Elsy Wameyo

I had never seen the sun go down in Kenya until the time I watched it set on the home of Elsy Wameyo’s grandmother. As Elsy showed me the view from the front porch, the sunset was just as brilliantly orange as you’d imagine it would be, hovering above a warm African horizon. Life there was still and serene – the tranquility punctuated only by the barking of Elsy’s dogs or the sound of her little cousins playing around her.

She directed my attention out into the growing dark. “See what I’m staring at? It’s just a gate. I don’t think you can see that far, but Lake Victoria is out there.” Pointing, she said, “This big building is my auntie’s home she’s built. And then over here is my uncle's home.”

Elsy had about twenty friends and relatives over only a few minutes prior. Those still around were cleaning up. “The goats are over there in that little cage. There's chickens roaming around,” she continued. Satisfied with the tour, she said, “The level of peace and freedom that I have right now is just insane, right? This is my grandmother's home. I've never actually met her, but I think just sitting here and feeling that – really deeply – gives me that peace I was searching for.”

Then Elsy turned and said, “Just give me one second. Let me just move this chair.” She quickly got situated and made room for a few tiny, smiling guests. Gesturing towards her cousins she said, “They want to listen in and hear the accent.”

I laughed. “The accent.” As a guy raised in the Pacific Northwest in the United States, within my own country I’m widely considered accent-less. Average. “General American” or “GenAm” in linguistics (apparently).

I don’t think I have ever been so effortlessly cool before. Elsy’s little cousins were the best audience as I just… talked normally.

“I'm like, far deep in what you would call the villages, yeah?” Elsy explained once her cousins scurried off again to play games in the twilight. Elsy told me she was born in Nairobi, but moved to Australia with her family when she was seven. For her, Adelaide, South Australia was home. “Because I'm here in Kenya, even for me, the language and the sound that I'm hearing daily is already so foreign. So to hear someone speak like you in an American accent (because I haven't even been in Australia) is crazy.I haven't heard it in so long.”

When we had this conversation, it had been nearly two years since Elsy first returned to her birthplace. At the end of 2022, Elsy Wameyo was a burgeoning international hip hop sensation following the success of her critically acclaimed debut EP Nilotic. But after months and months of nonstop work, she decided to move back home. She stayed in Nairobi for almost a year, then returned to Australia in December of 2023 for a tour and then returned to Kenya yet again.

“River Nile” was Elsy Wameyo’s breakout hit

“This year I've had a lot of shows in Europe and the UK and staying in Nairobi is just so much easier,” she told me. “Logistically and financially, flying from Australia to anywhere is just wild. So staying in Nairobi has been like my pivot point. So I just go to the UK, come back. Go to Switzerland, come back. So I've been here for like two years, but I've been in and out.”

While obviously thrilled and motivated by the growing momentum in her music career, I learned that touring had been really tough on Elsy. It pushed her to the point of complete exhaustion. She once described the person she became as “the consequences of a munificent heart that had nothing left to give.” Run ragged, she gave into weaknesses while she was away. The once deeply spiritual, deeply devoted Christian woman she believed herself to be became a giant question mark in her soul that she needed to interrogate and learn to understand again.

“I came thinking that I was coming to find peace,” she remembered, deep in thought as the reflection of the waning sunlight faded in her kind eyes. “I thought, ‘I'm just going to get there and I'm not going to be on tour and everything's going to be amazing.’ And it's interesting because on one side of it, it definitely is.”

But suddenly, Elsy shifted in her chair and a wide smile crossed her face. But her words, though energetic, became desperate. “But in terms of the work?” she motioned wildly in the air and laughed in exasperation. “Oh, Zach, it’s still ghetto! It’s still ghetto!”

As an independent hip hop artist, all of the international gigs she was playing, all of the press arrangements, all of her albums, all of her photos, all of her music videos – they were her doing. Her and a small, trusted team.

“I do a lot of things by myself,” she explained, sitting back in her chair. “I think I don't know how to give myself space to just breathe. I'm a maniac when it comes to working. I don't pause. I don't until I'm forced to.”

She sighed.

“It's not until now in this very moment that I've actually realized how broken I was, for lack of better words. Do you know when you become numb to the pain? Because you're just like, ‘It has to be done, man.’ Like you have to write that album. Have to do those tech specs for the show. And you’re sitting here and seeing emails from Copenhagen.”

Her voice took on a higher tone, preparing for a mock impersonation. “They’re like ‘Elsy, we need your specs!’ And I’m like, ‘Leave me alone. The chickens are calling me!’ You know what I'm saying?”

My heart broke in empathy at that moment. While Copenhagen has never once emailed me for tech specs for a hip hop show – or referred to me as Elsy – I understood.

“It wasn't until I sat here and I just looked out…” she said, looking off in the distance. “I haven't treated myself very well for the past couple of years, honestly.”

“I’m in the thick of things right now,” I replied. I’ll spare you the finer details, but I told Elsy how it felt to be a father of three with one on the way, trying to maintain a strong relationship with my wife and kids amidst national tours, medical emergencies, and a growing startup – all while somehow accidentally becoming a music editor for a magazine based in this place called London I still have never visited (but am now making phone calls to quite frequently).

“Shut up,” Elsy said. “Wait. Shut up. Four kids? You look so young!”

After the shock subsided when she realized I was almost ten years older than her, we were able to connect over burnout and the very unique brand of depression and anxiety it instills.

“Right now, there’s no rest for me,” I concluded. “We deserve a break, you know?”

Elsy smiled genuinely. “I feel like these moments are sick, though! Because I love when I talk to people and it doesn't feel like I'm working. It's these moments where I'm realizing (like on Saint Sinner) that it's the dark world versus the real world or whatever you want to call it. I've realized that unfortunately, you have to live in both. You can never run away. That's the sad part. But I think it allows you to see the beauty in where the sun is. To put your feet up for a second and see the sky and hear the birds and watch the stars come up. It's okay to rest. It's okay to not work. It's okay that someone calls you and you're not like, ‘I'm in the studio.’ You know what I'm saying? Like, ‘No, I'm with the chickens. I'm with the goats. I'm chilling.’”

Elsy referenced Saint Sinner, her new album. It’s the record we got together to discuss. Incorporating Elsy’s academic lyrics, intricate flow, and powerfully sung vocals, it also features samples and nods to traditional musical styles from the Nile and its people.

“Maybe pain is the point?” I asked Elsy after some discussion of the album. “Sometimes we feel like if we just do the right thing, everything will work out and get easier. But Jesus was perfect and they killed him for it.”

“No one wants to be in pain, right?” replied Elsy, nodding. “It's human nature to want to protect yourself. But I think now the situation is that as a people we've run so far away from our main source – the source being God. In the Word it talks about how He leaves the 99 for the one. When you see a sheep that's lost, it doesn't even know where it needs to go. It doesn't even know who it's looking for. It's simply just wandering. But us, because we've gone so far, we almost forget the reason for it, right? You have a hole in your heart and you're trying to fill it up. But we were created with that hole for a reason.”

What exactly did Elsy mean when she said we were created with a hole in our heart? And that we have one for a reason?

“There's a desire that we have, and that's to worship,” she elaborated. “You try to fill in that hole with money, you try to put food, you try to put clothes, you try this and this and that in the name of trying to fill this desire. But at the end of the day your heart is simply yearning to worship God because that's what you were created to do. But because we're so far from the source, no one understands what that hole is. That’s pain.”

She paused to collect herself and think before replying.

Up until this point, I was completely swept up in this version of Elsy Wameyo that had family cookouts in the Kenyan countryside, searching for peace and watching the sunset while talking philosophy next to the goats. She exuded so much warmth and light that I had entirely forgotten how badass her music was. From this exchange so far, one might conclude that she’d written a worship album. But Saint Sinner goes HARD.

I told Elsy this and we started laughing.

“Boys and girls, let me tell you,” she giggled. “I feel like I live a double life! I've really enjoyed Saint Sinner though, because I think that's exactly what it is, man.”

She explained that the duality we discussed didn’t just apply to joy and sorrow, faith and doubt, sin and holiness. Elsy said her biggest strength was having that duality in every aspect of her life.

“Being Kenyan living in Australia; being black living in, as I call it, white walls; being a saint and a sinner and a human being; being a Christian in an industry that is run by the devil; I think there's so many,” she told me. “There's so many points in my life where I'm really just battling. It really is a battle. But let me tell you, God is so good.”

Dusk had arrived. Elsy turned on the porch light. I asked her what she would tell the world about Saint Sinner if she could sit everyone down and have them listen to her all at once. What would she say? What would she ask them to feel? What would she hope they understood?

“I think the one thing that people don't fully grasp is that for me, when I listen to a song, it almost feels like it's the word of God in front of me and I'm reading it,” she said. Next, Elsy struggled to find the right words to articulate an inexpressible desire of hers. I could hear it in her voice and see it on her face. It was earnest. The yearning in this wholesome person was like dogs barking in the Kenyan night  – sharp stress interrupting such serenity.

“It's so much deeper than the music,” she finally said. “My music is the byproduct of what I've actually gone through. I feel like with my songs, God has said, ‘Do you know what? Take this project and show the world evidence of what I've actually done.’ So when I give you my project, it's nice and it's fun. You hear a song and you're just like, ‘Oh, this is dope. This is fire.’ And half the time you don't even hear what I'm saying. You hear a song like ‘Umva’ and you're just like, ‘Oh, this is sick.’”

Then she pointed to herself. “But this girl is crying in that song. You know what I'm saying? That’s what I would tell the world.”

Twilight had become dusk, dusk had become night. The little cousins were still up, but even their energy was giving out. It was time to go. As we concluded our first and possibly only conversation in this life, I said goodbye to Elsy Wameyo feeling profound gratitude. I was thankful for the sin and struggle she had to wade through in order to bring me her perspective on life and music.