Op-Ed: Does the CIA Control Afrobeats?

2021 will forever be remembered as one of the years that various strains of Nigerian popular music, collectively and controversially called Afrobeats, travelled across the world, thanks to the COVID-era digital streaming boom, a thriving Nigerian diaspora and, crucially, the music’s joyful, danceable quality, a timely release valve for pandemic-imposed doldrums. Wizkid and Burna Boy won a Grammy that March. In July, “Essence” by Wizkid and Tems became the first Nigerian-led song to enter the Billboard Hot 100. A month after, CKay’s Emo-kissed “Love Nwantiti” set TikTok alight, before going on to chart in 150 countries and becoming the first Nigerian solo song to hit 1 billion streams on Spotify. It was proof of TikTok’s ability to vault artists from obscurity into global stardom; however, a recent video by media platform The Spearhead claims nothing about CKay’s success was “organic.” It claims the U.S.’s Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) was behind it all. 

The 18-minute video, with 18 million views on Twitter and affirmed by many, claims that the US State Department and the CIA have seized control of Afrobeats. This takeover was supposedly achieved through cynical funding of the Nigerian music industry, and in collusion with platforms like TikTok and YouTube, as well as global labels like Sony, Warner and Universal Music, all with the aim of “manufacturing consent” (to quote American linguist Noam Chomsky); to platform only artists who serve U.S. interests. This means preventing the release of, to borrow from second-wave feminists, ‘consciousness-raising music’ that challenges American foreign policy. It says this is why major artists like Wizkid and Davido are apolitical, while even politically predisposed artists like Burna Boy go quiet after becoming affiliated with these American institutions. 

It’s not the first time that the music industry is accused of being under the thumb of a secret organization. The 2010s were flush with Illuminati accusations; D’Banj, after joining Kanye West’s G.O.O.D. Music in 2011, and Mavin Record artists, after the release of 2014 hit “Dorobucci,” were at the receiving end of a satanic panic that associated success, particularly of the global variety, with the occult. Recently, Rema received a similar treatment after his debut 2023 O2 Arena concert; many saw the Devil’s pitchfork in his use of equestrian symbolism and allusions to 16th century Benin royal court. It’s a mirror to Nigeria’s hyper-religious culture, one dutifully held up by Nollywood movies in the early aughts, like Chris Obi Rapu’s “Living in Bondage,” in which sudden, generational wealth is attributed to a paranormal source.

As one OkayAfrica video explains, The Spearhead claims are a smorgasbord of truths, half-truths and outright falsehoods that obscure more grounded problems facing Afrobeats. It’s true, as The Spearhead claims, that the U.S. practices music diplomacy and invests in Nigerian music; the State Department launched the Global Music Diplomacy Initiative in 2023 and announced a partnership with YouTube the following year. Recently, the U.S. Mission hosted a three-day workshop in Lagos on intellectual property protection for Nigerian music professionals. However, these do not prove a CIA conspiracy, and The Spearhead video provides no actual evidence for that. It also does not consider well-attested explanations, which do not require a spy agency gaming TikTok’s algorithm, for why artists on global labels get outsized visibility, such as access to massive marketing budgets and worldwide distribution.

Counterexamples, in the lives and music of Nigerian artists on global labels, challenge the claim of a concerted effort to keep Afrobeats politically neutered. As Nigerians commemorate the 2020 EndSARS protests this month, some of them may recall that Wizkid and Davido (at the time signed to Sony Music) both backed the anti-police brutality protests, despite The Spearhead claiming that their global label ties neutralize them politically. The Spearhead also seems not to realize that Burna Boy’s “Monsters You Made,” a critique of Western imperialism, was released by Warner Music, the same label it accuses of preventing the release of anti-imperialist music. Again, there are well-attested reasons, which do not require a spy agency, for why artists tend to rethink their sound and themes after joining global labels, such as to broaden their international appeal. But then, expecting political themes from Afrobeats at all is a category error, like expecting heat from the Shackleton Ice Shelf. Afrobeats, like the Cyrenaic hedonists, is primarily about pleasure; about money, sex, love, weed and, as in the case of artists like Shallipopi and Zaylevelten, the love of weed.

The belief in American interference draws from the broader suspicion of Western investments that has trailed Afrobeats since its spate of global success in the late 2010s. As funding from global labels allowed the music to cross borders and win foreign awards, critics back home raised questions about authenticity, exploitation and ownership, the same anxieties fuelling the claims of American control.

It’s hard to miss the long shadow of history cast over these claims. During the Cold War, the U.S. used culture as soft power to shape public opinion. The CIA secretly funded the famous 1962 African Writers Conference at Makerere University. It smuggled George Orwell’s books past the Iron Curtain to whip up anti-communist sentiments in the Eastern Bloc; it acquired the rights to the novelist’s “Animal Farm” and funded a film adaptation as Cold War propaganda. And in 1960, Louis Armstrong’s State Department-sponsored jazz tour of Congo gave CIA operatives cover to access the mineral-rich province of Katanga. These precedents do not prove the CIA controls Afrobeats today but they create an environment where claims of American control are easy to believe.

In attempting to reclaim African agency, these claims, however, achieve the ironic effect of displacing the same agency. By attributing Afrobeats’ global success to secret, shadowy powers, they shift attention away from decades-long efforts of artists, home-based labels and African audiences. More importantly, these claims distract from well-documented problems facing the music industry; according to a Harvard Law School research center, though Afrobeats generated around $100 million globally in 2023, only a fraction reached African creators. This disparity is symptomatic of structural arrangements that give platforms like Spotify and TikTok monopoly over royalties, distribution and intellectual property norms, leaving African artists with little control over monetization. Unlike claims of CIA takeover, this is a proven issue, with the weight of evidence solidly behind it.

One reason why Ckay’s “Love Nwantiti” travelled well beyond its original site—besides how it artfully evokes bedroom intimacy with plucky highlife guitar accents and a sultry delivery—is that it does not demand linguistic fluency of any kind. The chorus, a hypnotic series of “Ah, ah, ahs,” substitutes language for the more Universal Grammar of feeling (to quote Chomsky again). They sound like moans produced deep in the bowels of orgasmic bliss. But they also sound like how Nigerians typically express skepticism, which is the appropriate response to claims of CIA control of Afrobeats.