My friend Tom Pryor, the savviest international music journalist I know, made me aware of this video by the New York-based, Ghanaian rapper Blitz The Ambassador. Blitz came on the scene in 2009 with his mix of socially conscious hip hop in the spirit of Public Enemy and African beats drawn from Ghanaian highlife and Nigerian Afrobeat, among other styles.

The video for “Make You No Forget” features Seun Kuti, son of the legendary Fela Kuti and a topnotch performer in his own right. My brother and I can make the embarrassing claim of almost having killed Seun Kuti in our mother’s station wagon. We were driving him around Washington, DC to film an interview for National Geographic and came within a screeching stop of a head-on collision. There was an intense moment of silent and then Seun said in his big African voice, “That’s OK. I was not meant to die here.”

In regards to Ghana: I once spent six hours trying to cross the border from Togo into Ghana with my dear friend Richard Dimosi. We got our passports stamped and everything, but then were stopped from crossing because we didn’t have the proper papers for our rental car. We turned around and a Ghanaian customs official had to cross out the stamps on our passports with the scratchy handwriting, “Did not disembark.”