For the follow-up to his Mobo-winner Alpha Place, the UK rapper revisited Nigeria, drawing inspiration from bygone days of school bullies and washing his clothes by hand
W
hen Knucks was 12, his parents made a monumental decision. The fledgling rapper had been getting into trouble at his school in London so, in a bid to rectify this, they packed him off to boarding school in Enugu in Nigeria. “Some people out there just didn’t understand me,” says Knucks, as we talk at his record label’s office. “Like, in Britain people are saying, ‘Go home.’ But people in Nigeria were like, ‘You don’t belong here either.’”
Boarding school proved to be a challenging couple of years for Knucks, whose real name is Afamefuna Ashley Nwachukwu. He swiftly picked up a handful of “nemeses”, including the most popular boy in the year, who threatened him on his first day and warned him to stay away from his girlfriend. Miles from the place he called home, and without amenities such as a washing machine, Knucks found solace in a friendship with the school cook. “She was my mother figure,” he says. “If I was sad or homesick, I would go to her.”
Tales from Knucks’s two years in Nigeria feed into his new album, A Fine African Man, which finds the 30-year-old reflecting on “where I stand in the world, what kind of person I am, how my values are influenced by things that happened back then”. On the song Cut Knuckles, he compares the luxuries of his current life (“Now I’m watchin’ the brand new stuff that I got gettin’ tumble dried”) with memories of having to handwash his clothes in Enugu (“No washing machine / Man wasn’t a teen / But was washin’ my clothes by hand / Cut knuckles, the water stang”).
