Newhallville Rapper Rocks Nairobi

Nairobi, Kenya — New Haven-born poet and hip-hop MC Akua Naru surveyed the large and hyped up crowd at The Alchemist Bar here for the final show of a five-country African tour. Flashing a sly grin, she confided in them, ​“You know, there are one or two Kenyas in my family, truth be told.”

The crowd in attendance had already abandoned its characteristic Nairobian chillness before Naru started her set. More than 30 minutes before show time, a ten-deep wall of humanity formed in front of the stage, so densely packed and impenetrable it could make Donald Trump weep orange tears of jubilation.

Naru’s band — the German-based DIGFLO — started up with some pounding jazz-funk riffs, and a chant gathered steam: ​“Ah-koo-ah! Ah-koo-ah!” 

Naru took the stage, her piercing eyes staring out from under a black fedora, her angular face fringed by waist-length dreadlocks that flung out in all directions as she bounded around. She launched into a high-octane version of ​“Heard” from her 2015 album The Miner’s Canary.

“Your narrative deserves a platform and a turn,” she rapped, ​“to know what it’s like to be heard.”

Naru’s own narrative begins in New Haven’s Newhallville neighborhood, where she was reared on gospel music and nurtured by community institutions — and continues across the globe, where she is making a name for herself in the music business.

Heading ​“Upmarket”

That journey landed her last Thursday at the Alchemist. Situated in Nairobi’s Westlands nightlife district, the Alchemist became the epicenter for the booming capital’s hipsterdom the second it opened in January. In a city glutted with posh rooftop bars offering bottle service and VIP lounges, The Alchemist presents itself as an easygoing, come-as-you-are neighborhood joint, though its appeal so far has tilted toward the international set.

Built around a tree-lined courtyard, The Alchemist contains nooks and crannies filled with cushioned swings and stacked wooden pallets covered with throw pillows. It is festooned with hookah pipes, graffiti murals, tacked-up vinyl records, and various other tchotchkes. In addition to several bars, it also houses a sit-down brick-oven pizzeria and two food trucks, one of which serves up some of the best burgers in Kenya (which the Nigerian-Kenyan sister proprietors will happily drench in peanut sauce if you so desire). Some nights there’s a pop-up tattoo parlor in the back. And towering above everything, behind the stage, is a decommissioned canary-yellow double-decker bus, emblazoned with the words ​“Where does your faith live?”

This past Thursday night the faithful — an even mix of do-gooder expatriates and artsy Kenyans — arrived off the dusty matatu-clogged street through an unmarked gate. An unusually long cold season had just ended, and everyone was ready to raise their consciousness while dancing under the stars. Blonde NGO workers in peasant skirts and flannel-clad bros swilling Tusker Malts jostled for space with jamaaz in tight t‑shirts and well-tended dreads chatting up chic ladies in top-knot headwraps.

I asked a Kenyan friend how she would describe the Nairobians in the crowd. She immediately and succinctly answered: ​“Upmarket.”

A Pizza (Not Apizza) In Nairobi

“I grew up in an environment where black women were strong and ran shit,” Naru said in an interview before the show. ​“That’s the same strength I draw upon standing on stage in front of the microphone.”

Naru had just received a stunning gift from a Kenyan fan: a perfectly fitting denim jacket, on the back of which the fan had painted a vibrant portrait of Naru’s idol, author Toni Morrison, wearing a golden crown. Naru donned the jacket as we sat down to converse over what was really the only acceptable food choice to a pescatarian New Havener like her: pizza with anchovies.

Born Latanya Hinton, Naru recounted a childhood spent on Shelton Avenue in Newhallville in the late 1980s and early 1990s. The streets of her youth were full of kids playing double dutch or kickball. There was always a block party on Starr Street. Hip-hop culture was in full swing, with people gathering to rap, beatbox, or dance to music pumping from boomboxes. At Helene Grant Elementary, ​“Lift Every Voice” was always sung — never the national anthem — which taught Naru to be proud of her heritage.

Naru’s mother, who had migrated to New Haven from Farmville, N.C., worked at Yale-New Haven Hospital. From infancy, Naru’s grandmother took her to church at Shekinah Glory Apostolic, off Congress Avenue. At the time, the church was largely female-led, with strong women as pastor and choir director.

Her mother’s Pentecostal faith meant that secular music was not allowed in Naru’s house. But when Naru was 9, her ​“cool, very evolved” 12-year-old uncle began sneaking in hip-hop cassettes for Naru to consume, including those by early female rapper Roxanne Shanté. Before long, the uncle was laying down beats for Naru to exercise her budding MC skills at backyard parties around the neighborhood. Though the uncle never achieved his own childhood dream of becoming a music producer (he’s now a businessman in New Haven), he helped set Naru on a path to achieve hers.

As a teenager, Naru joined CityKids, a program aimed at providing a safe space for urban youth to develop leadership and performing arts skills. The New Haven chapter was funded in large part by singer and New Havener Michael Bolton. Naru remembers two things most vividly about the program: First, CityKids had a professional studio, where she heard her voice on a recording for the first time and began writing songs for others to perform. Second, CityKids welcomed speakers from a variety of backgrounds every Thursday, who would speak on subjects like police brutality, fatherlessness, and racism. This challenged Naru to ​“find better ways to shape my argument.”

After college at Rutgers and graduate school at the University of Pennsylvania, Naru became a ​“daughter of the world,” she said. She realized her childhood ambition to travel extensively in Africa, lived in China for two years, and eventually made a home in Cologne, Germany, where she formed a band and began recording.

She still returns to New Haven every year and sometimes performs at Cafe Nine or on 94.3 WYBC, where her cousin Juan Castillo is a longtime fixture. She is currently recording a third LP and preparing to mount shows in Brazil.

Poetry and Alchemy

Naru took ownership of the audience from her first word and didn’t let go for two hours. Every hook was shouted along with, even in her YouTube hit ​“Poetry: How Does It Feel Now,” a moaned slow groove so intimate that shyer listeners may feel compelled to back shamefacedly out of the bedroom into which they’ve intruded.

At the end of each song she gave DIGFLO space to jam, calling for solos from each player in turn while she took to a corner of the stage to dance freely. Their virtuosic improvisations were well-employed, as they were often required to vamp as Naru grabbed the mic and spoke her mind.
It wasn’t hard to hear echoes of the Pentecostal preacher in Naru, in the call-and-response nature of her performance, her rapid and relentless delivery, and especially the charismatic sermonizing she often engaged in mid-song. During a powerful closing performance of ​“Black and Blues People,” she addressed the audience about the mortal dangers black people face in the United States, recounting the fates of Terence Crutcher, Tyre King, and Keith Lamont Scott.

“Don’t tell me to calm down,” she intoned. ​“I can’t be calm. This is urgent. We’ve been in this shit for 400 years. This is not a time to be calm. That’s the problem — we’re still in this shit because people’s calmness is supporting the status quo!”

As the intensity rose, Kenyans in the crowd threw up single fists and crossed-forearm ​“X” signs. On the dance floor, white expats glanced around nervously to see how they were supposed to behave. But making the uneasy wazungu in the crowd feel more comfortable was not something that Akua Naru came here to do.

Once she dove back into the song, though, the crowd cohered into a hand-waving whole, shouting along to the explosive refrain ​“Black people unite!”

After Naru left the stage, Kenyan TV personality Patricia Kihoro took the mic, adorned with Maasai beads, imploring Naru to perform one more song, and to adopt a Kenyan name to replace the Ghanaian one she chose at the start of her career. Naru obligingly returned for an encore, sporting her new Toni Morrison jacket.

She ended the evening with ​“The World is Listening,” a tribute to nearly two dozen female MCs who inspired her career. In the song, she acknowledges that nearly all of these women have faded or removed themselves from the hip-hop scene, and ties it to the musical patriarchy and broader undervaluing of women within society.

“Tell me what’s the plight of a female MC’s fate?” she demanded. ​“Or what’s the worth of a woman’s story to a DJ?”

By the time she made her triumphant exit, the title of Naru’s song had become ​“Nairobi is Listening,” and she had adopted a Kenyan name: Wanjiku.