THE KING OF AFROPOP

He’s the guy Drake and Beyoncé call up whenever they need a continent-spanning smash hit and now, Lagos’s own Wizkid is taking over speakers everywhere with the sounds of home.

- EDWIN STATS HOUGHTON

“Ayy, hello. Come say hi. No?”

“He’s acting shy,” says Wizkid, turning to me. He’s referring to his son Zion Ayo Balogun, the beautiful, cherub-like three-year-old who has just interrupted our conversation to remind his father that he was promised a trip to the zoo today. “He’s not shy.”

As for many of us, domestic life for Africa’s biggest pop star has gotten tricky. Wizkid is calling from Accra, Ghana, where he has spent the past several months, somewhat unexpectedly, on account of pandemic travel restrictions that have kept him from returning to his native Nigeria. “I was in Ghana for a two-week holiday and now I’ve been here for six months,” he says in the pidgin cadence of Lagos, the city he calls home. “So I’m just here working, making music, spending time with my family and son. Just taking each day as it comes.”

Unlike most of us, however, Wizkid looks to be living inside an Old Master painting, at least judging by the slice of domestic reality that is visible through our shared Zoom window. Framed by the pristine backdrop of a floor-to-ceiling white curtain, Wiz is draped in a black-and-gold Versace robe, which falls open just enough to reveal the heavy platinum links that adorn his neck and wrist. His “work from home” mode strongly suggests a 21st-century avatar of Mansa Musa, the 14th-century West African ruler whose personal wealth was so great that he disrupted the gold markets of Cairo with the gifts he dispensed along his pilgrimage to Mecca. If not for Wiz’s faintly visible tattoos and the spliff tucked behind his left ear, you’d think you were talking to actual royalty.