To coincide with February’s designation as Reggae Month and Black History month in Jamaica and the USA, respectively, renowned Jamaican singer/songwriter/musician Hezron Clarke will release his latest single/video “Kuja Nyumbani,” a powerful assertion of African identity, via Hardshield Records/Tad’s Record, on February 7. Hezron, who wrote, produced and performs “Kuja Nyumbani” (Swahili for ‘I want to go home’) calls the song “a complaint to mama Africa, letting her know what happened when her children were taken from her bosom.”
Set to a gentle rhythm featuring traditional African instrumentation including the kalimba (thumb piano), “Kuja Nyumbani’s” lyrics present a harrowing account of the sub-human conditions Africans endured throughout the transatlantic slave trade: ‘I have a very long tale to tell of 400 years, to you this letter I send, mama Africa, I have much complaints/Hope you can understand the handwriting, we are not allowed the use of a pen/ I know that you are wondering why the ink smells and looks so red, I collected this red ink from the place of where they tortured slaves.”
“Kuja Nyumbani” is the sixth single from Hezron’s critically lauded album, Man on a Mission (M.O.A.M), his second album released with Tad’s Record. Remarkably, Hezron wrote the song at just 19. “At the time, I had an Afro-centric, revolutionary mentality, so I wrote a song called “Mama Africa”. Then I migrated to the US from Jamaica and African people around me told me to write some lyrics in Swahili so “Mama Africa” became “Kuja Nyumbani”,” explained Hezron.
In 2023 Hezron was invited to Africa for the first time by Ghanian promoter Cynthia Raymond who extended the invitation after hearing several songs from Man On A Mission, especially “Kuja Nyumbani”. “Cynthia cried when she heard it; many Africans in the UK and Canada have told me the song deeply touched them, too; they want to go back home but because of their circumstances, they can’t,” Hezron offers.
A descendant of the Maroons, (who successfully defeated 18th century British colonizers and established a self-governed territory in Jamaica) and Ghana’s Ashanti people, Hezron performed five shows during his 2023 visit to Ghana, as part of his Homecoming tour and connected with his familial roots. Hezron met Otumfuo Osei Tutu II, the Asantehene (or king) of Ghana’s Ashanti Empire who gave him the name Kwame Bonsu. “For the king to put his hand on your head and give you an African name is the highest honor a person from the west can receive,” Hezron noted. “Actor Idris Elba and I are the only people from the west who have received that distinction.
Hezron also visited the Cape Coast Castle. The castle’s horrific underground dungeon was considered the “gate of no return” as the final stop for enslaved Africans prior to their being forcibly transported across the Atlantic Ocean. “There were rooms without light or air, just one opening where a single hose would wash 200 slaves who were held there for three months. They ate, urinated and defecated in the same place and food was thrown through that same opening. Female slaves were raped, some starved to death,” Hezron lamented. “Everything the host told me about what our ancestors went through was in “Kuja Nyumbani”, which I wrote almost 30 years earlier.”
The evocative black and white “Kuja Nyumbani” video, was directed by Devon Morris, . Hezron and his band’s performance of the song is interspersed with images of slave rebellion leaders Nat Turner and Harriet Tubman, African freedom fighters Steve Biko, Winnie and Nelson Mandela and Julius Malema, American civil rights leaders Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X, Jamaica’s national heroes Marcus Garvey, Sam Sharpe and Nanny (leader of the Maroons), Rastafarian Deity Halie Selassie I and reggae icons Bob Marley and Peter Tosh, whose music often highlighted African struggles throughout the Diaspora. In the song’s final verse, which Hezron wrote three years ago, he acknowledges the aforementioned individuals’ contributions “in fighting oppression and making changes for African people.”
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