My mother’s boyfriend is convinced we’ll see an African nation come close to the finals of this year’s FIFA World Cup.
“Well, maybe now it’s time for Africa,” I joked.
I don’t think he got it.
While my knowledge of the beautiful game is beautifully gossamer at best, my knowledge of pop culture deserves a trophy. I’m not totally clueless on how this whole thing works, though – I did live through 2010, and I recognise the World Cup as one of those rare sporting events whose crossover appeal, like the Super Bowl, has major cultural impact beyond the field (pitch? whatever). The Super Bowl has the Halftime Show, an event so massive that it can send years-old singles back to number one on the Billboard charts or secure you a Grammy for Album of the Year.
The World Cup, of course, has the official anthem.
Every four years, hundreds of songwriters, singers, bands and pop stars submit songs to FIFA for consideration to become the soundtrack of the tournament; a song that will be played at nauseam around the world, at every match, in a torrent of promotional material, and eventually will become synonymous with the memory of the tournament itself. Of all the sixteen anthems that have existed since FIFA introduced the concept in 1990, no other exemplifies the full potential of that cultural dominance quite like “Waka Waka (This Time For Africa)”.
The official anthem of the 2010 FIFA World Cup hosted in South Africa, “Waka Waka” is the most commercially successful World Cup anthem to date, and has since found a place in the same echelon as “The Macarena”: a fixture on wedding playlists, at community events, and rotation on Top 40 radio. It’s an omnipresent menace that has become inextricably entwined with South Africa’s cultural history and identity. I have experienced this first-hand while having a cigarette outside a nightclub in Brazil. After striking up a conversation with a group of backpackers of various nationalities, I was asked where I am from.
“South Africa,” I replied.
Their enthusiastic response:
“Ah! Waka Waka!”
When it was announced that this year’s FIFA World Cup anthem would once again be performed by Shakira – her third, in all – I found myself thinking about “Waka Waka” far more than I care to admit.
The case of “Waka Waka” is actually quite fascinating.
The song is based almost entirely on another: “Zangalewa” by Cameroonian group The Golden Sounds. Released in 1986, the song uses the chant “zamina mina”, a marching refrain used by Cameroonian soldiers during World War II and still used today by sports teams, police forces and even scout groups. The Golden Sounds incorporated the chant into” Zangalewa” as a tribute to Cameroonian soldiers lost at war.
As it happened, “Zangalewa” became an unexpected hit in Colombia, Shakira’s home country.
Shakira would eventually use it as the basis for “Waka Waka”, transforming its military origins into a metaphor for the high stakes of playing football.
“You’re a good soldier, choosing your battles,” she sings at the start of the song’s first verse.
Because playing the World Cup for your country is going to war, obviously.
Shakira wrote and produced the song with longtime collaborator John Hill, arriving at an Afro-Caribbean sound heavily influenced by soca. By coincidence, while Hill was finishing work on “Waka Waka” in New York, South African band Freshlyground were in the city putting the final touches on an album. Hill presented the song to them, and the band returned a Xhosa verse incorporating elements of kwela and pantsula – the only South African elements on the entire track.
And so “Waka Waka” as we know it was born: a chimera of African music styles, an interpolation of a Cameroonian makossa song, performed by the biggest Latin American pop star of all time. The de facto national anthem of South Africa.
In its accompanying music video, Shakira performs a dance that, for lack of a better phrase – went viral, a prototype TikTok dance trend years before TikTok existed. Though she has claimed the choreography draws inspiration from kwaito dance moves (I’ve never seen Mandoza ‘namaste,’ have you?) — like the rest of “Waka Waka”, it’s ambiguously African. The gestures and movements rely more on broad tropes than specific traditions, sort of like how people simplify Bhangra to “screwing the lightbulb and petting the dog.”
Because when it comes down to it, “Waka Waka” treats Africa less as a land of diverse nations and more as an homogenous aesthetic.
A common defence of the song at the time was that it was never intended to be an ethnographic study. It was a global pop product designed to appeal to a massive international audience, and by that metric it did its job exceptionally well. But this also exposes the central problem with “Waka Waka”: it isn’t a genuine representation of Africa, yet it sold itself as one, and much of the world bought in.
The song was an astronomical hit. It reached number one in multiple countries, cracked the Billboard Hot 100, and still holds the Guinness World Record as the most successful FIFA World Cup anthem ever released. It has become one of Shakira’s signature songs, occupying a permanent place in her live shows.
In fact, it was the slightly jarring experience of watching Jennifer Lopez sing the chorus of “Waka Waka” alongside Shakira during their Super Bowl Halftime Show that made me realise just how bizarre the song really is. I guess we really are “all Africa.”
“Waka Waka” performs an odd double duty. It’s both a global (non South African) pop star’s biggest hit, and an epitaph to a cultural moment that placed South Africa on the world stage like never before.
The question is: can it be both? Or better: can we just give it to Shakira and call it a day?
A song like “Waka Waka” is hardly an accurate representation of South Africa’s musical identity, and neither did it ever try to be. Though South Africa hosted the tournament in 2010, much of the global conversation focused on the event being the first World Cup held on African soil. “Waka Waka”, and its bracketed refrain “This Time For Africa”, attempted to represent that idea.
The problem is that this approach falls neatly into the Western habit of treating Africa as a singular concept rather than a continent made up of vastly different cultures, languages and histories. The song does its best to fuse those complexities into three-and-a-half minutes, yet the result has always felt more costume than couture.
What’s more, turning a phrase rooted in African resistance into a hook for a pop song promoting one of the world’s most powerful sporting organisations feels – to put it politely – problematic as fuck.
“Waka Waka” as a shallow pastiche of disparate African motifs becomes even harder to ignore when you consider Shakira’s position as the song’s central voice. It was one of the reasons many people questioned FIFA’s decision not to appoint a South African artist to headline the anthem in the first place.
Freshlyground’s inclusion often feels like an afterthought. That impression is only reinforced by the fact that the band is frequently absent from discussions about the song and entirely omitted from the version included on Shakira’s 2010 album, Sale El Sol – the version that Shakira performs on her tours.
Last year, Freshlyground manager Simon Atwell raised concerns about royalties from the song. According to Atwell, the band had originally been told that proceeds would be donated to African charities of their choosing, only to later discover that Shakira would decide where the funds were directed.
An EWN report from last year suggested that approximately R158 million in royalties remains unaccounted for, based on the song’s continued global success, including more than four billion YouTube views and nearly one billion Spotify streams. Atwell claims he was later informed that the money had been paid directly to FIFA and invested into its own charity initiative, 20 Centres For 2010 (Google it. I had to).
I’ll be honest: I’ve never liked this song.
It’s too kitsch to be camp, and always delivered with a sincerity that feels performative, disingenuous to the reality of the South African experience. But watching it become a source of national pride, a rare moment of cultural unity in a deeply fractured country, made me tolerate it.
Now that we’re back in World Cup mode, and Shakira is once again unavoidable thanks to her new FIFA anthem “Dai Dai”, I’ve found myself wondering why “Waka Waka” became so closely associated with South African pride in the first place, and why we embraced it as our own.
It all goes back to FIFA.
By using the power of nationalism, combined with pageantry and spectacle, the World Cup is ultimately one of the most successful marketing exercises ever devised. “Waka Waka” remains perhaps the clearest example of how that machinery works: transforming a complex continent, a host nation and countless cultural histories into a single, globally marketable narrative.
Despite the song’s popularity as, more than anything else, a Shakira song, “Waka Waka’s” legacy remains tied to South Africa. For many people around the world, the song and its accompanying visuals became their introduction to the country. It proposed an image of South Africa that still lingers today: colourful, celebratory, simplified and endlessly marketable.
What FIFA presented was a glossy version of the country, carefully packaged and window-dressed for global consumption. This South Africa was designed to sell tickets, merchandise, sponsorships and, of course, make you buy “Waka Waka” on iTunes. It was a version of the country that took years to construct and existed for just one month, disappearing almost as quickly as it arrived when Andrés Iniesta scored Spain’s winning goal in Soweto, on the same ground where Nelson Mandela addressed the nation after his release two decades earlier.
Like the stadiums dotted across the country, white elephants from a moment that promised a future it could never fully deliver, “Waka Waka” remains an inescapable part of South Africa’s cultural DNA, but it shouldn’t be allowed to overwrite the artists, stories and histories that were already here long before FIFA arrived. In fact, it should be a reminder to add those artists to our wedding playlists before anyone else.
Because it was never this time for Africa. It was always time for Africa.
Also – justice for the vuvuzela.
Banned like the WAGS.
FIFA, why do you hate nice things?
