M.anifest (born Kwame Ametepee Tsikata, 20 November 1982) is a Ghanaian rapper, singer, and songwriter.
He won Best Rapper and Hip-Hop song of the year at the 2017 Ghana Music Awards. He has worked with Damon Albarn, Flea, Tony Allen, Erykah Badu, and is featured on five songs on the Rocket Juice and The Moon album. He is the grandson of one of Africa’s foremost ethnomusicologists and composers J.H. Kwabena Nketia.
In 2012, BBC’s arts program The Strand tipped him as one of four acts to look out for 2012. In 2015 M.anifest's single "Someway bi" earned him a third-place honor in the International Songwriters Competition (ISC). In the same year, The Guardian named M.anifest as "the foremost rapper on the continent.".
M.anifest currently lives in Accra (Madina) and Minneapolis.
M.anifest is the son of Ghanaian lawyer and academician Tsatsu Tsikata and Reverend Dr. Priscilla Naana Nketia, a lawyer and pastor. His maternal grandfather Joseph Hanson Kwabena Nketia was a composer, professor, and ethnomusicologist. M.anifest migrated to the Twin Cities (Minneapolis-St Paul, USA) in 2001 to attend Macalester College, where he graduated in 2005 with a Bachelor of Arts in economics.
M.anifest went to high school at SOS-Hermann Gmeiner International College in Tema. He was the entertainment prefect of his school known as Amet Tsikata. He has had artist residencies and given lectures in St. Lawrence University, University of Ghana, and spoken to several classes in Hamline University, Macalester College (his Alma Mater), Penumbra Theater's Summer Arts Institute, Ashesi University.
