Discover: Salima Chica Wants You to Know the Voice Behind the Hits

When Salima Chica received a call from South African legend Oskido asking to turn her breakout hit “Tiki Tiki” into an Afro-house remix, she could hardly believe it.

But there was an issue: she was in Cape Town, he wanted her in Johannesburg, and she could not afford to fly.

For the Congolese-Angolan singer, whose “Tiki Tiki” and “Songi Songi” had already been buzzing across social media and DJ circles, the call marked a shift. Oskido was the producer, DJ, and Kalawa Jazmee co-founder who had helped shape South African dance music. She had to make it work. 

So she took the 18-plus-hour bus ride to Johannesburg.

By the time she arrived and began working, the fatigue disappeared.“[I] forgot about the whole trip,” she explains about the experience. “[I] forgot about the tiredness and we just did it.”

The song —“Tiki Tiki 2.0” — dropped earlier this month. Within days, it had moved into major DJ sets around the world. It also gave formal credit to a voice DJs had already been using.

That tension sits at the center of Chica’s rise. Her voice moved faster than her image, passing through DJ remixes and TikTok snippets before many listeners knew who was behind it. But with her debut EP, Étoile, she is trying to make the artist as recognizable as the voice she once tried to hide.

The Voice Before the Face

On Spotify, Chica has around six million monthly listeners, much of that momentum tied to “Tiki Tiki” and “Songi Songi.”These are songs that have not only been streamed but repeatedly remade.

“There are so many versions of ‘Tiki Tiki,’” Chica tells OkayAfrica on a call while she is visiting Angola. “There are rock versions, there are funk versions, there are Afro house versions. I think there are like more than 300 versions out there, if not more.”

The pull begins with the voice itself. Chica’s falsetto melodies are mesmerizing, carried by a tone some listeners have compared to Indian music. She is playful in her use of it. For DJs, that uniqueness could make a track feel instantly recognizable.

“DJs in Europe were going crazy,” she recalls when her vocals first started circulating in DJ circles. “My DMs were flooded with messages.”

They wanted features, and Chica says that period became her “DJ era.” She began making money from music.

Then came the snippet that changed things. After hearing a beat, Chica – who is spiritual – says the melody arrived almost instantly. “God sends it right now, boom, in two seconds it’s gone,” she says. Listening to the beat, she suddenly started singing “tikiiii tikiiii tikiiii.”

“It just came from heaven,” she says.

She had not recorded a studio version of “Tiki Tiki” when she posted the rough idea on TikTok. It took off, remixes followed, and so did confusion over authorship. Chica describes the confusion as a minor setback that ultimately pushed the song further, as listeners searched for the person behind it.

It was a lesson. At that point, she had been watching her vocals and unreleased snippets circulate in Afrobeat and Afro-house edits, sometimes without proper credit. 

“Now I know that I should always register my songs beforehand to protect myself and to protect my music,” she says. “So a lot of people won’t be able to steal it, and if they do, it will just be taken down.” 

Learning Not to Hide

The reason the voice keeps being reused is also the reason Chica once feared it. It is too distinctive to be missed.

Born in Namibia and raised in Cape Town, Chica was artistic from childhood. But self-expression came with limits and music became a private refuge. 

“Every time I sang, all the problems that I went through, all the trauma… it just disappeared for the moments when I would write a song or start singing,” she says of writing her first song at 12.

She was also bullied for her skin tone and features, experiences that left her insecure and afraid of judgment. For years, she says, that fear shaped how long it took her to put herself out there. It also pushed her toward music that fit what was popular instead of forging her own path.

“All these years I’ve been trying to fit in doing what everyone [was doing]...” she says. The shift, she says, came through faith. “I feel like God was just telling me to be myself fully. That’s when I was like, okay… ‘Do you ... because you’re special. You’re different.’”

A Star Falls to Earth

Her upcoming Étoile is where Chica plans to really showcase what she can do. She describes the project as a “shooting star coming from heaven and crashing into earth.” 

She adds: “This EP is about me.”

The project is softer, more spiritual and more personal than the songs that first caught fire online. Chica wrote every song herself, co-produced the project and selected its final tracks from about 15 demos. Some songs sound like dance or feel-good records, but Chica hears them as praise songs in disguise.

What she wants listeners to hear in Étoile is the freedom she had to learn for herself. After years of trying to fit in, Chica is no longer treating being different as something to overcome. 

“When God chooses someone to be different, he separates them,” she says. “The separation is a journey of learning, of being resilient, of being strong.”