Although the hip hop community spent the majority of last week criticizing Kanye West about his bizarre meeting with Donald Trump, it appears as though the rapper remains focused on building relationships with world leaders. Most recently, West and his wife, Kim Kardashian, paid a visit to Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni, reportedly greeting the 74-year-old with a free pair of white Yeezy sneakers.
According to reports, this visit was much less controversial than his recent encounter at the White House, as President Museveni shared that he and West held “fruitful discussions” about promoting tourism and the arts.
Like he previously promised, West is currently in Africa to work on his upcoming album, Yandhi, with a Periscope session revealing he’s since turned a tent into a makeshift recording studio at a national park. Recently, the rapper deleted his social media accounts. But, he’s since made a return to Twitter, namely to check in on the Periscope livestream feature, something that someone named Jack (presumably Jack Dorsey of Twitter) has since praised in a screenshot West posted.
During one of the videos Ye shared with fans, he can be heard rapping over an in-progress track, spitting, “Relax your mind / Let your conscious be free / No matter what they say / I’m gonna still be free.”
The album, which has already been delayed once, is expected to be released on Nov. 23.
In addition to meeting with the Ugandan president on Monday (Oct. 15), Charlamagne tha God confirmed that their upcoming scheduled talk that was intended to center on mental health has since been canceled.
“Normalizing being mentally healthy is a conversation that I really wanted to have with Kanye because he’s been so vocal about his own mental health struggles,” Charlamagne shared in a statement on Instagram. “Unfortunately, I think to have that conversation with him right now would not be productive and a total distraction from the point of the convo, which is to eradicate the stigma of mental health especially in the black community.”
See below.