How much history she will eventually make remains to be seen but it is easy to see that she has made the right start. Her name, in translation from Igbo, means ‘Mother is the Greatest’ and it is an approximation of this that she found on the wall of her very first studio. Now, two albums into her career, she is living up to that epither after being favourably compared to Lauryn Hill on her debut, Victim of Truth and praised for raising the game on her sophomore offering, No Longer At Ease. She has a strong following in Europe and just cracked the market in the UK with the breakout heat ‘Heartbeat’ which is laced with the cathartic beats of German DJ and longtime collaborator DJ Farhout to boot.

What this writer is hoping for is that, more than a decade after the passing of the last truly world famous Nigerian musician, Fela, we finally have an heir to his throne. Despite the pretenders and regents who have strode his afrobeat stage with something like the charisma of the old master, from his sons Fela and Seun to his one-time drummer Tony Allen (Go listen to his most recent LP Secret Agent), it appears that his true successor will neither be a man nor connected to him. Out of the constellation of Nigerian songstresses who have emerged of late, Nneka is the brightest star. With her catchy yet often anguished hooks and her gripping vocal style tearing off all insincerity from around every melody to leave it raw and reverberating, she with her wld hair and bohemian affectations, her guitar- tight understanding of the suffering of Nigerians at its most fundamental levels slides easily into the chasm left gaping by Fela’s untimely exit. When I first heard the song ‘Kangpe’ with its hip hop and afrobeat influences, and the dreadlocked end of a reggae infusion, I thought here is a voice completely unabashed in its propagation of Nigerian culture, unafraid to speak her mind. And the opening lines: “So na so, e be, na condition wey make you waje like this” that is the closest thing to Fela (forget Lauryn Hill) that I have heard in my lifetime.

Remember, no wahala, na wahala