LA knew him as Nipsey, but to Eritreans, he was just Ermias
LOS ANGELES - At the age of 19, Nipsey Hussle took the money he earned hustling on the streets of South Los Angeles and bought a plane ticket to his father's homeland - a tiny country in eastern Africa that fought a brutal war to secure its place in the world as Eritrea.
That trip split his life into before and after, from being steeped in gang culture with aspirations of being a rapper, to a community activist with an entrepreneurial spirit who earned a Grammy nod.
Hussle, born Ermias Asghedom, stayed in Eritrea for three months in 2004. He made meaningful connections around the dinner table with family he had never met. But most of all, Hussle, for the first time in his life, lived in a place where people with chocolate skin like his own were in charge.
When he returned to L.A., his eyes opened to "the way things could be." The world was suddenly bigger than the Crenshaw district of South L.A., where he grew up
