“Hello, Michael!” I could faintly hear Christina Matovu, the soul and gospel singer, calling my name from the Zoom App. It was 11:30 pm in Lagos and London on Thursday, May 5, 2022.
Christina, Burna Boy’s backing vocalist and only female member of his band ‘The Outsiders’, commands a powerful stage presence and has one of the most distinctive voices in the African pop space.
From her harmonisation of ‘I don’ charge my energy, I no get time for no enemy. Tori pe won le tomi’ in ‘Anybody’ to ‘I need Igbo and shayo o’ in ‘Last Last’ released on May 13, 2022, among many other Burna Boy’s songs, you cannot but recognise Christina’s mellifluous voice.
I dozed off while expecting her to join the Zoom call. When I opened my eyes, I could hear her apologising for joining late.
Christina gained global recognition as an ‘Outsider’, shaping and lighting up Burna Boy’s live performances with her voice and unusual swag.
After watching Burna Boy’s ‘One Night in Space‘ concert at Madison Square Garden in New York on Thursday, April 28, 2022, I wanted to know more about ‘The Outsiders’, the band powering the Grammy winner’s live performances.
Christina’s voice, vibe, energy and carriage at Burna Boy’s concerts are always pleasant to watch. And she stood out at Madison Square on April 28.
“She is really fire,” Mavin Records CEO Don Jazzy tweeted a day after the concert.
Christina has been getting a lot of flowers for her performance at the show, and they won’t stop coming.
When she joined the Zoom call from London, where she was born in September 1990 to Ugandan parents, Christina, the third generation of Ugandan immigrants, brought an unusual vibe and energy from the first minute of the call, which lasted two hours from 11:30 pm to 1:30 am.
“Many journalists have reached out to me, but Michael, I chose to talk to you. You’d realise it took me days to respond to your mail,” she told me.
Her 95-year-old grandmother, “the patriarch and pinnacle of the family”, moved to Liverpool in 1940 on a scholarship and started building a family.
“I have a lot of respect for journalists because my grandad was a journalist. It’s very respected in my family,” she told me. “My paternal grandfather was a DJ with 48 children.”
Christina and her elder brother, Douglas, children of a single mom, were raised by their grandmother while their mom was always away at work.
She did not meet her dad, Fred Matovu Kasolo, until she was 29.
Her mom, Pastor Diana Nanteza, remarried in 1989 after losing Douglas’ father. “They had me in 1990. Unfortunately, things didn’t work out between my parents, and my father left after my first birthday.” She told me it was at age seven that she first realised her father’s absence.
“For a long time, I didn’t understand not having my father around until I was seven because we had my grandma’s last child who was like the father figure. I didn’t really miss dad and didn’t know what it was until my 7th birthday when my grandmother gave me a gift and said, ‘this is from your dad’. I said what’s that, she said ‘your father’, so where is he? And that was the entrance of rejection.”
She spent her formative years studying at St James Hatcham Church of England School in London, Greenhill Academy in Uganda and Cator Park School For Girls in London.
As a kid and teenager, Christina had a hard time struggling with self-rejection, bullying and body shaming because of her weight, which left her traumatised. Then she became suicidal at 14.
“I just felt like I was ugly, bad, never going to amount to anything because that’s what I was told,” Christina said. “They say the first 12 years of your life becomes your law. My law was that I wasn’t good enough, and that was what I carried into my adolescence and adulthood.”
Christina remembers indulging in self-harm and endangering her life by walking into the middle of the road because she wanted everything to end.
“When I started to self-reject, I started self-sabotage, self-harm, it was getting dangerous, and I was walking into the middle of the road. I was doing all kinds of things.”
Her turning point came at 14, following motivation from a friend and a period of self-interrogation.
“God saved me through one of my classmates, Rachel Tracy, who I’m still friends with to this day, and she does not remember what she said, but the day I wanted to commit suicide, she said something to me ‘Christina, do you expect people to accept you if you can’t accept yourself?’ What she put into me with those words saved my life that day,” Christina told me. “I was like, do you mean it starts with me because I didn’t see it like that.”
From the teenage girl bullied and body shamed into contemplating suicide at 14, Christina now embodies a rare charm, refreshing candour and happy demeanour while proudly wearing her Ugandan nationality everywhere she goes.
The door to Christina’s music career was opened the same year her turning point came, and she started singing in the church choir.
“I’m very grateful that God revealed himself to me the way he did when I was 14, and that’s when I started singing in the church choir,” she said.
Although she studied for a degree but never graduated, Christina, however, got a Diploma in Vocals at the Institute of Contemporary Music Performance, London.
Before global fame, she was a member of the Insignia Choir and London Community Gospel Choir. She started gaining global recognition in 2015 after appearing on The Voice U.K.
“My coach Ricky Wilson and the experience changed my life,” she told me.
Leaving at the knockout stage didn’t slow Christina down. Shortly after The Voice, she released her debut E.P. ‘Heart Art’.
She draws inspiration from American singers Chaka Khan, Whitney Houston, Mariah Carey, and Kierra Sheard.
In 2016, a year after The Voice, Christina met Burna Boy through his uncle, Tolu Benson-Idonije, who was also a minister in their local church in North London, the Worship Tabernacle. That was the year ‘The Outsiders’ was formed.
“My journey with The Outsiders began before The Outsiders started. Emmanuel, who plays the drums, and I go to the same church. Damini’s (Burna Boy) uncle, Uncle Tolu, is one of Burna’s biggest fans. After church, you’d always see him blazing Burna Boy’s songs in his Mercedes,” she recounted. “I was leading praise and worship, and Emmanuel was playing the drums in church, so Uncle Tolu said, ‘Burna’s having a Homecoming show and wants to get another band, but I want to give you this opportunity.’ We did the first show with him at the Hammersmith Apollo in London on Nigeria’s Independence Day on October 1, 2016, and we never looked back.”
Since 2016, The Outsiders have become an integral element of Burna Boy’s career, shaping and redefining his live performances across the globe. The band bears some semblance with Egypt 80, the music band of Afrobeat legend Fela Anikulapo-Kuti, which left remarkable footprints worldwide.
It was during one of ‘The Outsider’s’ international tours that Christina met her father in Uganda for the first and only time since he left the family after her first birthday.
“Meeting my dad was a great moment,” she told me. “While we were on break during our East African tour in March 2019, I decided to go to Uganda to look for my dad and surprise him on his birthday.” Before the visit, Christina watched videos of family reunions and was looking forward to that kind of experience.
“Unfortunately, after meeting my dad for the first time, he passed away nine months after, on January 9, 2020. My dad celebrated my first birthday with me, and I celebrated his last birthday with him,” she said. “If you ask me how working with The Outsiders changed my life, that’s one of the many testimonies that I have because I was able to meet my dad.”
Being an Outsider “as a black and plus size has given me confidence and allowed me to shine,” Christina said.
Although the band comprises seven core members, other performers join them for live shows, and Christina trains the choirs whenever there is a live performance.
At Burna Boy’s Lagos concert in December 2021 and the Hollywood Bowl in 2021, which Christina told me was her most memorable outing, “I had to teach a whole new choir in two days because we didn’t have the luxury of carrying the whole band from London. I’ve been doing this for five years.”
The music industry is renowned for its glitz, glamour and razzmatazz, but behind the scenes, life could be going haywire for the brightest shining stars, yet they try not to allow their dark moments interfere with their career.
Christina recounted some of her dark moments.
A day after she got a call about her father’s death in January 2020, Christina was on stage with The Outsiders at a concert in Côte d’Ivoire.
“I told Burna, don’t worry, I’m gonna do the show; when I go home, I’ll focus on my dad. It’s one of the best we’ve ever done. It was the show where Burna performed in the rain,” she said.
That experience pales when compared with the life-threatening health challenge she faced when COVID-19 shuttered the world in 2020.
“In May 2020, I was diagnosed with bilateral pulmonary embolism (P.E) hypertension,” Christina told me. “I noticed them in February 2020 when I could not breathe; every breath felt like my last, and to even breathe felt like somebody was stabbing me and twisting the knife. I was in so much pain.”
P.E. occurs when a blood clot gets lodged in the lung, blocking blood flow to part of the lung. The U.S National Library of Medicine says it is a leading cause of unexpected death in the U.S. and is estimated to cause 50,000 to 200,000 deaths every year.
“After a series of tests revealed the problem, I was immediately put on blood thinners which meant injections in my stomach twice a day, and I had to do that for three months. When I was admitted, the doctors were just so confused. They were like, how are you even still alive because you could die for a lot less. You were still going on planes and could have died on stage. When you look at me, you see a living, breathing, walking, talking and singing miracle because I shouldn’t be able to do what I’m doing. I shouldn’t have been able to do what I did on the Madison Square Garden stage, but to God be the glory, great things he has done.”
Though Christina told me she’s not religious, the idea of God is present in her whole life and her music. On the Zoom call, she showered me with Biblical anecdotes and different descriptions of God’s love.
“I respect religion for what it is, but ultimately I stand on my relationship with God, so I love God so much, and the relationship I have with him is what is manifesting. That’s why I was able to praise him on that Madison Square stage because that’s all I was doing on that stage, praising my father.”
Christina’s story, journey and the many battles she has conquered deserve to be documented to inspire others, I told her.
“I’m going to write a couple of books one day, but I’m still writing the chapters. I have a lot to say,” she told me.
She invited me to be a panellist on her Twitter space on Friday, May 6, 2022. On the Twitter Space, which lasted for more than three hours and had over 2,500 listeners from across the globe, I realised Christina is attracting a fanbase across Africa and other parts of the world. Many of them got attracted to her through Burna Boy.
She’s also building her solo career and told me her second E.P. would be released later in 2022. She plans to drop a single ‘Black sweet dreams’ on May 25.
As the call began to drag into midnight, Christina apologised for taking my time. “Michael, I could do this day and night. I just love to share my story. I’m a storyteller.”
We sang the chorus of Burna Boy’s ‘Last Last’. The single, from his forthcoming album ‘Love, Damini’, sampled Toni Braxton’s 2000 R&B hit, ‘He Wasn’t Man Enough’.
Christina told me ‘Last Last’ allowed her “to pay homage to Toni Braxton. I grew up on that song”.
“Getting it signed off took some time because she’s (Braxton) grieving.” (Braxton lost her 50-year-old sister Traci Braxton to cancer in March 2022).
We ended the chat with a promise to continue the conversation on the Twitter space later in the evening.
“I like to explain myself, write and express it in a way that your heart will receive it best, because it’s very heavy what we’ve been talking about but it hasn’t felt heavy,” Christina told me.
