Opinion: Why Are African Artists Like Tyla Forced to Strip Their Identities For Global Stardom?

With the ascendancy of Afrobeats and amapiano, the thrill of the new adds to the allure of the African superstar. From Burna Boy to Asake, Davido and now Tyla, the idea of being African has become an asset. The problem, though, is that to maintain that ascendance as an African artist often demands levels of reinvention and the stripping away of the authentic Africanness that made them interesting in the first place.

Stripping it back

It’s in the contrived accent. It’s in geographical alignment (African stars typically move to locations like London or California after blowing up, admittedly for convenience). It’s in the vehement rejection of a collective “Afrobeats” identity.

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by OkayAfrica. (@okayafrica)

On the other hand, it’s in the laziness with which African identity, or cultural views are approached and interpreted. Tyla in particular has come under fire for her African-ness (or presumed lack of it) since attaining global recognition and has had to defend her heritage as a Coloured person from South Africa.

In June, the 22-year-old released a statement on social media in which she insisted that she had never denied her Blackness. “I don't expect to be identified as Coloured outside of [South Africa] by anyone not comfortable doing so because I understand the weight of that word outside of SA, But to close this conversation, l'm both Coloured in South Africa and a black women [sic],” her statement read. That clarification should have resolved the issue, but once again, her African identity and its possible conflict with her impressive success was an issue during the VMAs.

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Episodes Entertainment (@episodesent)

There is a sense in which, despite the work that has been done to assimilate Tyla into the hallway of global stardom, her proud embrace of her African identity continues to serve as a talking point, as a deficit that dislodges her potential to be a true, global superstar.

The true cost of an African identity

It’s true that it’s never been a better time to be an African — the continent is the youngest in the world and its people are increasingly shaping the taste, sensibility and pulse of global culture. The elephant in the room however is that African identity, regardless of its weighty currency is often a vehicle and never the destination. To be an African artist today is to be in constant pursuit of assimilation, whether by choice or by industry expectations.

It’s to start out as a street pop artist whose Yoruba, grit-filled dialectic is swapped for a sanitized, soft-toned direction to appeal to wider audiences. The goal is to expand market options, to embrace a globally palatable personality and become a cool and culturally legible person who could be from any part of the world but happens, rather interestingly, to be from Africa.

To be an African pop star today is, by virtue of constantly moving towards a Western center, to almost never be African at all. The proposition is clear: while it is cool to arrive African, it’s even cooler to try to stay global, to adopt that abstract identity that hardly authentically includes or affirms the African perspective or sensibilities. At the same time, it also means being susceptible to cultural barriers, to fighting as Tyla has had to, the skewered notion that global superstars can only come from certain places.

While this issue, quiet as it is kept, is directly dictated by commercial interests, we must establish a culture where pop stars vehemently refuse assimilation, where to be globally notable doesn’t require unconscious self-erasure. It is even more important that institutions establish rewards and recognitions that directly encourage and celebrate the authenticity and diversity that artists from outside the U.S. bring to the table. It’s easy to ask, what’s wrong with wanting to be globally palatable? To be mistaken for American or British, to assimilate to a culture whose global currency is already established? What seems harder to answer is this: what’s wrong with being and staying African?