{"id":85136,"date":"2023-07-19T16:59:28","date_gmt":"2023-07-19T16:59:28","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.ghanamma.com\/2023\/07\/19\/akon-admits-pretending-to-be-african-prince\/"},"modified":"2023-07-19T16:59:28","modified_gmt":"2023-07-19T16:59:28","slug":"akon-admits-pretending-to-be-african-prince","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.ghanamma.com\/2023\/07\/19\/akon-admits-pretending-to-be-african-prince\/","title":{"rendered":"Akon Admits Pretending To Be African Prince"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><\/p>\n<div>\n<p><strong>Akon\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n<p><strong>\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>Akon\u00a0has confessed to lying about\u00a0his background\u00a0in the past,\u00a0pretending to\u00a0be an African\u00a0Prince.<\/p>\n<p>In\u00a0his appearance in the latest episodes of\u00a0<em>\u2018<\/em><em>Drink Champs\u2019, Akon seems to be saying fake it until you make it.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n<p>\u201cI kind of used the excuse that I was a survivor because it made me feel better about it. But there was nothing for me to survive. Because my parents were wealthy. I was living in Jersey. We lived in a three-storey house, just me and my older brother. We had the whole house to ourselves! Now when I think about it, we were just bored as hell looking for something to do,\u201d he stated.<\/p>\n<p>As he was growing up, Akon saw friends around him selling drugs and he never understood why they would put in so much labour for such little financial incentive.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cI think a lot of my choices came from just wanting to be accepted, you know, amongst the crowd,\u201d he said. \u201cSo that\u2019s how I got caught into all the things that I got caught into, including cars. Because cars made me feel special. I was young, I can drive with the most elite vehicles, and I ran with the scenario that I was an African prince,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n<p>Akon\u00a0shared that the inspiration for the African prince scam came after he watched the 1988 Eddie Murphy comedy\u00a0<em>\u2018<\/em><em>Coming to America\u2019<\/em>.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cAfter\u00a0<em>Coming to America<\/em>, I was like, \u2018Shiiiit!\u2019\u201d he explained. \u201cThat\u2019s what motivated it!\u201d<\/p>\n<p>He said he was working at a barbershop when a man introduced him to the scam.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cBefore you know it, I just copied and pasted it,\u201d Akon laughed. \u201cLiterally like every other month, I would come to school in a different car, and they were like\u2026 I\u2019m like, \u2018Yeah, I\u2019m an African prince.\u2019 And they believed it because of the whip that I was driving in!\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Back in 2010, Akon told MTV on an episode of\u00a0<em>\u2018<\/em><em>When I Was 17\u2019<\/em>\u00a0that he was a \u201cyoung hustler\u201d at the time, stealing cars or scamming money out of people.<\/p>\n<p>He told people he was a \u201cprince\u201d so they wouldn\u2019t question where he got all of his money, to which his brother Omar added, \u201cPeople just didn\u2019t know any better so they believed that we were princes from Africa.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Akon is no stranger to a good ruse. Last year\u00a0he admitted\u00a0that he used to employ his brother Abou \u2018Bu\u2019 Thiam to perform as his double when he couldn\u2019t make it to a show.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cBu was my double. He was my double. This was before the internet. If you saw Abou in one place and you saw me, you couldn\u2019t tell the difference,\u201d he said on\u00a0<em>The Morning Hustle<\/em>. Asked if Bu can sing, he simply replied, \u201cNo.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>\u00a0<\/p>\n<p><!-- AI CONTENT END 2 -->\n\t<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Akon\u00a0 \u00a0 Akon\u00a0has confessed to lying about\u00a0his background\u00a0in the past,\u00a0pretending to\u00a0be an African\u00a0Prince. In\u00a0his appearance in the latest episodes of\u00a0\u2018Drink Champs\u2019, Akon seems to be saying fake it until you make it.\u00a0 \u201cI kind of used the excuse that I was a survivor because it made me feel better about it. But there was nothing [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":85137,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[15],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-85136","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-entertainment"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v24.2 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>Akon Admits Pretending To Be African Prince - Ghanamma.com<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.ghanamma.com\/2023\/07\/19\/akon-admits-pretending-to-be-african-prince\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Akon Admits Pretending To Be African Prince - Ghanamma.com\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Akon\u00a0 \u00a0 Akon\u00a0has confessed to lying about\u00a0his background\u00a0in the past,\u00a0pretending to\u00a0be an African\u00a0Prince. 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