Belinda Ekua Amoah aka Mzbel ( Ms Belinda for Short) was born on December 26,1979 in Accra to Albert A. Amoah, an engineer and Agnes Nyarko. She is the last-born of seven children. She grew up in the ghettoes of James Town and Mallam and started her schooling at God’s Wisdom Preparatory and Morning Star schools. She continued to Korle Gonno 1 and Owusu Mills JSS at Mamprobi for her Junior Secondary School education. She had her Senior Secondary Education at Abuakwa State College between 1995 and 1997 where she offered General Arts. She majored in economics, geography and French.
As a child, she always wanted to be a newscaster. So after SSS, She applied to go to the Ghana Institute of Journalism but she could not because of financial constraints. She was later convinced by a cousin who supported her with some money to enroll at the Ghana Institute of Languages to become a bilingual secretary between 1998 and 1999. While at the institute, she had the hint that Manifold Tutorial College was offering a one-year course in Production and enrolled, combining it with her course at the Institute of Languages. She studied public relations, TV and radio production.
She did her internship with GBC Radio 1 where she hosted a children’s programme ‘Mmofra Kyepem’. She moved to Groove FM (now Adom FM) to continue her internship and did a programme titled ‘Kids on Groove’. A friend who realized her potential and her production background advised her to apply to TV3 as a production assistant for one of the station’s youth programmes known as Goldblast. She also worked as floor manager for Goldblast and also as a production assistant for another programme Talking Drum.
In the year 2002, Mzbel had the opportunity to work with Hush Hush Studios, which at that time had come on the scene as a new production firm. While at Hush Hush, She sometimes went into the studio and as the boys were playing the instruments, she sang songs she had created. She did not take it seriously at first and was only doing it for fun. Still working part-time at Hush Hush Studios, she secured another job at Metro TV, where she was tasked to produce a children’s programme and ended up as a producer for the programme, Smash TV a weekend entertainment programme. She didn’t keep the job because she quit after a few months due to some misunderstanding.
With luck on her side, it did not take long before she got another job this time at Apex Advertising as an editor. According to Mzbel, music came accidentally. She says that one day she had a call from Hush Hush Studios and was informed that some of her songs that she had sung at the studio had been selected for production and they wanted her to come over and take pictures for posters and cassette inlays. She went ahead and took the photographs and not long afterwards the songs were on air and everyone wanted to know who Mzbel was.
Her first album titled ‘Awosome’ was released in 2004. The somewhat controversial lead song enjoyed massive airplay and soon, Mzbel became the toast of many shows across the country. Her second albums, ’16 Years’ followed the same path with several hit songs from the album. In 2005, she was manhandled on stage during a performance in Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology, Kumasi. As if trauma was not enough, she was assaulted by armed robbers in her home the following year.
She was able to put all the bitter experiences behind her to release her third album, in 2007 which also enjoyed a lot of airplay. The lead song, ‘It Dey Be’ as usual caused a lot of controversy. She boycotted the 2008 Ghana Awards and in that year won a special Portrait of and Excellent Woman award for blazing the trail as a female artist and her contribution to female empowerment.