Martell’s Afrobeats End-of-Year Dinner and the People Who Built the Culture
Photography: Grant Walker (2025) for Martell.
Some rooms feel like a party.
This one felt like a checkpoint.
The lighting was low and warm, the kind that slows time. Red linen ran the length of the table, candles flickering, blue napkins folded with care. Conversations settled easily into the room, unforced and unhurried.
Nothing felt staged. It felt grounded, like everyone had arrived with a shared understanding of why the room mattered.
Photography: Grant Walker (2025) for Martell.
Martell and Adesope hosted the dinner, and from the moment I sat down, the intention was clear. This was not about spectacle. It was about presence. People leaned in when they spoke. Laughter came from memory rather than small talk. There was an ease that only exists when people no longer need to explain who they are or why they belong in the room.
At one point, I paused and looked down the table. Faces I recognised immediately. Others I knew through years of proximity, shared work, shared pressure. People whose paths I had crossed over decades. People I had worked with, disagreed with, learned from, built with. People who were part of the journey long before Afrobeats became a global headline. Promoters, broadcasters, creatives, cultural custodians. Builders.
That was when it landed quietly but clearly.
This was not just a dinner. It was a moment of reflection. The culture, sitting with itself.
Photography: Grant Walker (2025) for Martell.
Afrobeats has grown into a global cultural force, connecting people across continents, but movements like this are never sustained by moments alone. They are sustained by people. By trust built slowly. By those who stay long enough to see an idea take shape, struggle, evolve, and endure. Martell understands that kind of growth, which is why this night felt rooted rather than reactive.
Photography: Grant Walker (2025) for Martell.
Adesope understands it too, which is why this evening made sense coming from him. Our relationship goes back years. Not industry years, but real ones. Back to a time when none of this was guaranteed. When building platforms meant committing to unglamorous work and believing without reassurance. To me, Adesope has always been more than a broadcaster. He is a builder. Someone who chose early on to tell our stories properly, on our terms, and kept doing so even when it would have been easier to wait for validation elsewhere.
We have watched this thing grow side by side. From a time when Afrobeats was not trendy and there was no infrastructure to support it. When promoting shows meant carrying flyers, delivering tickets at unreasonable hours, convincing people to trust a vision they could not yet fully see. From house parties to club nights. From club nights to tours. From tours to concerts. From concerts to festivals.
What carried all of that was never hype.
It was consistency. It was proximity. It was people choosing to show up.
The culture moves because people carry each other through phases. Because they hold space for other people’s visions while their own are still forming. Because they move with a sense of where things could go, even when the wider world has not caught up.
That is what the room represented.
It is also why it mattered that this night was curated by Adesope. He understands the cost of building cultural infrastructure. The patience it takes. The discipline behind the shine. The long stretches where the work is invisible but essential.
I found myself thinking back to conversations we have had over the years, the ones that drift into the parts people rarely romanticise. Working jobs. Studying. Using whatever resources were available to bring people together. The house parties that became club nights. The club nights that became tours. The tours that became concerts. The concerts that became festivals. Not because it was glamorous, but because it was necessary.
And running through all of it, including that dinner, was the same throughline. Commitment.
Photography: Grant Walker (2025) for Martell.
Sometimes that looks like delivering tickets late into the night because you want the show to succeed. Sometimes it is building trust with barbershops, salons, restaurants, and the community spaces where culture actually lives. Sometimes it is carrying other people’s ideas while your own are still taking shape. Often, it is moving as though the future is already visible to you, even if it is not yet obvious to anyone else.
Adesope understands that story because he has lived his own version of it. Building an audience one conversation at a time. Fighting to make sure the culture is taken seriously. Sustaining a platform not for clout, but for longevity.
So when he curated this dinner, it did not feel random. It felt like a full circle moment. A pause long enough to acknowledge that this movement has been built by real people with real stamina, and that it continues to be shaped by choices made quietly, consistently, behind the scenes.
The dinner was a celebration of influential Black voices in Afrobeats, the people shaping the sound, the narratives, the opportunities, and the future. It also held the unspoken questions that come with growth. About protection. About credit. About what it takes to make expansion sustainable.
What mattered most was the room itself. A room where those conversations can happen honestly, with context, and with respect for the people who have been here from the beginning.
Credits
Photography by Grant Walker (2025) for Martell
Dinner hosted by Martell, curated and hosted by Adesope Olajide (Shoopsydoo)
