Waka Waka (This Time for Africa)

The chant that was never hers

Everyone on earth seems to know the hook. It is one of those syllable patterns that bypasses language entirely — children in Jakarta, pub crowds in Manchester, taxi drivers in Lagos and stadium rows in Buenos Aires can all produce it on demand, and almost none of them could tell you what it means. That is the first clue that something unusual is going on.

Because the chant at the heart of "Waka Waka (This Time for Africa)" did not come from a Colombian pop star, a Swedish hitmaker, or a FIFA marketing committee. It came from a group of Cameroonian soldiers.

In 1986, a band called Golden Sounds released a makossa track widely known as "Zangaléwa," and it became a sensation across Central and West Africa. The members were reportedly serving in the Cameroonian armed forces — accounts often connect them to the presidential guard — and their stage act was part comedy, part costume satire. They performed in pith helmets and padded uniforms, exaggerating the look of colonial-era officers and the stiff, strutting authority of the men who gave them orders. The song's chant, with its rolling "zamina mina" and the "waka waka" phrase, was reportedly a soldiers' call-and-response: the kind of thing you shout on a march to keep your legs moving and your spirits from collapsing.

The phrase itself is usually traced to Fang, a language spoken across Cameroon, Equatorial Guinea and Gabon, with "waka waka" generally glossed as something close to do it or get moving. In other words, a command. A push. An instruction shouted at a body that wants to stop.

So the song the world sings as a party chant began life as a work song for tired men in uniform, laced with a joke at the expense of their superiors. Twenty-four years later, it would open the first World Cup ever held on African soil.

A Colombian, a World Cup, and a continent watching closely

By 2010 Shakira was already the most globally fluent pop star alive. Born in Barranquilla on Colombia's Caribbean coast in 1977, with Lebanese heritage on her father's side, she had spent her career refusing to sit still: Spanish-language rock albums in the 1990s, a crossover into English with "Laundry Service" in 2001, and a sound that happily absorbed Andean flutes, Arabic scales, cumbia, reggaeton and straight-ahead rock guitar. She had already sung at the closing ceremony of the 2006 World Cup in Germany. She was also, by then, a serious philanthropist, having founded a foundation in Colombia that built schools for children in poverty — a detail that mattered for what came next, since proceeds from the single were reportedly directed toward a FIFA-linked campaign to build community and education centres across Africa.

But when FIFA announced that a Colombian would sing the official song for South Africa's World Cup, a great deal of South Africa was unimpressed. The country had waited generations for this tournament. It was the first World Cup on the continent, staged sixteen years after the end of apartheid, and the sense that the moment belonged to African artists was strong and loud. Local musicians and commentators asked the obvious question: with the richest music scene imaginable on the doorstep, why import a star?

The answer, partly, arrived in the recording itself. Shakira made the track with Freshlyground, the Cape Town Afro-fusion band fronted by Zolani Mahola, whose voices and instrumentation are woven through the song and whose presence on stage made the collaboration visible rather than cosmetic. The chant's Cameroonian origins were acknowledged in the credits, and reports at the time described an arrangement reached with the original authors, with Golden Sounds members among those recognised. It did not satisfy everyone. But it shifted the song from a borrowing into something closer to a handover.

There is a specific reason British and American readers should find this story strange. "Waka Waka" went to number one in dozens of countries and became, by most reckonings, the best-selling World Cup song ever recorded. Its video became one of the most-watched clips on YouTube, with a view count that has run into the billions. And yet in the United States it barely dented the upper reaches of the Hot 100, stalling in the thirties, and in the UK it did not come close to the top. The two countries that most loudly export pop culture were, for once, the ones standing slightly outside the global room. If you grew up in London or Los Angeles thinking of "Waka Waka" as a minor curiosity, the rest of the planet was having an entirely different experience of it.

What the song is actually telling you

Strip away the chant and the English verses turn out to be far less about football than people assume. They are about endurance.

The opening addresses someone directly — a competitor, a fighter, a person standing at the edge of a test they did not choose. The imagery is of a soldier on a battlefield more than an athlete on a pitch: the body hurting, the pressure of the moment pressing down, the clock running. Shakira's lines keep circling a single instruction: get up. The pain is real, the lyric concedes, but it is the price of being in the arena at all. You chose this; now hold the line.

Then comes the turn that gives the song its emotional weight. Rather than promising victory, it reframes struggle as something collective. The idea is that the person suffering is not alone, that others have walked this same ground, and that the act of continuing is itself the achievement. The chorus does not say you will win. It says, in effect, keep moving, and this moment belongs to you.

Read that way, the original Cameroonian chant is not decoration bolted onto a pop song. It is the song's thesis. A marching call written by soldiers to push exhausted bodies forward is, structurally, exactly the same message as a verse telling an athlete to rise when everything hurts. Shakira's English words and the Fang chant are saying the same thing in two languages separated by three decades and a continent.

The subtitle does the rest of the work. "This Time for Africa" is a line with a double edge — a celebration, obviously, but also a claim. This time. The implication is that previous times were not. A tournament held in Africa after decades of World Cups elsewhere, in a country that had been excluded from international football during the apartheid era, carries that phrase like a small, firm correction.

From Soweto to every stadium on earth

The song's public life began properly on 10 June 2010, at the kickoff concert in Soweto, with the tournament's opening match a day away. A month later Shakira and Freshlyground performed it again at the closing ceremony at Soccer City in Johannesburg, the vast calabash-shaped stadium on the edge of the township, in front of a global audience measured in the hundreds of millions. Between those two dates, the song fused permanently with a set of images: vuvuzelas, Siphiwe Tshabalala's thunderbolt of an opening goal, Spain's first world title, and a continent hosting the planet's biggest event and pulling it off.

What happened afterwards is the part nobody plans. Official tournament songs are usually disposable — competently made, briefly ubiquitous, then gone. "Waka Waka" refused to expire. It became a default soundtrack for school sports days, gym playlists, wedding receptions, flash mobs and children's dance routines in countries that have never qualified for a World Cup. A Spanish-language version, "Waka Waka (Esto es África)," gave it a second life across Latin America. In much of the world, it stopped being a football song and simply became a song — the rare novelty-adjacent hit that outlived its novelty by an order of magnitude.

Part of that durability is musical. The track is built on a bouncing, uncluttered groove with a melodic hook that sits in an easy range, and the chant requires no linguistic competence whatsoever to join. It is engineered, almost accidentally, for mass participation: anyone can be inside it within four seconds.

But part of it is the lineage. The song carries real African musical DNA — makossa rhythm, Freshlyground's South African textures, a chant with a documented history — rather than a studio approximation of it. Listeners may not know the provenance, but they can hear that the thing has roots.

Why it still lands

Sixteen years on, "Waka Waka" has quietly become a case study in how global pop should and should not work. The criticism it attracted in 2010 was legitimate and has only grown more relevant: who gets chosen to represent a place, who profits from a borrowed melody, and what acknowledgment actually looks like. These are the exact arguments the music industry has been having ever since, usually with far less generous outcomes than this one.

At the same time, the song is a demonstration of what cultural travel can achieve when the chain stays visible. A chant invented by Cameroonian soldiers to survive a march was picked up by a Colombian singer, recorded with a South African band, released for a tournament in Johannesburg, and absorbed by listeners on every continent. Each link is traceable. Very few global hits can show their work that clearly.

And the message has not aged at all, because it never depended on football. The song's real subject is the moment when you are hurting, exposed, and far from finished — and the choice to continue anyway, with the knowledge that others have stood exactly where you are standing. That is why it works at a child's sports day, in a hospital rehab ward, at a protest, in a gym at six in the morning. It is a song about getting up, written originally by people whose job required them to keep walking.

Which is also why the chant survives while the tournament it advertised recedes into archive footage. The World Cup of 2010 is a memory. The instruction at the centre of "Waka Waka" — move, keep moving — is permanent.

How to dive deeper

🎧 Immerse in the sound

• Golden Sounds "Zangaléwa" original recording — Hearing the 1986 Cameroonian source is the single most revealing thing you can do with this song. The chant arrives rawer, funnier and more rhythmically loose, and the makossa groove underneath makes Shakira's version sound like a faithful translation rather than an invention.
• Freshlyground "Nomvula" album — The South African band who co-performed the hit deserve to be heard on their own terms, and their best-loved album shows the Afro-fusion range that made them the right collaborators. Zolani Mahola's voice is the texture that keeps the single tethered to the host country.
• Shakira "Sale el Sol" — Released in the same era, this record captures Shakira at her most confidently multilingual, moving between rock, cumbia and ballads without apology. It places "Waka Waka" inside a career built on refusing to pick one musical passport.

📚 Follow the story

• Makossa and Cameroonian popular music histories — Books and long-form writing on makossa explain the scene that produced the original chant, including how army bands and comedy troupes shaped popular song. It reframes "Zangaléwa" as part of a tradition rather than a one-off curiosity.
• Accounts of the 2010 FIFA World Cup in South Africa — The tournament's story — the first on African soil, staged sixteen years after apartheid ended — gives the subtitle its full weight. Reading about the build-up, the scepticism and the national mood explains why the choice of singer became a public argument.
• Writing on cultural borrowing in global pop — Essays and studies on how melodies travel, and who gets credited when they do, turn this song into a useful test case. "Waka Waka" sits unusually well in that literature because its chain of custody is actually documented.

🌍 Visit the places

• Soccer City / FNB Stadium, Johannesburg — The calabash-shaped stadium where the closing-ceremony performance happened is still in use and still startling in person. Standing in it, the scale of what the song was soundtracking becomes physical rather than abstract.
• Soweto, Johannesburg — The township that hosted the kickoff concert is a destination in its own right, with Vilakazi Street, the Hector Pieterson Memorial and a music history far older than any World Cup. It is the right place to understand why South Africans wanted this moment to be theirs.
• Cape Town's live music scene — Freshlyground emerged from Cape Town's Afro-fusion circuit, and the city's venues still carry that mix of township jazz, folk and pop. Hearing it live is the fastest way to understand what the band brought to the record.

🎸 Experience it yourself

• Djembe or hand drum for beginners — The song's pull is percussive before it is melodic, and a hand drum lets you find the pattern that drives the chant. Even a few sessions change how you hear the groove underneath the vocal.
• Beginner guitar chord books with world-pop sections — The chord movement is approachable enough for an early player, and stripping the song to guitar exposes how simple its architecture really is. The simplicity is the point: it was built to be joined.
• Group singing or call-and-response workshops — This is a call-and-response song at heart, designed for many voices rather than one. Trying it in a group, with someone leading and everyone answering, restores the function the chant had before it was ever a record.

🎵 Listen to this song