NewsKo-jo Cue says a teacher changed his name, and nobody was around to check
In a new interview with Abena Soreno, the rapper says the name he spelled as Kenny became Kennedy at school. He also talks about growing up without his father, the boys from Bantama who never made it, and the year music could not help him.
Rapper Ko-jo Cue says the name most people know him by was given to him by a schoolteacher.
"So my name is actually not Kennedy," he told Abena Soreno on The Conversation, a 29-minute interview posted on Oreno Media's YouTube channel on 29 October 2026. He said he spelled his name as Kenny when he started school, until a teacher decided it was "just short for Kennedy" and changed it, "because nobody was around to come and check".
Off the pitch, into a library
He said he grew up loving football in Bantama, Kumasi, and used to sneak out of the house to play. His family moved him to an aunt on the KNUST campus because they worried he would get cuts. "There was nobody around," he said, but her husband had a library, and that is where he started reading and writing.
He said some of the best footballers he has ever seen were boys he grew up with in Bantama, and that one of his cousins "ended up doing almost like eight years".
No father around
"I did not grow up with my dad around," he said, adding that most of the people he grew up with did not either. "Nobody actually teaches you how to behave as a male." He said he took advice from an older cousin, an 18-year-old at the time.
His 2019 album For My Brothers opens with Rich Dad, Poor Dad and Dua. In a 2019 interview with OkayAfrica, he said the first is about his relationship with his own father and the second about how fathers' words shape their children. He told the same outlet that Survivor's Guilt, also on the album, followed the death of a friend.
When music could not help
Asked whether music has ever failed him, he described it as something he had leaned on "for so long" and said there are moments when he cannot make music at all. He pointed to 2021, "when I had to quit". He did not say on the show what happened. In April 2025 he told Pulse Ghana he stopped music for nearly two years, deleted his social media and gave away his studio equipment. In May 2026, speaking on The Pesewa Podcast, he shared that he and his wife lost their twin daughters at birth in 2020, during the lockdown.
He said the gym helped for a while, then video games, and that cooking is what finally worked.
The chapter still to come
Asked what Kenny wants that Ko-jo Cue cannot give him, he answered: "Peace, I guess." He said his music is still at the point of "struggling to find your feet", while in real life he has moved past it, and that he is pacing the story on purpose.
Ko-jo Cue never connects the dots himself. A teacher once held the pen over his name; today he is the one holding the pen, and he says the best chapters are still unwritten. Go and watch Abena Soreno's full interview.
- Oreno Media: The Ko-jo Cue Conversation: Becoming The Man Nobody Taught You To Be, with Abena Soreno (29 Oct 2026)
- OkayAfrica: Ko-Jo Cue Addresses the Struggles of Young African Men In 'For My Brothers' (Nov 2019)
- Yen: Kojo Cue shares how he and his wife lost their newborn twin daughters (5 May 2026)
- GhanaWeb: 'My wife and I lost our twin girls at birth' - Kojo Cue opens up (May 2026)
- Pulse Ghana: Kojo Cue reveals mental health struggles behind two-year music hiatus (17 Apr 2025)
- Deezer: For My Brothers, Ko-jo Cue (2019)
Every factual line in this story is checked against at least two independent sources, unless the text says it comes from one report.