Nicki Minaj’s Angola performance strikes bum note

Nicki Minaj, the singer, has become the latest in a string of American performers to come under fire from human rights groups for accepting large sums of money to perform for eccentric dictatorships round the world.

The rapper received a reputed $2 million (Dh7.3 million) to entertain several thousand people in Angola, which has been ruled by President Jose Eduardo dos Santos for 36 years. Her concert was arranged by Angola’s largest mobile phone company, which is part-owned by the dos Santos family.

Before going on stage Minaj, posted on the internet a photograph of herself with Isabel dos Santos, the dictator’s 45-year-old daughter, who is Angola’s only billionaire. Minaj wrote: “She’s just the 8th richest woman in the world. At least that’s what I was told by someone before we took this photo. Girl power. This motivates me so much!”

The singer responded to those who urged her to cancel the concert by saying: “Every tongue that rises up against me in judgment shall be condemned.”

Angola is the second-largest producer of oil in Africa but suffers from endemic poverty, while dos Santos, 73, has been accused of overseeing corruption and human rights abuses.

Earlier this year 15 Angolan activists, including a prominent rapper, were arrested during a book reading at which one of the works was about non-violent resistance to repressive regimes. Thor Halvorssen, the president of the Human Rights Foundation, said Minaj had “revealed the depth of her ignorance” and it was “quite possible she doesn’t know anything about Angola”.

Halvorssen added: “Minaj’s payday is all the more jarring given that she joined the chorus of the Black Lives Matter movement. It appears that when those black lives happen to be in Angola they matter less than a pay cheque from a dictator.”

Mariah Carey was widely criticised for accepting $1 million to perform for dos Santos in 2013. In the same year Jennifer Lopez serenaded Gurbanguly Berdymukhamedov, the repressive leader of Turkmenistan, with a rendition of Happy Birthday. Two years earlier, Nelly Furtado faced a backlash over a private concert she gave to Libya’s Gaddafi family and ended up giving her $1 million fee to charity. Hilary Swank, the Oscar-winning actress, did the same after being paid to attend the birthday of Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov, a decision she “deeply regretted”.