You have to let the world speak to you and then you speak, you know, so I'm in that moment now where I'm finding the world's voice.

I wasn't making music consciously when I was younger. I was a musician, but that has its own stigmas. Anywhere on the planet, it's one of the more undervalued positions.

It is the very survival of the streets that makes children pick up guns in Somalia, not some older, wide-eyed rebel leader. My intimate experiences during these years are something which I have shared with people through my music but am very careful about how they are addressed.

It was interesting to find how dominating American vision is all over the world. I think there's something to be said about the world's mindset and its economics and all of that, and I think it affects the way we see ourselves and it affects music.

Hip-hop in Africa has been very often a duplication of an American experience, but in a context that's totally alien to it.

It was not my dream to be an artist. How could it have been? I thought, artist, much like a leader, was something you either were or weren't. Never something you set out to be.

You have to let the world speak to you and then you speak, you know, so I'm in that moment now where I'm finding the world's voice.