By Yusuf Bangura
The African Giant, Burna Boy, will grace this year’s opening ceremony of the UEFA Champions League Final in Istanbul on June 10th, 2023 according to a UEFA tweet to that effect, (same here: https://mobile.twitter.com/UEFA/status/1636312148279173120)
Burna Boy is clearly the current King of Afrobeats. I don’t get tired of listening to his *Love Damini* album, which features the super hit single ‘Last Last’, and other great songs like ‘Common Person’, ‘For My Hand’, ‘Wild Dreams’, ‘Roller Coaster’, ‘Dirty Secrets’, and ‘It’s Plenty’. Last September when I visited the Manor store in Geneva, I was pleasantly surprised to see a giant poster of him adorning one of the walls in the men’s section. And when we were in Lisbon a week later, one of the taxis we hired was playing ‘Last Last’ when we got into the taxi.
Afrobeats is the new music genre that’s conquering the world and, in some cases, unsettling regimes that want to control the lives of young women. A few days ago, the Iranian morality police arrested five Iranian teenage girls for circulating a video in which they were dancing to Rema’s global hit *Calm Down* without headscarves. As Americans will say, ‘they aren’t seen nothing yet’!
