Emmanuel Jal’s Many Homes Are in the Music

“NEVER GIVE UP! NEVER GIVE IN!”

The chant rolled through the dark Nairobi club, washed in blue and red light, as Emmanuel Jal stood above the crowd and led the room in call-and-response. The audience shouted the words back louder and louder, their voices riding over the thump of the bass. Bodies pressed closer, phones rose into the air, and the phrase gathered force with each repetition.

“NEVER GIVE UP! NEVER GIVE IN!”

By then, Jal — standing on a makeshift stage on the DJ booth — had the crowd in a trance. All night during his top-billing set in Nairobi, he moved them with ease. He fed off their late-night energy and sent it back amplified. 

Behind the decks, the music was his spell. He sped the music up and slowed it down, and the crowd followed without hesitation. He spun. He danced. He sang. He jumped. He dipped. He kicked.

“NEVER GIVE UP! NEVER GIVE IN!”

And then, just like that, he jumped into the crowd.

The moment captured something central to Jal’s current chapter. Afro-house has become one of the most powerful African sounds in global club culture, moving from Johannesburg and Nairobi to European festivals and underground rooms. Jal’s route into that world was a pivot that made sense. 

His dance hit “Kuar” began as a song tied to South Sudan’s 2011 independence referendum. But remixes by producers including Henrik Schwarz and Olof Dreijer later carried it into global house circuits, foreshadowing the Afro-house chapter that would come years later.

In the years since, the South Sudanese-Canadian artist has become one of the genre’s most distinct East African voices. He now has more than 1.6 million monthly listeners on Spotify, while “Gorah,” his wildly popular collaboration with Zimbabwean producer Nitefreak, has crossed 100 million streams. And it doesn’t hurt that his 2025 song “Chaak,” with Bun Xapa, was named one of OkayAfrica’s top songs of 2025.

Together, the records trace a clear arc in which Jal–previously a hip-hop artist– found a form that could carry his voice, his language, and his history across the world.

But as he tells OkayAfrica two days before his set in Nairobi, his story is also one of diaspora. It is a life and sound shaped by several homes, and a refusal to let South Sudanese memory be reduced to crisis.

For Jal, home is not about a fixed address.

“Home is where you are loved,” he says. “You can be in a house full of your brothers and sisters and still be alone.”

His own map stretches across several places: South Sudan, where he is from; Kenya, where he was brought and has become his creative home; the UK, one of his early bases; and Canada, where he is also a citizen. His music now moves just as widely.

“You can be South Sudanese by origin, live in Kenya, build your career in Canada, and have your music live in Spain or Mexico,” he says. “That’s just how my life is. I belong to many places at once.”

After the Nairobi gig, Jal was set to fly to India, then Mauritius, before spending much of the summer moving through Europe and Asia. But Nairobi holds a particular weight in his story. Jal first came to Kenya after being smuggled out of Sudan as a child during the war. It was here, he says, that he was disarmed, supported, and given room to imagine a life beyond survival. 

Years later, Kenya remains one of the places that most actively makes his current sound possible.

“Kenya is a tastemaker and an endorser,” he says. “Anywhere there’s music in Africa that is happening — South Africans, Congolese, Sudanese, West Africans — this is the one country that doesn’t discriminate. They treat every artist as an artist and even give you airplay.”

Kenya is also where Jal runs Jal Gua, a health-products shop that doubles as a creative base. The business has helped fund his events and, he says, supported more than 100 local entrepreneurs. It is also where he hosts DJ school sessions and invite-only pre-parties, bringing together Kenyan producers and musicians who help shape his records.

That ecosystem has shaped how Jal thinks about his sound. He does not describe his current music as only South Sudanese. 

“I’d call it [an] East African sound,” he says. “I don’t live in South Sudan, so you can say it’s South Sudanese music in terms of language, yes. But the choruses and the beats are made in Kenya. The producers are Kenyan, the band is Kenyan. Canada can claim the business; South Sudan can claim the language; Kenya can claim the sound.”

In Afro-house, that layered identity becomes especially clear. Jal’s songs move through Kiswahili, Arabic, English, Dinka, Nuer, and other textures. Sometimes, the words are made up!

“Sometimes I write songs where I just use musical sounds, words that don’t make sense at first,” he says. “The energy comes first… people feel it on the dance floor before they know any meaning. Later, we can decide [what it means].”

The result is music that can move a club before a listener understands a single word. But for those who do understand his lyrics– in Dinka or Nuer, for example– the songs carry intimate recognition.

For Jal, the club is also a place where language can travel. “To find a sound from South Sudan that is now globally making an impact and documenting history in a language that was being marginalized … that’s powerful,” he says. “When I bring my mother tongue into the club, it keeps the language alive on a global level.”

But preservation is only part of it. Jal is also thinking about what that visibility does for younger South Sudanese listeners who may be scattered across Nairobi, Toronto, Melbourne, London, or Juba. Hearing the language in a global record can become its own kind of permission.

“There’s a point where you no longer do what you do because of you. You do it for those to come,” he says. “Once the language is on a global record, it’s not just mine anymore. It’s for the next generation that’s going to hear it and know it’s possible.”

That future-facing instinct matters because South Sudan is still too often introduced to the world through war, displacement, and crisis. Jal knows that history intimately, but his music keeps widening the picture. It gives listeners other images to hold onto. In the club, it is shouted back by crowds who may not even know exactly what they are saying.

Despite that, Jal’s relationship with South Sudan itself remains complicated. He says he is banned from performing there, where he is better known as an activist than for the full breadth of his music.

“The system is scared,” he explains. “When you are popular and you are independent, it becomes a fear for insecure leaders.”

He says he has tried to hold events there before and has been stopped. So for now, some of the most powerful encounters with his South Sudanese audience happen outside the country, in diaspora rooms where the songs land differently.

“When I perform for South Sudanese in the diaspora, the energy is different,” he says. “Some of them know the words properly; they connect with every line. In those rooms, the music doesn’t need translation.”