Kofi Kingston On Becoming First African-Born WWE Champion

Kofi Kingston achieved a huge career highlight at WrestleMania 35 as he became WWE Champion. However, people all around the world were celebrating for their own unique reasons.

Kofi is not only a WWE Champion after 11 years with the company marking the longest tenured Superstar to get his first WWE Title match, but he was also born in Ghana making him the first-ever African-born WWE Champion.

Kingston shared a video his mother sent him of people in Ghana celebrating after his win and as he spoke to USA Today, he amplified the importance of this huge career milestone as he represents a portion of the world that has yet to receive their proper time in the spotlight.

“It means a lot, especially from a representation standpoint. It’s always important for people to be able to watch WWE, especially because it’s a global product, it’s important for people all over the world to be able to look at the screen and see somebody who looks like them doing great things. And in turn, that inspires them to do great things. For me to inspire people who look like me to do awesome things, and they can look at the screen and say ‘hey, I can do this because I can see someone that looks like me and he’s doing it.’”

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“It’s equally as important too that people who don’t necessarily look like me and can also look to my story for inspiration, because the main thing is I struggled, you know? To get here it’s been a long, hard struggle to make it to this point, and anybody out there, whether you’re black, white, Asian, South American, whatever, you can look to my story and see I struggled to get here but I kept fighting through. I didn’t give up, I didn’t take no for an answer, and I did it. It took me a long time to do it, but I did it. Anything is possible for anybody if they work hard enough.”

We will have to wait and see what happens next for Kingston. He has faith that even with Big E’s injury that WWE won’t split up the New Day with the Superstar Shake-Up, but you never know what can happen in WWE.

In the meantime, Kofi will continue representing everyone he can proudly no matter what connection they have with the man who started his WWE career with a forced Jamaican accent.