By Clifford Okyere
It still feels like yesterday when the country woke up to the disheartening news of the sudden death of Ghana’s finest and budding female dancehall artist, Priscilla Opoku-Kwarteng, popularly known as Ebony, in a gory accident. It was Thursday, February 8, 2018, eight days to her birthday, when the news broke the hearts of many and all Ghanaians, which up until now, the wound of her demise has not been healed.
Her authenticity, free-spiritedness, and uniqueness channelled through her music and displayed in her personality, alluded to the enormous love she received from the Ghanaian populace. Her lyrical choice, voice, rhythm, and sense of oddity resonated well with the ordinary Ghanaian, making it an easier route to travel for her after the release of her first hit studio song titled ‘Dancefloor’ in 2015 at age 17. Her sudden entry into the male-dominated music industry with a different relatable twist on the path of the street-deduced genre, dancehall, placed the young artist right on the map.
People soon identified with her because she came in owning and unapologetically displaying her sexuality and rawness, which the industry had lacked for a while since the era of Mzbel and Abrewa Nanas. She is the reason why Coco Channel once said, “In order to be irreplaceable, you need to be different”.
She continued to be consistent and strived to be different leading her to produce more hit after hit songs including “kupe”, ‘Poison’, ‘Sponsor’, ‘Date ur Fada’ and ‘Hustle’. It is therefore a fact that her discography can never be matched. Her most popular and still favourite song, released by her during her latter days and called “Maame hw3”, which centred on the constant abuse of women in society due to their defiant attitude towards advice from their mothers, won the hearts of many and is, in recent times, still used as a point of reference by parents.
Ebony reigns’ legacy still lives on. Five years after her untimely exit, has got nobody compete with her for the Queenship of Dancehall music in sub-Sahara Africa. But until we meet again in the next life, her music and legacy will continue to ride on; in a cowboy style, in our hearts forever, unreplaced!