NNEKA EGBUNA- A ‘WARRI GIRL’ ON GLOBAL STAGE

Multiple award winning artiste and songwriter, Nneka Egbunna, will be performing live at Alliance Francais at Herbert Macaulay Road, Yaba in Lagos, on the 8^th of February, 2013. The co-founder of Rope Foundation, posted this information on her Facebook page saying the event will start by 4pm prompt. Come meet this “Warri” girl turned global star and experience an acoustic set live.
Read more of Nneka Egbuna after this cut:

GIANT STRIDES
NNEKA EGBUNA- A ‘WARRI GIRL’ ON GLOBAL STAGE

In Giant Strides we introduce young Nigerians who have against all odds made success of their vocations, businesses and professions. In this issue, we are presenting to you a multiple award winning artiste and songwriter, Nneka Egbunna, who took herself from being a struggling everyday “Warri girl” to climbing different global music stages, playing in world-class sold out concerts across Africa, America and Europe, as well as performing alongside globally renowned stars such as Nas, The Roots, Lenny Kravitz, Erykah Badu, Talib Kweli, Lauryn Hill and Damian Marley. However, if Nneka is not doing music, she would be painting or minding her ROPE foundation which she co-founded with Ahmed Ner from Sierra Leone.

The foundation seeks to engage ex-child soldier who lost their limbs or became physically challenged through the wars, with the arts of music in order to express themselves. Though Nigeria doesn’t have child soldiers, they are trying to replicate ROPE foundation in Nigeria through other issues.
Delectable Nneka is born of an Anambra State-born Nigerian father and German mother. She was raised in a polygamous home in the city of Warri in Delta State of Nigeria; a city she is indeed proud of and makes it known to any body that cares to listen that she is from there. “I am from Warri. Of course, I am proud of what I am, who I am” she once exclaimed in a recent interview with Tell magazine, when asked if called a “Warri girl” what would be her reaction.

One can understand her stance. Warri which is part of the Niger Delta region of Nigeria provided her the platform to understand the environmental issues affecting the region. According to her “I’ve been educating myself of the past, the Shell issue and of course our political leaders who were not very concerned about the well-being of the people of the Niger Delta. Oil spillage, gas flaring, people are dependent on fishing and farming but they are ruined. Nobody really cared. Then you have the militants. Every time I go to Warri, I see the truth. So, I feel something has to change. For the fact that God has taken me this far to stand on a stage where more than one person listens to me, I see myself as the voice of the many who do not have the chance or courage to speak. So, I’m just raising awareness about what is happening and still happening in that side of the country.” she laments. This however has in no small measure influenced her songs, introducing some political undertones to them like her latest album “Soul is Heavy” and “Vagabonds in Power” which almost saw her being pushed off the stage by the States Security Service (SSS) during the Niger Delta Peace Concert in Port Harcourt River State. She recalled, “That was during the Niger Delta Peace Concert. I was performing the theme song and maybe 10,000 people were there. It was an open air and it was free. And when I started singing Vagabonds in Power, it was too much for them. They came on stage and were harassing us. So we had to take off. They wanted to arrest us and actually threatened my manager. I don’t know who gave them the order” she said. However, hearing about her parenthood, you would think she grew up with the proverbial “silver spoon”, not at all. Nneka’s life in Warri was not rosy, her ‘oyibo’ (foreign) looks notwithstanding. Growing up in a polygamous home without one’s biological mother is better imagined. For Nneka, she saw it all. She described her primary school at Delta Steel Company (DSC) Primary School as rough. “Sometimes, we didn’t have chairs.” she said. She later attended a public secondary school; Demonstration Secondary School, Warri, where she made a make a mark by establishing the Christian Union in school at that time. 
Nneka was only able to see another city (Lagos) apart from Warri, at the age of 16 when she sought to meet her mother in Germany. In her words, “That was at the age of 16…. I had never even been to Lagos. Lagos for me was big and when I saw the lights, the skyscrapers, the buildings, it was already like a different country for me. And then, talk less of entering a plane, because ‘na road I use enter Lagos from Warri’. Then, being in a plane for the first time, all that excitement and meeting my mother for the first time in a foreign land, you know, it was okay” she recalled. However, her foray into Germany was not as smooth as she would think. In less than three months, she was sent back. Her mother seemed to have lost the emotional touch between a mother and child. Nneka said “I think cultural differences (amongst other issues) were what made my mother not able to cope with us. My brother and I went together… I guess the whole re-embracing Africa through us was too much (for her). So we had to find our level.” However that German trip was to redefine Nneka who was hitherto not a confident and outspoken person, but would usually be jealous of people who were very courageous and self-confident to speak about things. She had to learn German, cater for herself. And according to her “I became stronger.” This started with her asylum experience in Germany which will always be in her mind. “I was in an asylum with people of different origins. So it was not a smooth entry. This was late 1999 or early 2000. I was there for about a week and then they took me to a reformation facility, this massive building where you had different children. Some didn’t have parents, or were difficult to raise; you had armed robbers, drug addicts who were all in this building. Me, I just came from Africa and they gave me a small room, with only a small bed, a small window and a small wash hand basin, like a prison. I was there for about a month. They find out what they can do with you, which school they could put you in, therapists come to talk with you for a while to find out what you’re all about. Then, there are guardians who would decide for you. So, there was this day when I sat with one of the guardians, and said I had a brother here (in Germany). I said I had never been a bad child so I didn’t deserve to be in a prison here; because as far as I was concerned, it was a prison. So they looked into the yellow phone book and found the number of one of my uncles and called him. Eventually, they got my brother on phone. They picked me up and I moved in with him. He was also squatting with somebody. We were there for a while together. His girlfriend at that time, who was also in a reformation facility, gave me connection to this Catholic home where different children were being taken care of. I became one of them. So, that was where I was for the next six years.
“Those years shaped me. Then I got into school and became more confident to work, because I could speak the language then. My very first job was selling shoes in a shoes place. But they fired me because the woman said I was not open enough. After that, I worked in a driving licence school as a secretary, despite the fact that I never had a driving licence. Then, I worked in a cinema, and I had to clean the toilets every morning, actually from five to eight, four floors. So I would come out from the cleaning place and go to school.” she said.
Besides the challenges that Nneka passed through, she had racism to contend with in Germany. As a student of Archaeology and Anthropology in a German University, she recalled her personal encounter with racism by a professor lecturer who would not want to give out credit to any black student “I had that situation when I submitted a dissertation. He (the lecturer) said, you guys are good at doing music, playing basketball, you know, it was really bad. And then of course, at my working place where they would give black people ‘yama-yama’ jobs and the oyibo people better jobs” 
But Nneka’s spirit refused to be broken; she forged ahead to graduate and faced music squarely. Though music has made her famous, she perhaps was not originally set out to be a musician. Singing according to her, was just part of her. “All I knew was that I liked singing, when I was cleaning in the morning, when I had to wash my father’s car. I sang once or twice in the church. But I was not in the choir. We went to St Peter’s Anglican Church...” she remembered. While tracing her rise to fame, she noted that music has always being something she did along side her various engagements, despite the challenges. “I met a couple of people who were into music when I was in that facility with these girls, including a musician I was babysitting for. Then I got the contact to studios and I would be a studio singer. I met a couple of producers but they never really believed in me because I was not that sexy kind of girl. Most of the musicians whose career they would push were girls who were very ‘feminine’. So what I would do was write the songs, then those girls would sing the songs. I always remained in the background.” Nneka struggled with these challenges until after three years when she met DJ Falk from Afghanistan and they started working together. However the partnership produced her first album which understandably did not do well. “We gave out about 5,000 copies in the beginning for a test, it didn’t go too well. It was difficult. DJ Falk and I produced it together. Most of it was done in the basement, not in the studio” she said. However, before all these, Nneka had to combine doing gigs with other works as that was the only way she could afford her studies. She worked in the cinema and was cleaning the toilets for almost three years. “But then I would still do music on the side.” She added. Continuing she said “So sometimes, I would do small shows to get some money. I earned about four hundred Euros at the cinema to finance my education; sometimes, maybe three hundred and something because we had a Nigerian oga who was a little thief. He would bring people in who entered Germany illegally and would tell them to work. But then he would remove money from their income, just like a bribe” she added.
However, a major break came for Nneka when she won the 2009 Music of Black Origin (MOBO) award, which obviously announced her to Africa as one of the continent’s genuine superstars. For her “MOBO was good. The name alone is heavy. I was like, wow, people acknowledge me as a black person. And it’s cool…Standing up there and making a speech and raising the Nigerian flag; that was for me a priority. It was great because after that I gained more popularity in Nigeria and Africa. Then Channel O invited me, nominated me for other awards.” she enthused. 
Prior to getting the award, Nneka described how she used to hold shows “I did shows. I sold out a whole concert. I would use my bicycle to go to play at the concert and bike back because it was difficult to catch the train at nighttime and I didn’t have the money for taxi. So I would use my bicycle back home so that I can sleep at least for four hours to wake up the next morning and clean toilets. I didn’t care about anybody or anything.” She said. She recalled her encounter with somebody who recognized her as a cleaner, “There was one morning when I was coming out of the cinema with the mop and all that. And there was one guy who came and he asked what I was doing there. I said I was cleaning the toilets and he said, ‘no way’. I was like, yeah. That’s life now. Me I no get shame.” Today cleaning toilets for Nneka Egbuna is a thing of the past. She has practically surmounted her ‘mountains’. She is not only sought after round the world, tickets for her shows and her albums are usually sold out and she is also one of the preferred brand ambassadors in the country. She is currently a Brand Ambassador for one of Nigeria’s leading CDMA telecommunication companies; Starcomms Telecom Ltd.

Source- National Spread (June,2012 edition)