Success stories - K’naan: From Somalia to Canada to the World

June 2010

Watching the slim figure on the stage, swaying to the rhythm of his now-trademark anthem “Wavin’ Flag,” it is hard to see the inner strength that has carried him to this place. To say K’naan has overcome some difficulties on the way to international stardom seems an understatement almost to the point of insult.

K’naan’s life began in Mogadishu, Somalia, in 1978, the son of an intellectual father and a musically gifted mother, but a happy childhood in a comfortable suburban home overlooking the Indian Ocean soon gave way to the frighteningly surreal as Somalia fell ever deeper into civil war. As he told an interviewer for London’s Daily Telegraph, “I remember tanks being lined up along the street of the neighbourhood … One day, a group of us were hanging around and someone threw a rock at a passing technical [an open car with a heavy gun mounted on it]. The technical opened fire and killed three of my friends.”

Amid the growing anarchy, K’naan’s father left for the United States, but it would take months of daily pleas to the U.S. embassy by his mother before the rest of the family could get away. In 1991, permission was finally granted and the family escaped on what K’naan believes may have been the last scheduled flight Somali Airlines ever flew.

After a brief stay in New York City, the family moved on to Toronto’s Rexdale neighbourhood, joining one of the biggest Somali communities in Canada. As with so many newcomers, K’naan says the adjustment was not easy. However, as he told the Chicago Tribune, “Even in the confusion and the algebra of our new life in North America, it was coloured with gratitude. I think sincere gratitude, for life made the weather and language barriers tolerable.”

Tolerable perhaps, but still difficult: in his teenage years, K’naan struggled with floods of anxiety attacks, depression, insomnia and more. It was during this time that he began to explore and find some comfort in poetry and music. In a blog for the Huffington Post, he says he realizes now that, for him, music was “much more of a need than a want: [it was] an antidote to a poison.”

The antidote did not work immediately. He left school in grade 10, and admits to “getting into trouble” in a neighbourhood where trouble was not hard to find. Seeing the toll gang-related violence was taking on his friends, he began a self-imposed exile, travelling the U.S. and Europe alone for several years, working on his poetry and music.

In 2002, now back in Canada, he was “discovered” by a member of Nelly Furtado’s production team and the rest, as they say, is history: two top-selling albums, three Juno awards, and a song—Wavin’ Flag—that is on the lips of hundreds of millions of people around the world, thanks to its adoption as the official song for the World Cup soccer tournament in South Africa by headline sponsor Coca-Cola.

Although his lyrics speak so clearly of the plight of his homeland, K’naan also has strong feelings for his adopted home. After winning twice at the 2010 Juno Awards, he told the National Post of his success that, “For it to happen in Canada was a specific joy to me. It could have happened at the Grammys and that would have been nice, but it wouldn’t have been the same as in Canada.”

Still, Somalia is close to his heart. As he wrote in a blog post, “I do hope that, in some way, my music opens an eye or two to a great continent of both immeasurable beauty and struggle. And to my own life, written as a country disguised as a person.”

Read more Success Stories.