Setting the record straight: Burna Boy didn’t create a music genre called Afrofusion

NNAMDI O. MADICHIE

Damini Ebunoluwa Ogulu was born in 1991 in Port Harcourt, the largest city in Rivers State in Nigeria. He would become known as Burna Boy, a singer, songwriter and record producer who rose to stardom in 2012 after releasing Like to Party, the lead single from L.I.F.E., his debut studio album.

With a growing army of global fans, he won a Grammy Award for his album Twice As Tall and has performed live at Madison Square Garden in the US. He recently revealed his sixth studio album, Love, Damini.

With music commonly described as a mix of reggae, dancehall, R&B and hip hop, Burna belongs to the broadly defined music genre Afrobeats (contemporary music mostly of Nigerian origin). But in an interview in 2015, he pronounced that his music was Afrofusion (a sub-genre of Afrobeats, but increasingly also a new name for Afrobeats, thanks to him). He referred, in one interview, to “when I started the Afrofusion thing”. Promoting