Sampa The Great
Finding home with Africa’s ARIA-winning first lady of hip-hop
The vast multitudes of Sampa The Great sit cross-legged in a meeting room at Ninja Tune’s South London office, sipping lemon tea to preserve her voice. Formerly known as Sampa Tembo, this swarm of spirits has become many things to many people since leaving her native Botswana. Her identity, history and soul have been pinned down and scrubbed over so many times that it’s sometimes hard to know who wrote which words first.
It is these many Sampas that make Sampa The Great, a title she conferred upon them at the grand age of seven in her childhood Zambia. “I wanted to put a name beside myself that I could aspire to be,” she says, her expansive voice sonorous even at breaking point. “It’s a challenge to myself, and also a goal; one day I’m going to get to a place where I’m the greatest version of myself.”
But to play host so many iterations — often at odds with one another — in the same liminal space can be testing. African spirituality, Sampa tells me, is based on the belief that there is no start or end to any of us. “We’ve been here before. What are the lessons we can learn?” she asks. “For me, what comes with that is you’ve already been connected. The disconnect happened, but there was a connection before. So, how do we journey back to that?”
It’s no accident that Sampa’s debut album is called The Return. It arrives after five years of relentless independent output; two mixtapes, one EP, multiple needle-shifting singles. One spin through its dazzling merry-go-round of rawness and regality, influences and influence and we all become hitchhikers on Sampa’s criss-crossing journeys. One month after playing her first Glastonbury, she is reaching the end of a particularly testing quest to reconcile these facsimiles of spirit to herself.
You should see Sampa in the flesh, but it’s just as easy to witness her transfiguration on record. Blessed with a multiplicity of voices, infused with the strength of her ancestors and the invisible links of a growing global community, Sampa shifts shapes seamlessly. She is an artist of exquisitely refined talent; dexterous wordplay and bold themes now come standard. She is also, quite undeniably, African.
“I think hip-hop is often so specific to an African-American culture, so with that comes their way of speaking, their slang, their references,” she muses. “Africa has its own culture and a rich one as well. I find [it] has to do with us as Africans being able to translate our sound to our people. I don’t want to sound American, I’m not American.”
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Before Sampa can find herself, she’s had to find her home. For the past five or so years, that’s been in Australia, where she arrived to study audio engineering, fell in with a group of jazz and R&B heads and somehow ended up becoming the flag-bearer for a ‘new wave’ of conscious hip-hop in the country.
“I think it’s a testament to how when something great comes out that people recognise, they want to claim it,” Sampa chuckles. “People [would] test me on stuff in Australia and I’m like ‘I’m new! I have no idea about Vegemite.’”
Thrust onto large stages and newspaper covers while still trying to figure out who she was, Sampa was feted by the media as a cultural salve to Australia’s particularly thorny relationship with its indigenous population and the music industry’s female quota issue. It would be the first of many Sampa schisms, as she found her spirit splintering at the seams.
“For a minute there I was like two different people. I’d tell Australians I was Zambian and they’d be like ‘OK’, and Zambians be like ‘huh?’” she laughs deeply. ““I didn’t do anything professionally there. So I had Zambians not knowing I was an artist and Australians refusing to accept I was Zambian.”
The ‘new wave’ of Australian hip-hop isn’t really that new; many of Sampa’s contemporaries, like B Wise and REMI have been going for close to a decade. What’s changed is the attitude, particularly a local willingness to adopt first and second-generation immigrants as our own. Australian rap now sounds Nigerian, Botswanan, Zimbabwean, South African, Sri Lankan. But while the influx of people of colour may have upended the rules, it hasn’t entirely removed the gatekeepers. It’s not that difficult to figure out where these artists are from. Many of them reference it in their lyrics, but it’s rarely covered in the media.
It’s a struggle Sampa knows well, having used her Australian Music Prize-winning mixtape Birds and the Bee9 to take aim at those that co-opted her flow but left her character for dead. “You don’t nurture this artist, you don’t know how to even promote this artist,” she reminisces. “You don’t even understand enough about their culture to say ‘OK, you’re an immigrant, what does that actually mean?’ To delve into the story. It takes a lot of teaching, that I found as a huge weight on me.”
Split in half, Sampa was drowning. To compound the issue, the more her star rose, seemingly, so did her experiences of racism. “There was a moment where I was just going to leave [Australia] and nothing more was going to happen,” she admits. “I had my first Kendrick [Lamar] support and then got spat on by this white dude on the train — in the same week.”
With her increased profile, Sampa found herself being subdivided in other ways, including the pressure to be a role model. When she talks about it, she chokes up. Tears brim in her eyes.
“I’d have little children of colour come up to me and say ‘I’ve never seen anything like you.’ It was so heavy. I couldn’t carry it. I didn’t even know who I was as an artist yet and then I had to carry everybody else. That’s what artists of colour feel. Every. Time. I didn’t constantly want to feel like I was an ambassador for everyone.”
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When Sampa was still a singular child and had not yet decided to be Great, she was a blossoming musical arranger. Whipping around her neighbourhood in Luanshya, she would round up the local kids to join her choir, where they’d recreate the soundtrack of The Lion King. A born leader, Sampa would delegate all of the harmonies, but you’d never hear her do it herself.
“I’d write songs for everyone but when it came to actually singing, I’d think it was too vulnerable for me,” Sampa admits. “You can actually see my soul when I sing. So I’d give it to someone else. Which is crazy because I can do it with ease when I rap.”
Vulnerability is a crucial aspect of The Return and Sampa’s reconciliation of her selves. Its star-studded guest list, which includes Stones’ Throw’s Jonwayne on the boards and appearances from Steam Down, Blue Lab Beats, Mandarin Dreams, Silentjay, MsM, Whosane, The Sunburnt Soul Choir and Sampa’s parents, is intercontinental in flavour and personal by design. It’s a huge coup for an artist only just starting to bubble in the Northern Hemisphere, but Sampa puts this down to levelling with everyone.
“I can honestly say that music is a language, regardless of where you’re from. It’s something I’ve known since I was a child. I think that resonates. The story resonates,” she says. “These are not people that I wanted as a feature for credibility. We see them all the time and have a human connection. I guess me wanting to know who they are as human beings could be the thing.”
In the spirit of honesty, Sampa refuses to put down a note in the studio with anyone before they talk about what’s eating them. “So off the bat, I was like ‘Yo, it’s my first album. Scared as shit,” she laughs. “‘This is meant to be the thing that defines me for the rest of my life, but actually, I’m terrified.”’ Facing this also meant facing up to her singing, something she only started doing in earnest on her last release.
“I do hear verses in different voices,” she says. “It helps carry the emotion of what’s behind them. I always told myself not to limit my expression because I am a whole person, so if the emotion is this, then I’ll be that. I’ll express it in the way that I see fit; singing, rapping, scatting. But I’m not a monolith. Different songs bring different feelings, emotions, pitches, personalities.”
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The many Sampas that comprise Sampa The Great have travelled to many continents to record, absorb, perform. But the key has been, and will always be, Africa. “When we talk about the diaspora that’s been displaced, people who don’t know where home is or where they are,” Sampa says. “From moving around I came to the conclusion that to keep myself sane and grow my career, I had to take elements of home and keep them with me.”
Part of the mission behind The Return is to, in Sampa’s words ‘flex the culture’ of the place that encouraged her aspirations of greatness. For the first two singles off the album, she returned to South Africa, shooting videos with her longterm collaborators that are soaked in local flavour. There are kids busting moves in traditional dress, scenes inside her parents’ home in Gaborone, street drifters and confronting, masked Nyau dancers. It is riotous celebration of colour and sound, but also reclamation, after years of co-opting, of pleading and being ignored, to take her home and infuse it into herself.
The music is no different. Sampa arrives fully formed; singing, slinging rhymes, scatting and speaking in her native tongue. It’s a hip-hop record unlike many others you’ll here, one which, despite its varied collaborators, sounds definitively African. For Sampa, it’s part of a turn inward that has been embraced by the likes of Skepta, whose wildly successful Homecoming festival in Nigeria has become a blueprint for how to market an African artist’s background as the foreground.
“It also comes with an assurance that what you’re doing is cool enough,” Sampa says. “That it’s accepted. It’s like ‘Ok, Beyonce’s wearing Ankara [African wax printed dress] so shit must be cool.’ But ten years ago, it just wasn’t. I think Africans have realised that they’re really dope as well. That’s when you can actually come into your being and do local hip-hop well.”
To that end, Sampa has realigned the spiritual with the physical, recently playing her first ever shows on African soil after half a decade in the game. It’s a move she’s clearly jazzed about. “It’s different hearing your song on the radio on a country you’re not from and a station you never grew up listening to,” she explains. “Until I heard my song on radio at home, I didn’t really believe how big it was.”
After years of displacement and renegotiating her identity, Sampa The Great is finally starting to feel like herself. She is someone and she is from somewhere. But as she rebuilds her city of hip-hop, traversing cultures and borders with love, respect and vulnerability, it’s also becoming clear that she is from everywhere.
As she puts it so eloquently, holding an empty mug in a small office on the other side of the world from where she was born: “If your ancestors live through you, then you’re already home. They are within you. You don’t have to prove you’re African, because you already are.”
As originally published in BRICK, Edition 08.
