East African Music Needs to Move as One to Be Heard Globally

Joshua Baraka is arguably Uganda’s biggest breakout artist of the moment. With songs like “Wrong Places” and “Morocco,” he has become one of the clearest examples of how far Ugandan music can travel when it is built with the region in mind. And he credits part of that rise to his willingness to think beyond Uganda and to treat East Africa as his real market, as he explains in a recent episode of Afrobeats Intelligence, presented by OkayAfrica and sponsored by Martell.

“From the start, I didn’t want to just stay in Uganda,” Baraka told host Joey Akan. “So for me personally, like with my team, we’ve always tried to grow around East Africa in general.” 

He recalls taking buses from Kampala to Kenya and Rwanda to push his music. “When I talk of East Africa, I talk about it in a block,” he continues, “because to me, it’s not just one place. It’s not just Uganda…. it’s East Africa.”

He was responding to an observation that Akan made about how East African artists talk about the scene. They rarely speak only of single countries. They tend to speak of East Africa as a single bloc.

Akan adds that when he was in Kenya and asked people to name the biggest Kenyan artists, many mentioned Baraka. Best believe Kenyans know Baraka is Ugandan. But it is proof that when the music is good — and Baraka’s music is excellent — it travels and gets absorbed into people’s lives before anyone stops to ask which border it crossed.

That is how music has always worked in the region. It moves through language, radio, clubs, weddings, TikTok, friendship, proximity, and taste. A song can be born in Kampala and find momentum in Bujumbura. A Tanzanian record can feel completely at home on the Kenyan coast. A Rwandan producer can bring in a Kenyan star and a Ugandan singer and have the collaboration make immediate sense.

That is what is happening now with “AYAYAAH,” a song by Rwanda’s Element Eleéeh featuring Kenya’s Bien and Baraka, which is climbing the charts. Bien’s “Finale” with Tanzania’s Alikiba – I’d say the hottest song in the region right now — is being played up and down the East.

You can look at OkayAfrica’s monthly East African music roundups, and the amount of cross-border collaboration happening across East Africa is hard to miss. Artists and producers are increasingly treating the region as a creative network rather than a set of separate national markets.

That matters especially now, when African music is often defined globally through the dominance of Afrobeats and Amapiano. Nigerian artists have built one of the world’s most powerful music export machines, while amapiano has reshaped dance floors across the continent and beyond. But their success has also narrowed the frame for how African music is understood internationally.

East Africa does not need to respond by inventing a single clean genre that can be packaged the same way. I believe its power is that it is not one thing. It is Bongo Flava, Afro-pop, gengetone, R&B, dancehall, singeli, taarab, Kinyatrap, and so much more, all moving around each other. 

Uganda has often moved differently within that circuit. Baraka points this out in the interview. 

“If you blow up in Uganda, they don’t really try to go out there and get together with other artists or take their music out there,” he says. “You’ll still make money, you still have deals, you’ll still be good.” That comfort can become a ceiling, and Baraka’s career offers a different blueprint.

There is a history for this. Bebe Cool, a Ugandan legend, built part of his career in Kenya from the late 90s into the 00s. He later joined forces with Necessary Noize’s Wyre and Nazizi to form the East African Bashment Crew. He never stopped being Ugandan, but that Kenyan connection helped make him a regional star. When he dropped his 2025 album, Break the Chains, after a long hiatus, he was welcomed back regionally.

The same point can be made through Mombasa, Kenya’s second largest city. Bongo music can feel more immediate on the Kenyan coast than whatever Nairobi is producing at a given moment. That does not make Mombasa any less Kenyan. It shows that coastal Kenya has always listened regionally, toward Tanzania, Kiswahili culture, and the Indian Ocean.

For now, Baraka is

preparing to tour Canada and Australia this summer

. He was recently nominated for Best African Music Act at the 2026 MOBO Awards. He could not have reached this point by being only a Ugandan artist. His rise works because he has understood something the industry is starting to fully build around: he is Ugandan and East African at the same time.