How Christine “Seven” Mosha Thinks East Africa Breaks Through

The Women Who Decide What Africa Listens To is an OkayAfrica series on the women shaping Africa’s music industry from behind the scenes. In an ecosystem where power still skews heavily toward men, the series profiles the executives, curators, and strategists who help determine which artists get built, which sounds get amplified, and how African music moves across the continent and beyond. Read the full series here.

Christine “Seven” Mosha watched as Tanzania’s Abigail Chams stepped onto the stage in a floor-length blue gown to stand beside the legendary Senegalese singer Youssou N’Dour.

It was the final evening of the Africa Forward Summit 2026, and Le Concert — the summit’s official closing show — had brought together a pan-African lineup in a room that included French President Emmanuel Macron and Kenyan President William Ruto. When the pair launched into “7 Seconds,” N’Dour’s global 1994 hit, Chams held her own.

For Mosha, the moment was a striking performance, but also a reminder of what artist development can look like when it works. After stepping into the role of Head of Sony Music East Africa, Mosha signed Chams to the label in 2022, when Chams was 19. She is now on a roster of artists that Mosha has helped push into larger continental and global spaces.

“For a long time, it was just marketing, marketing, selling,” Mosha tells OkayAfrica of Chams’ rise. “Now people understand who she is. We have everything in place. Now we’re moving.”

Weeks earlier, Mosha had been in Nairobi again, this time for another Sony artist. She watched as Nyashinski drew more than 11,000 people to his groundbreaking Showman Residency. Staged across seven shows, the run blended music, theatre, dance, and Nyashinski-coded spectacle. Together, the two moments offer a clear view of Mosha’s role: she is a music executive helping East African talent rise to a global level while also helping to build the systems and strategies that get it there.

That kind of influence also places Mosha, a Tanzanian native, in a part of the music business where women are still too rarely seen. By her own telling, she is the only senior manager at a major label from East Africa, male or female. In a male-dominated industry, that means her work also becomes about holding authority in rooms that have not always been built to imagine someone like her at their center.

In a wide-ranging hour-long interview, Mosha — who rarely gives interviews — spoke with OkayAfrica about her work and philosophy. What quickly became clear is that this role found her, much like so many others across her career. From radio presenting at MTV Base to launching her own label and nurturing artists, Mosha has built a career by stepping into roles with no clear blueprint in the markets where she worked.

“I love it,” she says. “I love the challenge.”

What East Africa Needs to Break Through

Sony found Mosha at a moment when she was already rethinking her next move after years of managing Tanzania’s Ali Kiba as he grew into one of East Africa’s biggest stars. When the company laid out the territories it wanted her to oversee, she asked to add the Democratic Republic of Congo and Ethiopia.

“One of the things that I’m known for is my ambition,” she explains when asked why she would add to her workload. “I am incredibly ambitious, and I set certain goals, and I tend to achieve them.”

It is refreshing to hear a woman speak so openly of her ambition, and it is central to what her role actually requires. At Sony Music East Africa, Mosha signs artists from across the region and helps connect them to the scale of a global music company, with access to investment, marketing, data, catalog management, and cross-border strategy. Sony Music’s wider system spans labels and divisions, including Columbia, Epic, RCA, Legacy, Masterworks, Sony Music Latin, and Sony Music Nashville, with artist rosters ranging from Beyoncé, SZA, and Tyla to Doja Cat, Harry Styles, and Tame Impala.

But for Mosha, the job also means developing the markets themselves, aligning Sony’s global machinery with a local industry that does not always fit neatly into an existing major-label structure. In other words, her work is finding artists and building the conditions in which they can really travel.

Asked what East Africa most needed from a major label, Mosha answered in a single word: “structure.”

“What has to complement that structure is culture,” she adds. “When the music is right, the culture is defined, and the structure is there, everything aligns… the infrastructure, the investment, the economy. At that point, there is a product that is well understood and consumed.”

That idea sits at the center of how Mosha thinks about East Africa’s place in the wider music industry. At a time when the conversation around African music is still largely dominated by West and Southern African scenes, she argues that East Africa’s challenge is a lack of definition. 

Too much of the region’s musical identity, she suggests, has not been clearly named, documented, or explained to the rest of the world. Take, for example, Tanzania’s bongo flava.

“If I asked you what bongo flava is, you probably wouldn’t have a straight answer,” Mosha says. “When did it start? What defines it? What kind of instrumentation does it use? It has not been documented. That information has never really been put out there before.”

In her view, that gap matters because music is harder to market, explain, and export when its story has not been clearly told. East Africa cannot fully break through, she says, unless it first explains itself to the world. As she puts it: “Our story needs to be out there.”

That work is already visible in the artists she is helping shape. Earlier in her career, Mosha points to Ali Kiba’s rise, including a Best African Act win at the MTV European Music Awards, as one of her first major highlights. She touches on some of the artists on her roster at Sony and how she works at knowing when an artist is ready, what kind of system they need, and how to position them for the next stage. For example, DRC’s Ferre Gola and the structured return of his career after a seven-year hiatus.

“They require the system,” she says of working with artists. “The know-how, the contacts, the research, the database, the analytics, and everything that the record label brings.”

And that is where Mosha’s ambition becomes clearest. She wants to change the scale of what East African music can be. 

“I do want to see an East African artist become a global star,” she says. “To me, a success would be completely shifting an industry and changing it completely forever. That would be a power move.”

A Woman in the Room

Mosha is clear that being a woman in this role has meant navigating resistance that often has little to do with the work itself. She remembers traveling to a Muslim country for business with a male artist, only for a dinner at a business partner’s home to turn awkward. In that household, the women were expected to move into the kitchen and family area, while the men stayed in the sitting room to continue the business conversation. The problem was that Mosha was the one leading the business. 

“It was so freaky and confusing for that family to understand how they place me,” she says. “I’m supposed to be part of the discussions. So I’m supposed to be in the sitting room, but then the sitting room, it’s male-dominated. So how are we going to do this?”

That moment captured the kind of friction Mosha runs into in this business. She says that when things dipped while she was managing high-profile male artists, the criticism rarely stayed on the music alone.

 “We keep on telling you a woman cannot do this job,” she recalls people saying about her. “Get a male team.” 

The scrutiny, in other words, always seemed to fall back on whether a woman should have been in the role at all. Despite this, Mosha is not someone who moves without reflection. She says she regularly reassesses her career every five years and makes a habit of asking bosses, friends, and collaborators to “assess” her honestly. Feedback matters to her because it sharpens what instinct alone cannot. That combination of self-belief and self-interrogation seems to shape the way she leads. 

It’s the habit of someone who trusts her instincts but doesn’t trust herself to see everything, and who would rather pull back and think than move loudly in the wrong direction.

It also helps explain the scale of what she wants. Ten years from now, Mosha says she wants her time at Sony Music to be remembered as the period that helped unlock the industry and produced two to three global superstars from East Africa.

“I’m betting on me,” she says. “Regardless of what I hear, regardless of what I’m told, regardless of how the institution is structured. This is what I’m gunning for, and I’ll get there. And that’s how people who’ve done the first achieve the first.”