Let’s get one thing straight before we start: African music didn’t just “blow up” in 2020 because Drake jumped on an Afrobeats beat. Aunty Google may think the story starts with Wizkid and “Essence,” but the real story starts in a Johannesburg jail cell, an OK Jazz rehearsal room in Kinshasa, and a shebeen full of aunties dancing to a woman who hadn’t even finished school yet.

Grab your malva pudding or your suya, whichever side of the continent you’re reading from. We’re doing this decade by decade.

The 1950s–60s: Mama Africa Puts Us on the Map

Picture this: apartheid South Africa, a system built entirely to convince Black people they had no culture worth exporting. Enter Miriam Makeba, a woman who was just 18 days old when she was jailed alongside her mother, and who grew up to become the first African vocalist the whole world had to sit up for.

Makeba started in Johannesburg vocal groups, the Manhattan Brothers and then an all-female outfit called the Skylarks, cooking up a blend of jazz, marabi and Western pop that nobody overseas had heard before. Then in 1959 she popped up in the anti-apartheid documentary Come Back, Africa, Harry Belafonte saw it, and suddenly Mama was in Venice, London, New York, basically doing the original “internationally acclaimed” arc before Instagram existed to caption it.

By the ’60s she was the Empress of African Song. Then in 1963, she testified against apartheid at the United Nations, and South Africa did what South Africa did best back then: revoked her passport and locked her out of her own country for thirty years. Imagine getting exiled for telling the truth in a song. That’s not “cancel culture,” Aunty. That’s a whole government being scared of a click sound.

The 1960s–70s: Kinshasa Plugs In, Lagos Turns Up the Funk

While Makeba was globetrotting, something enormous was happening quietly in Kinshasa. A guitarist named Franco Luambo Makiadi, nicknamed “the Sorcerer” because his fingers genuinely looked possessed, built a band called OK Jazz. Franco took Congolese rhythms and Cuban rumba influences and turned them into something so purely Congolese that he would get annoyed when Western journalists called it “Latin.” His words, basically: the horns are singing our melodies, the guitar is African, the rumba is ours. Where exactly is the Latin in that?

Franco led that band for 33 years. And every soukous DJ, every ndombolo hit, every log-drum bassline you hear in Nairobi or Dar es Salaam today has Franco’s guitar somewhere in its family tree.

Meanwhile in Lagos, a man named Fela Kuti came back from London with jazz training, met a former Black Panther named Sandra in the US who put him onto Malcolm X and Angela Davis, and basically had a musical and political awakening at the same time. He fused highlife, funk, jazz and pure Yoruba defiance into Afrobeat. Fela sang in pidgin so the whole of Anglophone Africa could understand him, and he used that clarity to drag Nigeria’s military government through the mud, album after album. The government responded the way governments with something to hide always do: they raided his compound, planted evidence on him and arrested him repeatedly. He kept recording anyway.

The 1980s–90s: Brenda Fassie Arrives and Refuses to Behave

Okay. This is the part of the story where things get properly chaotic, in the best way.

Brenda Fassie was born in Langa, Cape Town, in 1964, the youngest of nine kids, named after an American country singer, and singing for tourist money by age five, because her mum was a pianist and Brenda clearly came out of the womb with a microphone in hand. At 16 she left for Johannesburg, joined a group called Joy, then fronted Brenda and the Big Dudes, and in 1983 they dropped Weekend Special, a shiny, disco-bubblegum banger that sold over 200,000 copies and somehow toured her through the US, Europe, Australia and Brazil while apartheid was still very much apartheid back home.

Then she went solo with producer Chicco Twala, and this is where she stopped being just a pop star and became a whole institution. In 1990 she dropped Black President, a tribute to Nelson Mandela while he was still in prison. The government banned it. Naturally, that made every township in South Africa play it louder. Then Brenda made a decision that still deserves a standing ovation: she said “I am proud to be an African” and stopped recording in English altogether, switching to Zulu, Xhosa and Sotho.

She got nicknamed MaBrrr, but here’s the thing that actually matters: her 1998 album Memeza was the best-selling album in South Africa that year. She was still winning right as her sound started blending into the new genre bubbling up, called kwaito.

Brenda died in 2004, but ask any South African under 60 who “the Queen of African Pop” is, and you will not get a second name.

The 1990s–2000s: Kwaito Takes Over, Africa Starts Winning Grammys

Brenda’s township-pop energy fed directly into kwaito, slowed-down house music with township slang over it, the genre that basically raised an entire generation of South African youth. At the same time, further west, Angélique Kidjo from Benin was stitching Yoruba rhythms into funk and jazz and quietly collecting Grammys like they were nothing, proving African artists didn’t need to soften their sound to win on the biggest stages.

The 2000s–2010s: Lagos Starts Cooking Something New

Enter P-Square, D’Banj, and the early rumblings of Wizkid and Davido. Nigerian pop mixed hip-hop swagger with local rhythm and started calling itself something new: Afrobeats, with an “s.” Wizkid’s 2014 track Ojuelegba became a genre landmark, and suddenly UK and US ears were tuning in properly for the first time since Makeba’s era.

The 2010s–2020s: The World Finally Catches Up (Took Them Long Enough)

Wizkid’s 2020 album Made in Lagos, with “Essence” featuring Tems, went quadruple platinum and hit the Billboard Hot 100. Burna Boy’s African Giant landed a Grammy nomination, and he became the first African artist to sell out a US stadium. But South Africa wasn’t just watching from the sidelines this time. Amapiano (deep house plus jazz plus soul plus that unmistakable log-drum bassline) went from Soweto backyard parties to global club culture, carried by Kabza De Small, Uncle Waffles, DBN Gogo and Tyla, whose 2023 song Water won the very first Grammy for Best African Music Performance.

There isn’t one central African sound; there’s a relay race. Makeba passed the baton to Franco and Fela. They passed it to Brenda. Brenda’s township energy fed kwaito. Kwaito quietly raised Amapiano. Lagos built Afrobeats in parallel the whole time, and now the two are collaborating on the same tracks, at the same festivals, wearing each other’s log drums and Yoruba ad-libs like it’s nothing.

Seven decades, one continuous conversation. And honestly? We’re just getting warmed up.