Tema-born rapper and singer Kwesi Arthur has released the official music video for “Yawa (Hosanna),” one of the standout cuts from his 2026 project Redemption Valley. The clip arrived on his YouTube channel today, months after the song first reached streaming platforms.
The visual matches the record’s mood: gratitude after pressure. Early frames lean toward a church-and-street energy before opening into a sunlit outdoor feast — a long table on green lawn, friends gathered, fruit and glasses on white linen. Arthur appears in a tailored sage suit, glass in hand, looking less like a man escaping trouble than someone who has already walked out of it. Fans immediately flagged the simplicity, the character work, a cameo from Kwadwo Sheldon around the 1:17 mark, and an ending that several commenters said “left a deep one.”
That tone is the song. “Yawa” is Ghanaian slang for trouble, chaos, the mess people expected him to stay in. “Hosanna” is the praise that answers it. The hook keeps returning to the same idea: steadily singing hosanna / so far gone from yawa. He counts blessings one by one, warns anyone not to mess with his karma, and slips into Twi to say he will keep building what gives him peace rather than watching other people’s plans.
KaySo and Arthur produced the record. Harry Chaplin mixed and mastered. It sits as track three on Redemption Valley, released widely on 6 February 2026 after an early-access run on EVEN in January. The eight-track project — Redemption, I Be Where I Wanted To Be, Yawa (Hosanna), Immigrant, Babylon Interlude, What They Want (Gye), Okay Switch, and Broken Pieces — is framed as a journey through struggle, survival, and self-reclaiming. On Ghana’s Apple Music chart at launch, the set occupied the top eight spots.
The title is not a metaphor first. Redemption Valley is a real road in Tema Community 9: the route his parents used after he was born, the street that led to Redemption Valley Primary School, the walk to studios in his early years, and the same road families take toward the cemetery. Arthur has described it as a path to life and to death — which is why naming the project after it felt like a return to himself.
That context matters for why this video arrives now. Arthur broke through in 2017 with “Grind Day,” earned a 2018 BET Viewer’s Choice Best New International Act nomination, and later collected Rapper of the Year at the Vodafone Ghana Music Awards. After Son of Jacob in 2022 and a messy public split from former management, Redemption Valley was the first full statement of a more independent chapter: less industry noise, more journal. A lyric video dropped with the project in February; an intimate Audiomack Fine Tuned piano session followed. The official video is the delayed, polished image of a song that already lived as a blessing-count for listeners.
“Yawa (Hosanna)” is not a gospel record in the church-radio sense. It is street praise — Afrobeats bounce under hip-hop cadence, gratitude without soft-pedalling the people who hoped he would not see daylight. The new video does not over-explain that. It stages the aftermath: a table, a toast, a man who has decided the score is already settled.
Stream Redemption Valley and “Yawa (Hosanna)” on Spotify, Apple Music, and other platforms. The official video is on Kwesi Arthur’s YouTube channel.
