Ghanaian rapper Okyeame Kwame has recounted experiences that helped his craft as a musician including working as a cobbler.
Speaking at seminar for up-and-coming artistes recently, he said working as a shoeshine boy and selling polythene bags shaped his career and life.
“…I lived there and sold rubber bag when I was five years old, I made my own shoeshine box and on vacation, I’ll go through the neighborhood and shine shoes for coins. I didn’t know that this thing that I thought was disturbing me, was destroying my swag, was the thing that was going to give me the opportunity to meet a lot of people.
”Inside that house, I saw many things and all the things I experienced, little did I know was building my library to become an artist.”, he said.
Okyeame Kwame said he grew up in a big house with about 50 different families as tenants though his father was an accountant and could afford his own apartment.
“I grew up in the (big house) ‘efikesem’ type of setting where we had like 150 people in one big house built by some old cocoa farmer that has one toilet and bath. In that house, there is the hustler…, the sister in the house who is trying to go to London…The gentleman of the house who maybe works at COCOBOD that at the end of the month the water and light bill will be given to…, the house owner who is more than 70years old which is wicked…”
“I always felt that ‘my father is an accountant why do I have to live in a place like this…” he said.
Okyeame Kwame revealed that these odd jobs helped him meet and interact with so many people and this went a long way in influencing his music especially vocabulary.
