal win — "Ghanaian hits have 2 million streams, bro. We want global." Waakye over jollof. Both lyrics and flow, both hip-hop and highlife. Studio at sunrise, not midnight. Vinyl over streaming, though he laughs about the economics of it. Introvert — "not an inability, just how my internal system works."

Asked to recommend a future guest, M.anifest suggests Professor Kwaku Danso-Boafo — a former Vice-Chancellor of the University of Ghana, whose institutional stories, he believes, deserve wider telling.

The conversation closes as it began — warm, unhurried, two old friends trading one last laugh before the cameras stop.