Thousands of Guinean Migrants Came to New York City. This Weekend, Two of Guinea's Biggest Pop Stars Came to Them

This story first ran in Hell Gate, a worker-owned, subscriber-funded news outlet about New York City. As a fellow cooperative publication, we are excited to share this feature about Guinean superstars Habib Fatako and Maxim BK and the fans who love them. Hell Gate is a great read even if you don't live in the city—check them out and consider subscribing if you love their work like we do!

Red, green, and yellow lasers cut through the smoke floating in the air at the Queens concert hall Amazura on Friday night, projecting an endless Guinean flag above the sold-out dance floor. Elhadj Mohammed Diallo, the former journalist who served as the evening's host, paced across the stage, working the crowd for a cool four hours before the main event: Guinean rapper Maxim BK, followed by national treasure Habib Fatako, who blends traditional pastoral music known as mamaya with contemporary influences.

Among the 5,000 people on their feet, I saw a young man reach his hands through the crowd to embrace his childhood friend, whom he hadn't seen since leaving his village in Guinea. Neither knew that the other had also come to the United States. A separate set of friends who had made the journey to the Americas together reunited. "We got separated in Honduras," one told me. Yet another young man crouched behind me to hide from his uncle, who lives in New Jersey, and who was at the other end of the dance floor. "If he sees me out partying, he'll tell my mom back in Conakry that I'm a bandit!" he said. Many people told me this was their first time ever going out in New York City after almost two years of living here.

Elhadj Diallo, 28, who worked as a journalist and concert hype man back in Guinea, was brought on by Univers Culture, the concert's organizers. He arrived in the U.S. about a year and a half ago, after most local news outlets were shut down by the military junta currently in power and multiple journalists were arrested or disappeared. He left his mother, father, and two brothers back in Conakry. Since arriving in New York, Diallo has been able to move out of the City-run migrant shelters and into friends' apartments, but has yet to find stable employment.

Diallo is part of the approximately 14,000 Guineans who arrived in the U.S. and submitted asylum claims in New York between 2022 and 2024 after the coup. In Guinea, and especially online, this group is known as "Team Nicaragua," because most landed in the Americas via a loophole that allows those without visas to disembark in Nicaragua after making a couple short flights around Central America.

At the concert, when I asked how people knew each other, they frequently answered, "We made the route together," which means that at some point on the journey from Nicaragua through Honduras, Guatemala, and Mexico, the two had walked together, squeezed into a bus together, or spent the night together at one of the many stations along the way.

This invigoration of the Guinean diaspora in the U.S. has brought new possibilities for artists like Fatako and Maxim, who now have a much stronger demand for their music stateside. In 2015, Mamadou Diallo cofounded the organization that would eventually become Univers Culture, just one year after he arrived in the U.S. and was subsequently granted asylum. Univers Culture is run entirely by volunteers, and is devoted to the promotion of Guinean culture in the United States.

"With the arrival of the new wave, the new generation, it's changed the game. There's much more liveliness," Mamadou Diallo said. "Frankly, they've brought a lot of strength from the heart of Guinea, on every level."

I attended the concert with three young men from Guinea. As we got off the A train in Jamaica, we saw two other Guineans getting off the next car. Then we ran into another at the turnstile, and three more at the crosswalk. "We shared a room in the shelter," one of my friends said, about a man who joined us on the sidewalk. Another young man, Aliou, yelled at his friend from across the street. "He's a drop-out! He never comes to class anymore!" Aliou said, referring to English classes that the two used to attend together at a library near their shelter. By the time we reached the entrance to Amazura, we'd amassed a posse of about 20 people. Clearly, the $60 tickets were worth it for Team Nicaragua, many of whom are doing e-bike delivery as they search for more stable employment.

One Univers Culture organizer, DiaNass, 37, ran a pharmacy before arriving in the U.S. a little over a year and a half ago. In Guinea, DiaNass was an active member of the FNDC, a coalition formed in opposition to constitutional changes proposed by then-President Alpha Condé, and which continues to oppose the current junta leader of Guinea, Mamady Doumbouya, who came to power through a military coup in 2021. DiaNass is also a cofounder of the advocacy group Citoyenne Debout pour la Democracie, or Citizens Standing for Democracy. He fled Guinea after being arrested for his political activity. Since his arrival in the U.S., DiaNass has been sleeping on friends' couches as he looks for work.

"The young generation that has arrived recently, we've struggled together for a long time against the Guinean state," he said. "We resisted Alpha Condé, and we're trying to resist the legionnaire Mamady Doumbouya. We escaped kidnappings and found one another again here. We know each other. And that's what gave us the event you saw."

DiaNass told me that at the concert, he saw old friends and fellow organizers that he hadn't seen or heard from in years. "I had tears in my eyes," he said. "We hugged each other, we were so happy."

Habib Fatako, or "Habibou," as Guineans lovingly refer to him, is the son of Sékouba Fatako, another legend of mamaya music. In Guinea, "mamaya" refers to a musical tradition largely cultivated by the Peul people, which is characterized by narrative songs about nomadic life, and features instruments like the djembe, balafon, flute, and n'goni, a traditional string instrument played by Fatako.

Opening for Fatako was Maxim BK, who is considered by many of the music-loving Guineans I know to be the best young rapper in Guinea right now. Maxim BK is small in stature but, as someone at the concert put it to me, "his mind is large." His tagline, "boni bhoury gnaw," in Pulaar, translates to "meaner than Ebola." His fanbase refers to themselves as the "BBG Kingdom."

This was his first time in the U.S., but Maxim grew up listening to American rappers like Eminem and Lil Wayne in a "high banlieue" of Conakry—the equivalent to an American rapper saying he comes from the hood—which Maxim described as "full of ghettos." "I used to go around begging little venues in Conakry to put me on the list," he told me. Now, on the heels of a European tour, Maxim said he has an "enormous" number of friends who have recently arrived in the United States, many of whom saw his posts on TikTok and Facebook and came to see him as he visited Times Square the evening before the concert. "It's a risk for them to take the route here and find a better life," Maxim said. "Their families are worried about them, we don't have any updates from them. Some of them lost their lives. Some of them were sent back. It's a really complicated situation."

The organizers had originally hoped to bring a third performer, Djanii Alfa, who is living in exile because of his activism with the FNDC. Alfa fled Guinea after his imprisonment and brutalization by the police in 2022, an event which caused mass protests in the country. He's now living in the Congo, but with Trump's travel ban in place, the American embassy in the Congo is currently not issuing visas.

"There were two things that we feared if we brought Djanii to Guinea to get the visa. The first is that they would kill him. The second is that they would kidnap him as they have done with Billo and Foniké Mengué," Mamadou Diallo said, referring to two other prominent FNDC activists arrested at the same time as Alfa and whose whereabouts are still unknown. Recent asylum seekers from Guinea are fleeing this same repression.

To get Fatako and Maxim to New York City, Mamadou Diallo told me that it took months to secure the I-29 visas that the musicians needed to enter the U.S. All of the members of Fatako's band were denied their visas, so the group hired African musicians living in New York to perform. While Univers Culture had originally conceived of a tour that would allow the musicians to perform in other American cities with large Guinean populations, they had only been granted visits of five days.

"USCIS doesn't know how to behave with us. They gave us dates for a visa that were after the proposed date of the concert had already passed," Mamadou Diallo said. In the end, they received notice that their visas had been approved only two weeks before the revised date of the concert.

Introduced by Elhadj Diallo, multiple Guinean artists performed before the main attractions, including LasticsBoyz, twin contortionists living in Ohio, and Masta X, a rapper wearing a yellow ski mask. In between acts, the DJ played Guinean music, including the song "Guinea, Our Paradise," an ensemble-cast ode to Guinea, during which the audience joined together to belt out the lyrics. When Maxim arrived on stage, the dance floor was flooded with people, so that even at the back of the venue, there was little room to move.

"This song is for all the immigrants," Maxim said, a Guinean flag wrapped around his small frame, before performing his song "Ko Diamtoun," which translates to "may there be peace."

As Fatako sang his most famous song, "Yangaylan," which is a love song and means "I will sacrifice for you," members of the audience were brought to the stage to shower the singer with money, as is often done for griot performances in West Africa. Men in white damask boubous and women in hand-tailored dresses with bright wax prints brought envelopes stuffed with cash. Meanwhile, a stagehand in a purple tank top periodically scrambled and crouched across the stage to stuff all of the bills into suitcase after suitcase, like a ball boy at a tennis match.

When Fatako finally left the stage, near 2 a.m., a woman next to me yelled, "Say hi to Guinea for us!"

After working toward this event for nearly 10 years, Mamadou Diallo told me, "I would like my kids to remember the Guinean culture, so they can say, 'My Dad is African.'"