Drive around Amsterdam or Rotterdam lately with the radio up, and you’ll notice the airwaves sound less Euro-centric. Slang once saved for Sunday dinners in Southeast Amsterdam or auntie’s living room in Ga-Mashie gets prime-time play. Flip on FunX, the heartbeat of Dutch youth culture, and you’ll catch a DJ signing off with a casual “chale,” or a presenter cracking up over some “kwasia” behavior from the weekend.

Enter the Obroni Whisperer. In Twi, obroni means foreigner. Playing the whisperer means bridging two worlds: staying close enough to Ghana to get it right while getting far enough into the Dutch mainstream to be heard.

Kay Slice and Eben Badu speak it fluently. Slice, a Rotterdam-based multi-instrumentalist blending Highlife rhythms with poetic hip-hop flows, translates his heritage through sound. He’s cooked up a strain of Afrofusion that he’s currently taking to major stages across the Netherlands and beyond. Badu, an Amsterdammer drawing heavy inspiration from his Ghanaian roots, co-founded The New Originals (TNO) alongside Rizky Lasahido and Maru Asmellash in 2015. What started as a creative collective is now a brand reflecting Amsterdam’s cultural mix, and outside of TNO he works as a creative director and cultural programmer. They view this cultural duality as a home-field advantage.

“For a long time, the Dutch-Ghanaian creatives have been seen more as guests. But now we’re sort of becoming more of the host.”

— Eben Badu

“You definitely have to navigate in between,” Slice tells BLACKSTAR Haus, leaning into the rhythm of the conversation. “I feel in a way I’ve always been like a bridge, generation-wise and culturally also.”

Badu is on the same page. After a decade of scaling a collective into a recognizable brand, he calls this cultural crossover the “birth of a new language.”

To get the whisperer, you have to understand the silence that came before them. For years, surviving the Dutch creative scene meant keeping your Ghanaianness on the down-low. You were a guest in the fashion houses, a temporary booking in the music halls, and getting ahead meant playing it safe. Slice remembers the moment he realized the two worlds were playing by different rules. He was six or seven years old, playing at a Dutch friend’s house.

“At some point, it was dinner time,” Slice recalls. “The mother looked at me and said, ‘Hey, it was nice having you here, but now we’re eating, so you have to go.’ I was stunned. I didn’t understand the concept of not sharing food together. In a Ghanaian household, if you’re in the house when the fufu is served, you’re eating. Period.”

Cultural differences like that one are where the Obroni Whisperer earns the name.

This new language, as Badu puts it, is what lets the whisperer hold their own in historically white spaces. Onstage, Slice doesn’t slow down to explain himself. While the industry often expects diaspora artists to water things down, Slice lets the music ride. He blends hip-hop with the plucky and percussive suavity of Highlife and trusts the obroni crowd to keep up. By the time the sweat hits the stage, the front row is past needing a translation.

“I normally approach it like, ‘Are you guys down to travel to a place you’re maybe not familiar with?'” Slice explains. “I think that helps to create a way for people to navigate or find their way inside of it. Because I’m not really toning it down sound-wise. I’m just expressing it the way I want to express it.”

That zero-compromise energy is catching on. Making it in the Dutch market no longer means shedding your roots. Creators are winning by staying unfiltered, dismantling the Western stereotype that African art is just “happy” background music. Badu brings that energy to Dutch fashion. The New Originals started as a community and picked up a business plan along the way. Catch someone in a TNO jacket on a rainy Tuesday in Bijlmer, and you’re looking at a receipt for a decade of gathering people together before selling them a single item. The jacket is shorthand for an Amsterdammer who knows the most interesting design in the city comes from a brand unwilling to dilute its source material or its celebration of diaspora identity.

“In a Ghanaian household, if you’re in the house when the fufu is served, you’re eating. Period.”

— Kay Slice

“For a long time, the Dutch-Ghanaian creatives have been seen more as guests,” Badu says, reflecting on the industry’s gatekeepers. “But now we’re sort of becoming more of the host.”

Success, to them, means taking over the host duties. It’s a simple power dynamic: guests wait to be served, but hosts decide what’s on the menu. For years, Ghanaian talent was booked by Dutch institutions as a strategic splash of diversity or a checklist item. Now they’re growing platforms of their own and letting the obroni crowd come to them. Badu credits this to the communal nature of Ghanaian culture. His community is basically a chop bar: if the energy is good, the neighborhood will find you. That instinct naturally draws a crowd, though he’d rather you didn’t call it marketing. For him, it’s about making a space where the culture doesn’t have to translate itself to be respected.

“It’s about ownership,” Kay says. “Ownership is key. If we’re all waiting to get booked by the system, we aren’t growing. We have to create our own ecosystem. Whether it’s a community-driven party or an improvisational vibe, the importance no longer lies in being booked. It lies in the building.”

At Slice’s Kossa Kossa events, an ecosystem bridging Africa and the diaspora through sound, story, and style, hosting looks like a house party where you sweat through your shirt to live drums and groovy vocals. Slice might start a verse, but the audience is always going to finish the melody. It’s the kind of community where the heart and soul is allowed to be free to connect across cultures.

“In Holland, everything is efficient,” Slice notes with a cheeky smile. “I think of the supermarket Albert Heijn. You go in, everything is tjap tjap, you pay, you’re gone. But in Ghana, you go to the market, you talk to the person selling plantain, you hear a story, you share a laugh. There’s a dialogue. That’s what I want in the music. I want a house party in the kitchen where everyone is a part of the process.”

Neither Slice nor Badu plans on playing translator forever, and the endgame is a scene that no longer needs the service. “In ten years,” Badu says, looking ahead, “I hope the ‘third space’ we’ve created, this diaspora identity is just the mainstay. Not a niche. Not a special feature for Black History Month. Just the standard.” They’re clearing the path for the next generation of kids currently navigating the friction of their own dual identities. The goal is to make sure those kids know that being a “middle child” is a flex, the ability to see the world through a wide-angle lens. That self-assurance took both men years to lock in, and they want the next in line to show up with it pre-installed: the certainty that knowing the difference between the rhythm of a Rotterdam tram and a tro-tro in Accra is a superpower.

“I hope that the next generation feels like there are a lot of opportunities to express yourself,” Slice says. “I want them to feel like they can play the xylophone, produce a beat, or design a brand without having to ask: does this fit into the Dutch box?”

“Ownership is key. If we’re all waiting to get booked by the system, we aren’t growing. We have to create our own ecosystem.”

— Kay Slice

As things wrapped up, Badu offered a parting blessing in Twi: “Bo dwo mu, biribiara beba, Nyame wo ho.” It translates simply: do your work, it will come, God is there. It’s a reminder that while these two might be whispering to an obroni audience for now, they’re ultimately answering to something much larger.

Written by: Lodia Sebit

Photography by: Wesley Robert