If a category can be reopened and reshuffled hours after publication, what confidence does anyone have that it won’t happen again?

By Emmanuel “Waziri” Okoro

There is a particular kind of fatigue that comes with covering the Headies Awards year after year. It is the fatigue of watching an institution that positions itself as “Africa’s biggest and most prestigious music award show” fumble the basics with a consistency that would be almost impressive if it weren’t so exhausting. To be honest, this writer is frankly tired.

The 18th edition nominees list, released a couple of days ago, is the latest instalment in that fumble, a list that is already rife with shortcomings. Noted, every year comes with a fresh round of excitement, parsing of category lists, arguments over snubs, and maybe the quiet pride of seeing an artiste’s name where it belongs. And every year, somewhere underneath that excitement, sits the same set of structural problems the Headies has never quite bothered to fix.

This piece is an attempt to name them plainly, one more time, in the hope that naming them enough times eventually forces a correction.

A Year Under Review That Refuses to Be a Year

Let us start with the arithmetic, because the Headies never quite can. One of the most persistent and least interrogated problems with the awards over the last decade is its handling of the “year under review”, the eligibility window meant to determine which songs and projects qualify for a given edition. In theory, this should be a 12-month stretch. In practice, it has never once landed there.

The pattern, once you lay it out, tells its own story. At the 2018 Headies, the review period ran from July 2016 to December 2017 (seventeen months). There was no ceremony at all in 2019. The 2020 edition then stretched the window to a startling eighteen months: January 2018 to June 2019. The years that followed offered little correction: fourteen months at the 2021 Headies, fourteen again in 2022, and fourteen once more in 2023. The 2024 edition held the line at fourteen months too, despite promising two ceremonies that year and delivering only one.

Last year, nothing happened at all; Nigerian music went uncelebrated by the show meant to celebrate it. Now, at the 18th edition, the submission window spans from the 1st of August 2024 to the 30th of April 2026, twenty-one months, the widest gap in the award’s twenty-year history.

When a review period balloons past a year, it stops functioning as a snapshot of a single creative season and starts functioning as a grab bag, throwing projects from different years into direct competition with each other regardless of when they were actually released or how the conversation around them has already moved on. 

An album that dropped in the first month of the window and one that dropped in the last are, for all practical purposes, being asked to answer the same question, even though they were made for entirely different moments, competing against entirely different fields, and received by an audience whose tastes had shifted in the interim. 

That is not a fair contest. The consequences of this are not hypothetical; the Headies have lived them before. At the 2021 edition, both of Burna Boy’s African Giant (2019) and Twice As Tall (2020) were in contention, with their songs featuring in some of the categories, even as the two albums had already been assessed separately by the Grammys, with Twice As Tall going on to win Best Global Music Album at its own, distinctly bounded, edition.

It is worth pausing on that comparison, because it is instructive. The Grammys, BET Awards, Brit Awards all operate on eligibility windows that critics can argue over at the margins, but that never balloon to seventeen or twenty-one months. A defined year under review is not a bureaucratic nicety but the mechanism by which an award show tells a coherent story about a specific period in an industry’s life. 

Strip that mechanism away, and what you’re left with isn’t an award show so much as a periodic, loosely organised catalogue of whoever happened to release music since the last time anyone checked. If the Headies wants to be taken seriously as an arbiter of a given year in African music, it has to start behaving like one. That begins with committing, without exception, to a genuine twelve-month window, and holding itself to it the way every other major award show in the world manages to.

Home Is Always the Best Address

Then, there is also the matter of geography. The Headies has announced that its 18th edition, tagged “Africa to the World”, will be staged in Canada, a decision that, whatever the stated rationale, is bound to reopen a wound this publication and others have flagged before. Hosting an award show built around celebrating Nigerian and African music somewhere outside Nigeria or Africa is not a convention observed anywhere else. National and continental award shows tend to stay rooted in the places whose culture they claim to honour.

The 15th and 16th editions were held at the Cobb Energy Performing Arts Centre in Atlanta, and the complaints then were the same complaints now: what does it say about an industry when its most prestigious award show goes shopping for venues abroad rather than investing in the infrastructure to host its own moment at home?

The 17th edition, fittingly tagged “Back to Base”, returned to the Landmark Event Centre in Victoria Island, Lagos, a gesture that suggested the organisers understood the problem. That understanding appears to have been temporary. Some stakeholders will point to investment and collaboration opportunities as justification for the move to Canada, and those opportunities may well be real. Diaspora audiences matter, international visibility matters, and there is nothing wrong in principle with an African award show wanting a global stage.

But an award show’s first obligation is to the industry and audience it claims to represent, and there is no partnership abroad valuable enough to substitute for the simple act of celebrating African music on African soil. 

Every edition staged outside the continent is, whether intended or not, a small signal to the artistes, the fans, and the industry at home that the real audience worth impressing sits elsewhere. That signal accumulates. It shapes how seriously the show is taken by the very ecosystem it claims to serve, and it is a cost the Headies keeps paying without ever quite reckoning with it.

A Next Rated Category That Doesn’t Add Up

The unusually wide review window has also scrambled some of the individual categories, and nowhere is this more visible than in Next Rated, the award meant to spotlight the most promising emerging artiste “poised for superstardom”.

This year’s nominees include Mavo, Llona, FOLA, Shoday, and Fido, and even a cursory look at the list reveals an obvious mismatch: FOLA is not in the same tier as his fellow nominees.

His trajectory over the review period has already outpaced what “emerging” implies. He enters the 18th edition as its most nominated artiste, with ten nods in total, including placements in major categories like Album of the Year, Best Male Artiste, Best Recording of the Year, Best R&B Album, and Song Writer of the Year. An artiste with that breadth of recognition across the marquee categories has, by definition, “already arrived”. He does not belong in a category built for those still on their way. The same argument can also be made for Mavo, who is not only the go-to for collaborations, but has carved a niche for himself in the industry. 

The irony is that this dilutes the category rather than elevating it. Next Rated is supposed to function as a signal to the industry, a marker that says: watch this one, they are about to break through. 

When a nominee has already broken through several times over in the same awards cycle, the category stops doing that work. It becomes redundant, a formality attached to a name that has already collected its due recognition elsewhere on the ballot, at the expense of artistes for whom the nod might have actually meant something.

Editing After Releasing A Nominees List Is An Eyesore

Perhaps the most damning item on this list, though, is the least defensible: a few hours after the Headies published its nominees list across its website and social platforms, the organisers quietly began editing it. Davido has since been added to the Best Male Artiste category; and Olamide’s “99”, featuring Young Jonn, Asake, Seyi Vibez, and Daecolm, has been added to the Song of the Year lineup.

There is a broader culture of “anyhowness” that Nigerian institutions have normalised across public life, a tolerance for process that bends after the fact rather than holding before it, and the Headies has not been spared from it.

A nominations list is not a rough draft but the output of a process that is supposed to have already happened, a committee that deliberated and finalised its categories before making anything public. To publish and then quietly revise raises real questions about how that process actually worked, and whether “finalised” means anything at the Headies at all. Calling it borderline criminal is not hyperbole so much as an accurate description of what it does to the credibility of the exercise.

It also raises an uncomfortable question about everyone who was already on the list before the edits. If a category can be reopened and reshuffled hours after publication, what confidence does anyone have that it won’t happen again, quietly, before the ceremony itself? The artistes who made the cut on merit deserve a process solid enough that their nomination isn’t contingent on who gets added, or removed, in the days that follow.

There is more that could be said, and more that probably will need to be said again after the award has been organised. But after seventeen editions, the question worth sitting with is not what else is wrong this time. It is what it says about the future of the Headies that, after all this time, we are still here.

Emmanuel “Waziri” Okoro is a Nigerian writer and journo with an insatiable knack for music and pop culture, with bylines on Afrocritik, PM News, Tribune, The Sun, ThisDay, Vanguard, and The Guardian. When he’s not writing, you will find him arguing why Arsenal FC is the best football club in the multiverse. Connect with him on Twitter, Instagram, and Threads: @BughiLorde.

The post What the Headies Awards Keep Getting Wrong: A Cursory Look at the 18th Edition Nominees List first appeared on Afrocritik.

“When they found my living ancestral line, I said that it’s not enough for me to just know that information. I physically have to go there, and I have to meet them” – Matt B.

By Emmanuel “Waziri” Okoro

There is a peculiar kind of vertigo that comes with discovering you have been homesick for a place you have never been. I think of this often when I consider the millions of descendants of displacement scattered across the Americas, each carrying a blank space where a country’s name should be. For Matt B, that blank space had a shape long before it had a name. It just took a DNA kit, a Grammy, and a plane ticket to Owerri, Imo State, Nigeria, to fill it in.

I met Matt B – virtually, a few days before the release of his most personal work yet. But it didn’t feel like meeting a stranger. It felt like joining a man mid-sentence, in a story that started six years earlier and, as far as he’s concerned, has not ended. There’s an easy excitement in his voice when he says, “I’m excited for it to drop. I’m excited to see what people think about it. It’s all just so surreal”. 

We are there to talk about ALKEBULAN III: The Water Remembers, the closing chapter of a trilogy that began as curiosity and has become, over three albums, a pilgrimage. Over the course of the interview, we explore, among other things, the circumstances that led to his new project, how he makes music, what he looks for when selecting collaborators, and much more.

I: Where Do We Come From?

Matt B, born Matthew David Benson in Chicago, grew up singing alongside his two older brothers in church. The three of them later formed a family group called TriEnd in his teenage years. Over the past two decades, he has built a career that’s hard to categorise. He built an early audience in Asia with his 2014 album, Love & War, watched “Colour Blind” go viral in China, and found his way onto Billboard’s charts with the Trap-Soul-inflected 2021 project, Eden. But underneath the catalogue sat a question he had carried for longer than he’d been making music.

“I always wondered who I am and where I’ve come from”, he tells me, describing himself in the language he uses deliberately: not just African-American, but Freedman, Foundational Black American — a man aware that his identity had been interrupted somewhere along a coastline centuries ago. 

In 2019, he took an AncestryDNA test to try to answer it. The test told him he was majority Nigerian. It was, he says plainly, “not enough for me”. So he went looking for the answer the way he does best: inside a song. The search became his 2023 project, ALKEBULAN, then ALKEBULAN II released a year later. That second record won him a Grammy for Best Global Music Album in 2025, and handed the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, founded 79 years ago, its first-ever Grammy in the process.

He is still, a year later, visibly stunned by that win. “To be recognised by my peers, and to be recognised as having the best album for that year, I’m lost for words every time I think about it. When they called my name, I was like, did they make a mistake? I had to pinch myself”.

It was in the wake of that win that AncestryDNA came back to him with something sharper than a percentage: a living bloodline, traced through records and genetic markers to the Igbo people of Owerri, Imo State. A certificate wasn’t going to cut it this time either. It wasn’t enough for him to just have that information. He knew he had to physically go there and reconnect with his people.

Thus, ALKEBULAN III: The Water Remembers did not begin as an album. It began as a documentary crew following Matt B and his wife, producer and manager, Angela V. Benson, through Ghana before they ever set foot in Nigeria. At Elmina Castle (a trading fortress built by the Portuguese in 1482, before evolving into a major hub for the Transatlantic slave trade), he stood before the Door of No Return. This was the passage through which captive Africans were marched onto ships bound for the Americas. At the Assin Manso Slave River — where, historical accounts hold, the enslaved were force-marched over fifty miles to the coast and bathed for the final time before that crossing — he took part in a traditional blessing ceremony.

“Something very powerful was said to me”, he recalls, “that my walking through the Door of No Return was not my door of no return. It actually was my door of return. And that my going to the Assin Manso River, that was not my last bath, that was my first bath”. This was his re-introduction, as he puts it, to the continent, an act of honour paid to ancestral ties that had never technically been severed, only obscured.

II: Ikechukwu, Ahamefula, Nwanne Di na Mba

By the time Matt B landed in Owerri, Nigeria, the emotional register had already shifted from research to reunion. Looking out into the distance, he turned to his wife and told her it felt like he’d been there before, a feeling he still struggles to put into words, except to say that it felt like home. What followed were two elaborate homecoming ceremonies, staged by two separate kingdoms, each treating him as a son who has returned. 

He was received with a 12-gun salute he hadn’t anticipated, tribal drums, dancing and fanfare. “To be received in that way as a family member, as a brother, and welcomed back into the tribe, it just was heartwarming for me, because it felt like a sense of belonging that I just longed for, for such a long period of time”.

Then came a name. His Royal Majesty Eze Engr Chidume Okoro of  Amano, Obohia, Ahiazu Mbaise, conferred on him the Igbo name Ikechukwu (God’s Power) along with the chieftaincy title Ahamefula (May my name not be forgotten). A second monarch, His Royal Highness Eze Leo Nwokocha, Chairman of Mbaise Council of Traditional Rulers, later bestowed the title Nwanne Di na Mba (A brother in a foreign land). He admits none of it was expected. “I was like, what is going on right now? This is crazy”.

Matt B named his entire trilogy after Alkebulan, which, according to some historical records, translates to “Mother of Mankind”. Being handed his own name back, in the region his ancestors were taken from, carries an obvious symmetry, and he draws the line himself. “There’s so much history, and there’s so much value in a name. It gives you your identity back”. He was taught, too, the etiquette of the kola nut, how it must be addressed in Igbo, because, as he was told, it does not speak English. A portion is carried home afterwards, proof to one’s own people that one was received and respected. 

III: Telling the Stories No One Else Will

Ask Matt B how he writes, and the answer changes depending on the assignment. Melody, he insists, usually comes first; a necessity, he says, when you’re singing in languages much of your audience won’t understand, because the emotion has to survive the translation gap through sound alone. But for this record, he reversed his own process. “I went into more of a historical dive before I started writing”, he explains, treating research as the foundation.

Two songs anchor the record’s emotional core, and both began as history before they became melody. “My Mother’s Song”, featuring the Malian vocalist, Fatoumata Diawara, is built around the true story of a nine-or-ten-year-old girl kidnapped from Sierra Leone in the 1700s who carried a song her mother had taught her across the Middle Passage. More than three centuries later, her descendants used the surviving lyrics and melody to trace their way back to their tribe. “When they made it back to their tribe, the lyrics and the melodies were almost the same”, he said, still visibly moved by it. “That is so powerful;  it just goes to show the importance of why those traditions matter”.

“Overboard”, an interlude built with the Kabusa Oriental Choir, draws from an account of a slave-ship rebellion in which captives who seized the vessel chose to jump overboard with their captors rather than live in bondage. “That was such a powerful story for me, so I put that into my lyrics, and that’s what I wrote around”. The choice to route this history through music rather than plain narration is deliberate. “If we aren’t telling the stories, then who will tell those stories? When you share it musically, then it could be digested a little easier” than it might in prose, where the same history risks landing as pure discomfort.

Across the album’s ten tracks, the Kabusa Oriental Choir functions as a structural device as much as a musical one, bookending the record and threading through its middle on songs like “At the End of the Door”, “Fertile Ground”, “Overboard”, and the title track. He confirms the placement was fully intentional. “They were a physical representation of the ancestors, the ancestral voice guiding me through that journey”. He walks me through the arc song by song. “At the End of the Door” doubles as both the record’s beginning and its end, an audible rendering of the Door of No Return itself. “Fertile Ground” is scored to footage of a plantation, where, despite the circumstances, there is a visible unity in people working the field together. “Overboard” carries the rebellion. And “The Water Remembers”, the closing track, is what he calls one of the most powerful interludes on the entire project.

The featured artistes on The Water Remembers: Diawara, Skales, Goya Menor, Boy Spyce, Camidoh, alongside the Kabusa Oriental Choir and an orchestral recording with the Royal Philharmonic at Abbey Road, were like archetypes assembled to complete a portrait. “It was important for me to work with West Africans for this project, because that’s where I descend from”. He notes that all of them “speak to the culture”, people who understand the music is not just about what is hot right now, but about creating longevity and something meaningful.

Assembling those voices around one project, largely without label infrastructure, came with its own friction, though perhaps not the kind one would expect. “As far as creative differences, I didn’t really experience that with anyone, honestly, from this project”, he said. “People were actually just very warm, very open-minded”. The real difficulty was technical: there was no blueprint to work from. “Even though this is my third time making a project like this, I have no blueprint”, he says, describing the search for a sound that could hold Afrobeats, Afrobeat, orchestral arrangement, and R&B together without flattening any of them. 

He worried, too, about singing convincingly in languages he doesn’t speak natively: Igbo, Yoruba, Swahili, and, on earlier records, Luganda and Zulu. And thus, he leaned on co-writers for diction and pronunciation, treating linguistic accuracy as inseparable from the respect the project was trying to pay.

That the whole thing was self-funded, without a major label, was, in his telling, not a limitation but a condition of the story surviving intact. “Some stories that are meant to be told, and they have to be told a certain way”, he says. “When you bring in too many powers that be, they want to control that narrative, which can water it down. It was really important, not only for me but my team, to ensure that we had the creative control of that narrative”. No expense, he was careful to note, was spared regardless; Abbey Road, The Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, Red cameras (some owned outright, others loaned in partnership) for the documentary and short film. Independence, for Matt B, was a creative firewall, not a budget cut.

IV: Homeward, Now for Others

Six albums and one Grammy win into a career that started in a college dorm room, Matt B’s hardest-won lesson isn’t about sound but trust. “Trusting yourself, trusting your process, knowing that you are unique, that you are creative, and that there’s no one else on this earth like you”, he says, before pivoting, characteristically, to the unglamorous mechanics behind the art. “Business is also really important. 90% of this industry is business, the other 10% is music”. He also notes that the people who eventually join an artiste’s momentum will rarely be the ones who built it. “They won’t necessarily do that journey for you. If you don’t put in that work yourself, why should anyone else trust what you’re doing?”

That philosophy extends, unsurprisingly, to who he still wants to work with. Careful not to pigeonhole himself, he rattles off a list that spans generations and geographies: Angélique Kidjo, whose voice he calls simply amazing; Nomcebo Zikode, a friend he has yet to collaborate with formally; and the Tanzanian star, Harmonise. Then come the Burna Boys, Davidos, and Temses of the industry. “I just love to create, and I love to make music. Anyone, big or small. If I love their sound and love what they represent, that’s a collaboration I want to do”.

As our conversation winds toward its close, I ask what advice he’d offer other African Americans chasing the same unanswered question he’d carried for years. He doesn’t hesitate. “I hope that I’m the blueprint for that”, he says, “That it isn’t as scary as what you think it’s going to be, that you will be well received when coming back to the continent, that you guys love us and that you want us to come home, and that the diaspora is stronger for it”.

There’s a particular irony in a man who once sang in languages he didn’t speak now being the one teaching others how to find their way home. But that, in the end, is what Matt B seems most at peace with; the fact that the question he carried for most of his life no longer belongs only to him. 

Somewhere in a lineage he didn’t know existed six years ago, there are cousins who now know his face. And somewhere, listening to The Water Remembers for the first time, there will be another Matt B — someone who has never set foot on the continent but has always, somehow, been homesick for it — hearing, in the choir’s opening notes, an invitation they didn’t know they’d been waiting for.

Emmanuel “Waziri” Okoro is a Nigerian writer and journo with an insatiable knack for music and pop culture, with bylines on Afrocritik, PM News, Tribune, The Sun, ThisDay, Vanguard, and The Guardian. When he’s not writing, you will find him arguing why Arsenal FC is the best football club in the multiverse. Connect with him on Twitter, Instagram, and Threads: @BughiLorde.

The post Matt B: The Water Remembered Him First first appeared on Afrocritik.