Music Will Carry Us Through Everything: The AfroDiaspora Connection and the Sound of Liberation

Nigerian musician and political activist Fela Kuti once said, “Music is a spiritual thing…it must be well used for the gift of humanity” — a thoughtful line that captures a universal truth: music is far bigger than entertainment. For Fela, music was sacred. A force capable of awakening people, healing people, uniting people, and fighting oppression. This sentiment lies at the heart of The AfroDiaspora Connection.

Photo Credit: MANOR (Media Partner)

The AfroDiaspora Connection is a collaborative music event series between Johannesburg-based alternative music development agency The Dig Global and long-established UK music and arts non-profit organization and record label, Jazz Refreshed. This multi-year collaboration was forged on one premise: to nurture a creative bridge between the euphoric Afrodiasporic sounds of South Africa and the United Kingdom, cultivating a sustainable cross-cultural music ecosystem that traverses national boundaries.

The autumn sun shone shyly over the expansive outdoor field of the Soweto Equestrian Centre as hundreds of jazz and alternative music enthusiasts gathered in convergence. Good food. Good company. Good music. Attendees arrived eager for the transformative power of live, unmistakable African music, and the evening delivered.

A carefully curated lineup featured the gifted Cape Town multidisciplinary musician Internet Athi, daring Nigerian-German Wayne Snow, and, of course, the highly anticipated UK-based main act, Kokoroko.

The message of the evening revealed itself slowly but clearly: there is an immeasurable power in Black joy. Not joy as escapism, but joy as reclamation. Of humanity. Of culture. Of hope in the face of oppression.

As the balmy afternoon gave way to evening, the radiant full moon joined us beneath the warmly lit stage, participating in the generous distribution of sonic liberation. The multi-levelled crowd, some seated and most standing, gathered in front of each artist, returning their presence with our own.

One such act was Internet Athi. Hot off the heels of his new album, Polymorphism, he captivated the audience with a sound that seamlessly blends South African jazz, neo-soul, R&B, and what he describes as Black improvised music. Internet Athi’s stage presence engulfed the stage while his accompanying band punctuated his ardent vocals with a passionate symphony of instruments that gave shape to his deeply rooted South African jazz influences.

The audience unfurled between the DJ’s interlude sets like a snake coaxed from its woven basket by the hypnotic sway of a charmer’s flute. Bodies loosened. Heads nodded. Spirits remained high despite the late festival schedule and unexpected shuffling of performances. Kids Love Jazz DJ Zango Kubheka kept us fed with a wide palette of sounds, bouncing from Cleo Sol to instantly recognisable legends such as Brenda Fassie.

His set was so groovy that when host and Jazz Refreshed co-founder Adam Moses stepped onstage to introduce the next act, the crowd loudly discouraged the interruption so we could continue stepping to Johannesburg-native and rising producer Jinji’s flip of Brenda Fassie’s Weekend Special. A small but poignant display of South Africa’s deep love for its musical giants.

Once we got that off our hips, we were presented with unfamiliar-to-most-in-the-crowd Wayne Snow. Draped in a quilt-like baby blue and white two-piece garment, Snow stepped onto the stage reserved yet curious, facing a South African audience for the first time. Presented in partnership with the Goethe-Institut, who have supported the AfroDiaspora Connection from the jump and platformed local musicians such as Zoe Modiga, Wayne Snow felt like a gift for uninitiated ears.

Backed by Hungarian producer and keyboardist Abase (real name Szabolcs Bognar), the audience was pulled into Snow’s Afrofuturistic and experimental sonic world. His blend of experimental pop and soultronica, with roots sunk deep into jazz and neo-soul, swept through the crowd with ease. We danced to his moon-kissed vocals, exchanging glances of quiet disbelief. His sound felt both foreign and strangely familiar, resonating somewhere deep in the body, perhaps because shared histories often recognise themselves before the mind does.

A close second was Abase’s bass-heavy, genre-bending showcase, which held the crowd in a trance repeatedly ruptured by joyous movement. In conversation with Notion, Wayne Snow once said, “I feel like music and dancing is when we break loose. It’s difficult to hide when you lose yourself to music, especially through movement; you can’t be in control of your emotions.”

That feeling sat in quiet conversation with Art Blakey’s belief that “music should wash away the dust of life.” Across geography and time, the idea remains intact: music as release. Music as clearing. Music as a soft undoing of the day’s weight.

iQhawe Magazine

Wayne Snow left us altered and familiar with his game.

Just expanded. But who we were familiar with would soon join us. The crowd buzzed with anticipation as Kokoroko littered onto the stage. At the mere sight of “On Stage: Kokoroko” plastered across the side screens, scattered murmurs melted into sharp attention as Adam Moses returned to introduce who many of us came for. The smoke-filled stage, coloured in thin stripes of blue and green, became the backdrop for the seven-piece band as they parked themselves into place with a cool and quiet confidence.

Frontwoman and trumpeter Sheila Maurice-Grey enthusiastically greeted the crowd and ushered us into the performance through the vocal duet alongside trombonist and singer, Noushy Nanguy. Their voices met at the edges and folded into a single luminous sound hovering above the audience. Their rendition of “Higher” moved through the venue with the ease of a warm current that felt both intimate and expansive. Sheila describes the track's hypnotic, repeating lyrics ("we go higher") as a mantra designed to be a voice of hope, comfort, and positive energy in uncertain times. 

Their entire set carried a tenderness rarely afforded to live music at that scale. Hypnotic brass swells. Percussive textures. Tasty rhythms washing over the crowd like memory. There was care in the way they played, as though every note was an offering toward connection and collective feeling. The synergy between Kokoroko’s band members felt instinctive, almost conversational, as though each musician was fluent in the emotional language of the other. They moved together with a quiet attentiveness, leaving room for one another while remaining deeply locked into the pulse of the performance. Solos never felt isolating or self-indulgent; every flourish, swell, and rhythmic shift was received and carried collectively by the band.

There was a softness to their chemistry, a trust that allowed the music to breathe without ever losing momentum. At times, it felt less like watching seven individual musicians perform and more like witnessing a single living organism moving through sound together.

Furthermore, the band held its audience in a hypnotic and celebratory embrace as songs such as “Something’s Going On” and “Sweetie” crisply and clearly wafted through the speakers. An extraordinary moment of note arrived when guitarist Toni Adenaike-Johnson delivered a soulfully dense solo that stunned the crowd into silence.

Towards the front, a crowd member contributed to the euphonious symphony with the persistent blowing of a whistle, a longstanding South African language of participatory music-making where the audience is never separate from the performance. At groove, a whistle often means: this moment is landing. In this, there was something unforgettable in the way the crowd and band leaned into each other. The give and take between both energies multiplied exponentially with each passing moment.

Midway through the performance Kokoroko percussionist, Onome Edgeworth, expressed a gratitude that landed heavily in the room: “From African and Caribbean kids from London, this means so much to us.”

Speaking on the conception of their latest album, Tuff Times Never Last, he continued: “So much has changed within our own lives —heartbreak, loss, new relationships, children — and we wanted to write a party album. We wanted people to dance even though life gets real…

Tough Times Never Last

…the music will carry us through everything.”

The sentiment resonates deeply throughout the Afrodiasporic consciousness, where endurance is lived rather than theorised, constantly reshaped through collaboration, and care. During Kokoroko’s performance, that philosophy felt embodied rather than explained. Joy arrived not despite difficulty, but in direct resistance to it. The music did not ignore struggle. It held it gently, then carried it somewhere lighter.

After the performance, I had a moment to speak with Onome.

I asked what it meant for a diasporic band with multiple African origins to return to the continent in this way.

“I think this is our heart,” he said. “We spend so much time writing music and being based in London, there’s always a kind of separation. But this… this is your heart. And when you come here and get a response like this, it’s powerful, man. It gives us the energy to keep going. It moves us forward. It feels like this crowd understands the music even deeper than we do at times. They carried us.”

While standing in the crowd earlier that evening, I found myself thinking about how deeply spiritual music is and how African musicality, knowingly or unknowingly, often roots itself in that spirituality. I asked him what direction this experience was moving him toward creatively.

“There’s this graffiti in London that says, ‘love is the moving towards,’” he said. “I used to cycle past it all the time and never really understood it. Then one day I sat with it, and I realised the act of loving is about moving towards something, whatever it is. And that’s what we experienced today. We gave a little to the crowd, and they moved towards us ten times more. That energy, being met with that kind of love, pushes you to do the same in return. So yeah… love is the answer.”

I asked him one final question: how do you feel?

“I feel empowered,” he replied. “I feel like this is the ultimate dream. It feels very special.”

Events like The AfroDiaspora Connection act as living infrastructures for a global jazz language constantly evolving through exchange. They collapse the distance between Johannesburg, London, Lagos, and beyond, allowing improvisation and collaboration to function as forms of cultural return rather than extraction.

KOKOROKO

In these spaces, jazz is not preserved as a fixed tradition but expanded through Afrodiasporic sound systems like Afrobeat, electronica, neo-soul, and experimental forms speaking fluently to one another. Past and present Black sonic histories meet in real time.

The event closed with electric performances by London musician Summer Pearl and the Kids Love Jazz Brass Ensemble.

Ultimately, what remained after the final note faded was not simply the memory of the performances. It was the insistence that joy itself can be a form of resistance, an active refusal to be diminished by history or circumstance. Across every set, every collaboration, every call-and-response between stage and crowd, music emerged as both archive and possibility, carrying within it the weight of what has been survived and the promise of what is still to come.

The AfroDiaspora Connection becomes, then, more than an event series. It is a remembrance of what Fela Kuti meant when he described music as a spiritual thing, something capable of moving people toward one another. In gathering distant geographies and shared emotional truths into one space, the event revealed Afrodiasporic sound not as nostalgia, but as a living language of return and becoming.

And that is the gift of music within the diaspora: even in the face of rupture, displacement, grief, and reinvention, music continues to carry us back to ourselves and through everything.