You could view the title of I Told Them as defiant: Burna Boy’s seventh album arrives preceded by controversy after its author told a journalist about his desire for Black Americans to return to Africa. It is a regular topic with the 32-year-old Nigerian, who is very big on pan-Africanism: he has claimed his ultimate career goal is “the eventual unity of Africa”. This time, however, he unwisely suggested that the reason Chinese and Italian immigrants in the US have “respect” and “don’t go through the things that African Americans go through” was because African Americans lacked knowledge of their own roots. You can understand the storm that followed: as more than one outraged commenter pointed out, he seemed to have overlooked the fact that Chinese and Italian Americans came to the US of their own volition, rather than on slave ships.
