To see Wizkid perform is to comprehend his prowess as an entertainer. The atmosphere at his mid-week show in Atlanta is nothing short of ecstatic, somewhere between Sunday service and Saturday-night rave. The moment Wizkid starts performing, all three tiers of the hall are on their feet singing in unison.
“As soon as he came on to the stage, I just got it,” says Naomi Campbell, self-confessed Afrobeats fanatic and friend of Wizkid, over the phone from her home in London. She is recalling his headline set at Homecoming, a festival co-conceived by British-Nigerian creative Grace Ladoja as a celebration of Lagos’s vibrant cultural scene, which the model attended with grime legend Skepta and actor John Boyega in the summer. “He’s very much loved by the people in Lagos,” continues Campbell. “Whenever I’m there with him, I’m just mesmerised by how much the people on the street love him. It’s a beautiful thing to witness.”
The album Wizkid is currently touring has come to symbolise a sort of post-lockdown euphoria, but it’s easy to forget that Made in Lagos was released when many places in the world were in the throes of a second wave. The musician found himself stranded in London during the lockdown. When I ask him about that time, his voice takes on a different tone. “Being away from Nigeria and my family for so long brought me to my darkest point. That’s why I feel this album means the same thing to me as it does to a lot of other people – it really helped me through a tough time,” he says. It was only earlier this year that the singer was finally able to return home and introduce Zion to Boluwatife, his 10-year-old son from a previous relationship, for the first time. “To see the two of them playing together, almost made me cry. It was a blessing.”
Blessed is without question the adjective Wizkid uses most often to describe his extraordinary path (it’s also – surprise, surprise – the title of the song he sings with Damian Marley on the latest album). Raised by a Muslim father and Christian mother, Wizkid and his seven siblings grew up in Surulere, the bustling middle-class enclave in Lagos. Here, the city’s bright-yellow auto rickshaws, or keke maruwas, are always bumper to bumper in traffic, and street vendors peddle their wares on every corner. “There are no amount of words I can put together to make you understand what Lagos is, to explain the hustle, or the political injustice, the strength of the people or the number of amazing creatives,” he says. “To fully understand it, you have to experience it for yourself. Go to Lekki, go to Ojuelegba [a particularly vibrant area of Wizkid’s neighbourhood], go to the clubs and you’ll see what the music does to the people.”