Kafui Dey interviews Wanlov the Kubolor — Kafui Dey

"If everybody around you is not feeling good, then you can't feel your most good. So spread the goodness — fetch it and spread it." — Wanlov the Kubolor

The Vagabond Philosopher: A Conversation with Wanlov the Kubolor

Wanlov the Kubolor — musician, filmmaker, activist and cultural icon — sits down with Kafui Dey for a wide-ranging conversation that takes in childhood burns, boarding school survival tactics, police chases in Texas, prison stays, 14 children spread across four continents, and a deep, unshakeable commitment to art as a force for social change. Born Emmanuel in Romania in 1980 to a Ghanaian petrochemical engineer and a Romanian public policy advisor, and raised mostly in Accra, Wanlov defies easy categorisation — which, as he explains, is precisely the point.

The Earliest Memory: Fire and a Plastic Bag

Wanlov's earliest memory is visceral and telling. As a young child in Accra, he watched his father burning a mango tree in the family compound — a tree he loved, a tree where he slept and made friends by sharing its fruit. Fascinated by a melting plastic bag held over the fire, he sat watching the liquid drip — not realising it was falling onto his foot, burning almost to the bone. The pain came later. A full vial of penicillin powder and a bandage sorted it out within a week. His father shook his head. No beating. No punishment. Just a shake of the head.

It is a detail Wanlov returns to more than once: his father never beat him. And it was that absence of violence at home that made the violence of boarding school so formative, so disorienting — and ultimately, so radicalising.

School Days: Survival as a Curriculum

Wanlov attended Tiny Thoughts, then Northridge Lyceum, before a "small altercation" with a classmate — whose family promptly had him transferred — landed him at Christ the King. He wasn't unhappy about it. He had always wanted to go there. He just hadn't been able to get in the normal way.

At Christ the King, one teacher earned particular infamy for a punishment he called the Russian Tank — making students lean forward and punching them on the top of the head with a square fist. Someone fainted. The teacher got in trouble. But for Wanlov, who had grown up in a home without physical punishment, these years were an introduction to a new world — one where power was exercised for its own sake, not for the benefit of those in its care.

By the time he arrived at Adisadel College for secondary school, he had refined his instincts into a system. Noticing that students who claimed to have been weeding were left alone by masters during school hours, he borrowed five cutlasses and hid them at strategic points around the school — at the pavilion, near the post office, at different vantage points. Whenever he wanted to leave school to walk to Labadi, hang out with friends, or simply roam, he would pick up a cutlass on his way back and tell any master he encountered that he had been punished and sent to weed. "That's very good. Go and bath and go to class." It worked every single day. By form three, one of his teachers asked him — in genuine confusion — whether he was actually in his class.

The system, Wanlov reflects, taught students not knowledge but compliance. Teachers were more interested in showing power and inflicting harm than imparting knowledge. And the lessons that stuck were the wrong ones: that those in authority don't have to be accountable, don't have to keep their word, and can demand obedience without offering anything in return.

Both and Neither: Growing Up Ghanaian-Romanian

Wanlov was born in Romania in 1980, the product of a union made possible by Kwame Nkrumah's vision of an industrialised Ghana. Nkrumah had sent students to Eastern Europe to study engineering and the sciences — men who would return to extract and process Ghana's resources themselves. Wanlov's father went to Ploiești, Romania, studied petrochemical engineering, and met his Romanian mother at a party. By 1982, the family had moved to Ghana.

Being both Ghanaian and Romanian, Wanlov is quick to point out, is not the same as being half of either. He carries two complete passports. But neither culture fully claims him. Romania is patrilineal — since his mother is the Romanian, not his father, he is not considered Romanian there. Ghana's Ashanti culture is matrilineal — since his father is the Ashanti, not his mother, he is technically an outsider in his own ethnic group too. He exists, as he puts it, in a suspenseful space — belonging fully to neither, free from the obligation to impress anyone.

Far from experiencing this as loss, Wanlov has come to see it as liberation. He has no cultural privilege to protect, no inheritance to guard, no expectations to meet. It gives him the freedom to move however he wants — to chart his own path, live on his own terms, and identify with everyone precisely because he is claimed by no one.

America: Motorbikes, Prison, and Finding Blackness

Wanlov arrived in Texas for an exchange programme after secondary school, then returned to study business and computer science at the University of Mary Hardin-Baylor. He never finished. In his third year, he led police on a seven-minute high-speed chase through the streets of Temple, Texas — triggered by an illegal U-turn — that ended with a helicopter overhead, two sheriffs on bikes, and several police cars in pursuit. He spent about a week in jail. He describes the experience as remarkably comfortable compared to Adisadel's overflowing toilets and midnight weeding duties.

A subsequent immigration detention — after his student visa lapsed — took him on a tour of Texas jails from Belton to Austin to San Antonio to Laredo on the Mexican border. At the Wackenhut Correctional Facility in downtown San Antonio, housed in the upper floors of a skyscraper, he heard a man speaking Romanian in the cells opposite. A Boeing engineer, married to an American-Mexican woman, who had been reported to immigration authorities by his wife after a domestic dispute. By the time Wanlov left, the man was being deported back to Romania with a backpack and a pair of shoes — to a country where he had no one left.

It was in America that Wanlov first understood, in his own words, that he was Black. Growing up in Accra, called "halfcaste" or "reddo" by other children, he had never fully placed himself. In Texas, the taxonomy was simpler: any trace of Black made you Black. Rather than finding this diminishing, he found it clarifying — a sense of totality, of belonging, that the half-and-half experience of his Ghanaian childhood had never given him.

Becoming Wanlov the Kubolor

He left America as Emmanuel, known as Spooky — a nickname that followed him from a JSS English class where he blurted out the word "spooky" when asked what the lesson was about, and narrowly escaped a caning for it. He returned to Ghana as Wanlov the Kubolor.

The name came together in stages. One Love came from listening to Nas, Lauryn Hill, Sizzla and others greet each other in song. Wanlov was the phonetic spelling, chosen in the stylised way he was writing things at the time. The Kubolor arrived one evening in Los Angeles, when Ghanaians at a show told him his music reminded them of who they were. They used the word kubalo — an old Ga word for vagabond, wanderer. And at that moment, Wanlov heard in his head: one love the kubalo. The dusty foot philosopher. Someone who runs from the three colonial institutions — the nuclear family, the church, the school — to learn from the streets and the environment instead. He had, he realised, been a kubalo since Christ the King.

The Music: From Disco to the Super Bowl

Wanlov's musical life began at Adisadel, recording over beats played from a cassette at a small studio in a nearby village run by a producer called King Sounds. He would freestyle, rap other people's lyrics, and gradually begin writing his own material — encouraged by a senior called Salim Ahmad, younger brother to the late Papa, who pushed him to write rather than just perform. He could also moonwalk. At school performances, the moonwalk ended all competition.

He returned to Ghana with his debut album Green Card already completed — a deliberate irony, the album as the green card he refused to pursue. It launched a series of card-titled projects: Yellow Card, Red Card, White Card, Blue Card, Orange Card. Black Card, recorded mostly in Romanian with songs named after animals used as allegories, is nearly complete.

His collaboration with Mensa — which became the Fokn Bois — produced Coz Ov Moni, described as the world's first Pidgin musical. Shot as a film, it screened at the African Film Festival in Rio de Janeiro alongside work by Kwaw Kese's uncle Kofi Ansah. It won a GUBA Special Achievement Award. A sequel followed. A third is in progress.

A song produced with Ambolley and a young artist called T.V. was picked up by the NFL for a Super Bowl advertisement, filmed in Ghana. Wanlov describes it simply: unique work, and being prepared when the moment came.

Fourteen Children, Five Continents

Wanlov has fourteen children and one on the way. They are spread across Ghana, Denmark, the UK, Japan, Tanzania, the United States and France. His eldest biological child, Obie — now nineteen — has been his Director of Photography since the age of thirteen and shoots professionally alongside him. His sister Debbie, born in Accra, is a musician in her own right. He is trying to convince her to release a song called Donald Trump.

He never planned to be a father. He is, by his own reckoning, not a natural administrator of the family unit. But he visits. He tours with his children through Romania in the summers. He believes in showing up.

On Ghana, Education, and What We Owe the Young

Wanlov is characteristically direct about what he sees around him. The education system, he argues, is not designed to develop children — it is designed to produce compliant workers for a colonial-shaped economy. He would redesign it around the child's actual interests, with teachers screened not just for qualifications but for genuine passion to teach. He would centre African history, African science and African literature — pointing to Ayi Kwei Armah's novel Osiris Rising, which imagines a curriculum that is seventy-five per cent Afrocentric — on the grounds that self-knowledge produces pride, and pride produces better choices, for people and for the environment.

On the rivers being poisoned and the forests being destroyed by illegal mining, he offers a striking formulation: the destruction outside is a manifestation of the destruction inside. The scattered, disorganised relationship Ghanaians have with their land reflects the scattered, disorganised relationship they have with themselves. Everything starts in the mind. The environment is just the mirror.

And on the sixtieth anniversary of the coup that overthrew Nkrumah — whose vision sent his father to Romania, who made Wanlov possible — he asks for more than a holiday. Play his speeches on the radio. Show his videos in schools. Let children understand what the man actually stood for, so they can understand why he matters, and let that knowledge direct them toward something worth being proud of.