How Vic Mensa, Chance The Rapper launched the ‘Black Star Line Festival’ in Accra
Senegalese-American artist, record producer, and business owner Akon recently caused a bonfire on social media when he dropped some divisive comments comparing African artists versus thereby reigniting the cross-cultural dispute of African descendants, widely known as the diaspora wars. Many viewed the “Sorry, Blame It On Me” comments as further deepening the wound and the difficulty of uniting African people from various ethnicities.
However, blessed are the peacemakers like Vic Mensa, born Victor Kwesi Mensah, and Chance the Rapper, real name Chancelor Johnathan Bennett, who are taking an uncommon route by building bridges instead of walls. Together, the hip-hop artists co-organized the Black Star Line Festival for January 6, 2023, in Accra, Ghana. Top-tier performers scheduled to perform are Mensa himself, Chance the Rapper, Erykah Badu, T-Pain, Sarkodie, Tobie Nwigwe, Asakaa Boys, and M.anifest who seek to band together with other performers throughout the diaspora.
“I’m half Ghanaian, and I’ve been visiting my family in Ghana since I was 11 years old. But it wasn’t until very recently, by 2020, that I started to go to Ghana alone and cultivate relationships in the spaces of music, fashion, and art,” says Mensa. “In those moments, I’ve started to recognize the immense privilege that I have to be in direct communication and conversation with my ancestry, as obviously something that’s been stolen by most of the people closest to me in life.”
Between 2020 and 2022, he traveled to Ghana and South Africa, where he noticed the tremendous divide between Black artists and their fanbase that exist on the continent. Mensa recalls meeting people who sported Savemoney tattoos, the name of his hip-hop collective.
“Hip-hop heads in South Africa, on podcasts and TV shows [who] know ten years of my music that I’ve never had the opportunity to interface with or build physically or even digitally. I was struck by the fact that we, as Black artists, perform Europe ten times over before we ever touched the continent of our origin,” he shares. Mensa believes the issue stems from a lack of infrastructure, and the suppression of traditional collaboration, not because the fans of his art do not exist.
He continues to elaborate on why Black artists skip touring the continent, which extends beyond their management team or record labels and primarily boils down to the erroneous, negative opinions many still retain against Africa regarding travel.
“Also, the lack of some of the touring infrastructure in the venues has created a situation where it’s just very rare that artists go and perform in Africa; if they do, it’s in South Africa, and though it’s becoming more frequent now [with] Kanye, Beyonce, Chris Brown, me, but the same is not true for the rest of the world,” he says. “As I said, I don’t think it’s the fault of just artists, managers, or record labels. Holistically, we’ve been led by propaganda to think of Africa as too far, too dangerous, and too scarce because by painting Africa in a demeaning light, [is] one of the primary tools of racist capitalist exploitation from its inception.”
“In many ways, the divide between us has been manufactured, and so when I was in South Africa in 2021, I had the concept to do a festival to create a vessel [to] bring Black artists to perform on a continent. Then, when I returned to Ghana in December 2021, I started to imagine it as a festival. One of the first people that came to mind to perform and be involved was Chance,” he discloses.
Mensa invited his friends to visit him in Ghana, and unexpectedly Chance was the only one to reach out to him to take up his offer. Together the musical comrades re-discovered Mensa’s home country and the relationships that the “Metaphysical” emcee had fostered. Throughout his trip, he continued to marinate on the concept of a possible festival that he wanted to serve as a conduit between Black Americans and their African counterparts, and Chance immediately came on board.
