Time magazine has named Stormzy one of its “next generation leaders” in the US news weekly’s annual list of young trailblazers. The 26-year-old rapper appears on the cover of the magazine and was interviewed by the Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People About Race author, Reni Eddo-Lodge.

The rapper sits alongside Swedish environmental activist Greta Thunberg, American actor Tessa Thompson and Spanish musician Rosalía on the list. Senegalese artist Selly Raby Kane, British-Somalian boxer Ramla Ali and South Korean gaming activist Kim “Geguri” Se-yeon also appear.

Born Michael Ebenazer Kwadjo Omari Owuo Jr, Stormzy posted a picture of the cover on Instagram, writing: “I’ve stared at this cover for a few minutes and it feels like one of those, ‘How the fuckkkkk did man get here?!’ moments.”

He continued: “Anyone who knows me knows how much I shy away from being anything other than ‘Mike’. The thought of being a ‘role model’ or ‘leader’ or whatever it is can often feel way way way too heavy and too overwhelming and a lot of the time … I can’t even bare [sic] the weight of being myself let alone any of these other titles.

“I am deeply flawed and still learning how to be a man and still figuring out how to grow into the person I need to be but within all of that confusion and all the juggling of being a human and trying to be a superhuman – I have purpose. And my purpose has lead [sic] me here.

‘I have a purpose’ … Stormzy on the cover of Time. Photograph: Time Magazine

In the interview, he expressed gratitude to his forerunners in the UK grime scene who had endured more explicit racism in the early 2000s, encountering demonisation from politicians and having their performances subject to scrutiny from the now-scrapped Form 696, which required promoters to detail the ethnicity of a performer’s audience.

“I know I’m the product of bare injustice,” he said. “I feel like all those artists or public figures or celebrities who went through that, had to go through that … they didn’t have the luxury of being free with their music, and they had to bite that bullet for me.”

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He described his headline slot at this year’s Glastonbury festival as “the pinnacle of my career, my defining moment”, and cited Beyoncé’s landmark Coachella set in 2018 as an influence: “Not in terms of anything to do with how it sounded or looked. Trying to imitate Beyoncé, that’s a fool’s game. Just in terms of quality, and impact.”

Stormzy used his performance at the festival to shine a light on his peers, name-checking a long list of fellow UK rappers, from Wiley to Little Simz, and bringing out Dave and Fredo to perform their single Funky Friday. “I proper felt like I needed to do that,” he told Time. “There’s been this historical thing of letting one black person in at a time.”

Explaining his partnership with Penguin – where his #Merky imprint publishes emerging British writers of colour – and the scholarship he established to support two black British students to go to Cambridge University, he said his purpose was to “shine a light where I can, do something where I can”.