Six years ago, Matt B took a DNA test hoping to answer a question that had lingered within his mind for years: “Where do I come from?” The answer would eventually lead him thousands of miles from his home in Los Angeles to West Africa, through the slave routes of Ghana and ultimately to Owerri, Nigeria, where genealogical research traced his ancestry to the Igbo people of Imo State.
What began as a search for lineage has since evolved into ALKEBULAN III: The Water Remembers, the final installment of Matt B’s acclaimed ALKEBULAN trilogy and perhaps the most personal work of his career. Spanning an album, short film, and feature documentary, the project examines ancestry, cultural memory, and the enduring relationship between Africa and its global diaspora. Ambitious in both scale and intention, ALKEBULAN III turns one artist’s ancestral search into a sweeping exploration of memory, belonging, and cultural reclamation. For Matt B, the journey carries particular significance. The Chicago-born artist won the GRAMMY Award for Best Global Music Album in 2025 for ALKEBULAN II, but rather than treating that achievement as the culmination of the story, he used it as a catalyst to dig deeper. The result is a body of work concerned less with where a person lives than with what remains within them.
At the heart of ALKEBULAN III is a provocative idea: history can separate people from their homeland, but it cannot completely erase the memory of where they came from. That idea took on new meaning when Matt and his wife, producer and manager Angela V. Benson, traveled to Ghana and Nigeria in June 2026, turning years of research into a physical return to the continent.
Originally published by NotJustOk.