Baloji: the sorcerer of African rap In order to avoid paying support to the boy's mother, Baloji's father moved him to Belgium, where he grew up with his father's family in Liège . Everybody knew I wasn't part of the family, but nobody talked about it. So, when my father left, I dropped out of school and left home. So began a shadowy life on the streets, his visa, based on being in full-time education, soon lapsing. If you don't have a passport, you lose access to all other rights, so you get in a really f---ed-up situation. Obsessed with rap, he taught himself English by listening to music with a dictionary beside him, while a spell living above a record shop taught him about rock, soul and latin music. Yet the glories of Congolese music - the great pan-African dance sound from the Sixties to the Nineties - meant nothing to him. That was the worst music ever. I really hated it. While rapping with local agit-hip hop band Starflam, he supported himself by nefarious means which he now regards with embarrassment. "I... stole things," he says, a touch evasively. He was a criminal? I never killed! An application for a visa to perform in Canada led to his arrest and near-deportation, only averted when his then girlfriend's mother agreed to stand as his monetary guardian. It was an experience that turned his life around. I realised everything I was about to lose - to be sent somewhere I didn't know anybody. I decided to change my life. A letter from his mother, with whom he'd had no contact for two decades, led to a further traumatic assessment of his position. People in Africa regard a child in Europe as a pension. The eldest child goes to university, gets a good job and supports the family. How could I explain to her that I didn't finish school and had no qualifications? I decided to record an album that would tell her everything I had been through. The resulting disc, Hotel Impala, made a considerable impact on the European rap scene, though his attempt to present it to his mother on a return trip to Congo was a disaster. I realised it was the sort of gesture only a European would make. It meant nothing to her. She wanted me to support the whole family, but I wasn't in a position to do that. His mixed feelings towards Africa are brilliantly expressed on Kinshasa Succursale, which chronicles his belated discovery of his musical roots. On the one hand, he excoriates Europe for treating Africa as an exotic spectacle; on the other, he lambasts Africa for making so little progress since independence, over arrangements that deploy diverse Congolese sounds from the distorted thumb pianos of the local group Konono No 1 to the lilting guitar grooves of classic dance band Zaiko Langa Langa. If he is able to utilise these elements in ways that will make sense to Western listeners beyond the African rap milieu, subtly offsetting them with funk, soul and reggae touches, while producing superb videos to accompany them, that is because he himself is coming to this music with ears that are at least half Western. "I'm an Afropean," he says. I'm a mix. Every day I'm confronted by the reality of being a black person in Europe. I don't really belong in Africa either. But this in-between situation is also a position: it's not neither one thing nor the other. It's a culture in its own right.