When Haitian hitmaker Paska first landed in Kenya last November, the trip had two clear goals: perform at a Konpa festival on the coast and record a song with a local artist
But on his first trip to Kenya, what the Haitian artist found was much bigger. Across Kenya, and in parts of East Africa, he encountered a connection to Konpa that had been building long before he arrived.
“It reminded me so much of Haiti,” he tells OkayAfrica of the trip. “For me, the biggest thing was realizing that we are not introducing something foreign... we’re reconnecting something that already exists between our people, our roots.”
That sense of reconnection sits at the heart of Konpa’s current East African moment. Over the last four years, the Haitian genre has become one of the region’s most unexpected sounds to enter the mainstream. Konpa influences can be heard in songs by major artists across the region, including Savara, Okello Max, Zuchu, Jay Melody, Mbosso, Siji. and Element Eleéeh. Its rise is now most visible in Bien and Ali Kiba’s “Finale,” a cross-border hit and one of East Africa’s biggest songs of the year so far.
But before Konpa entered the local mainstream, dancers were already introducing it in Afro-Latin social dance spaces. Konpa was played alongside salsa, bachata, and kizomba before branching into its own community, eventually helping local audiences hear it, move to it, and make sense of it.
“There’s a thing about the music when you listen to it, and it just makes you pop your head, or it makes you feel like you want to stand up and dance,” says Trevor Magak, a music producer, sound engineer, and the founder of Kenyan music collective Kodongklan that includes the likes of Bensoul, Okello Max, and Coster Ojwang. “It’s the melody, and here melody is king.”
Konpa, also written as Kompa, is a Haitian genre that originated on the island-nation in the 1950s. Built on smooth mid-tempo grooves, warm melodies, syncopated guitars, and bright keyboard or synth phrases, it has a floating, romantic feel that makes it easy to dance to and adapt to. For East African audiences already used to melody-driven songs, coastal grooves, Bongo Flava love songs, and social dance scenes, the sound had many points of entry.
People are taking note of its growth. When popular influencer Jeamy Blessed posted a video of herself dancing to “Finale,” her comments were filled with questions about how a Kenyan-Tanzanian song could sound so Haitian.
“Is this a Kenyan-Tanzanian song, or is it Haitian kompa?” she asked in a follow-up post, after commenters questioned the song’s origin. “And is there a difference between stealing culture and being inspired?”
That is what makes this moment interesting. Konpa is becoming one of Kenya and East Africa’s sounds of the moment, and in some spaces, the local version is already being called “Swahili Kompa” or “Kompa Flava.” The labels make sense as East African artists are adding local slang, melodies, and production instincts to the Haitian sound. But in doing so, they also raise questions. How do artists make the sound their own while still honoring where it comes from?
How Artists Make Konpa Feel Local
Savara saw the possibility early. The former Sauti Sol singer has long thought of himself as an artist who catches sounds before they fully break. By the time he made his 2024 hit “Show You Off,” he was what one would consider an early adopter of Konpa in Kenya.
“I’m always so way ahead of my time most of the time, and I came to accept it,” he tells OkayAfrica, speaking from Europe, where he is currently on tour. With “Show You Off,” he says, the question was not how to make a pure Konpa record, but how to make the sound feel natural to young East African listeners.
“I told [the producers], ‘okay, we’re going to do a Konpa sound’,” he says of the writing camp where the song was made. “But I’m not from the island.”
So he adjusted it. Konpa, he says, can be slow, so he mixed it with Zouk, made it faster, and added Kiswahili and local slang. Lines like “unawafinish kumalo” gave younger listeners something familiar to hold onto.
Magak was in the room when “Show You Off” was being made. He says the song was recorded at his home during a period when several artists and producers around him were already experimenting with Konpa. That same creative circle — including producer Hendrick Sam— would later shape records in the space like Okello Max’s hit “Taya”, Paska’s “Your Body” with Kodongklan, and finally “Finale.” (Fun fact: “Your Body” and “Finale” actually have the same melody).
In Magak’s view, the genre is blowing up now mostly because of timing. “Artists and producers had played with Konpa before, but audiences are more ready now,” he says. “It’s mostly about the timing.”
The slang helped, and so did the major artists attached to the songs. But the records also felt connected because they were part of the same line of experimentation. “If I’m using examples, there’s ‘Show You Off,’ there’s ‘Your Body,’ and then there’s Bien’s ‘Finale,’” he says. “They follow a [through]line.”
But by most accounts, Kenya’s hitmakers were fairly late to the sound. Across the region, artists had already been playing with similar textures, especially in places with closer links to Francophone and Central African music circuits. Rwanda and Burundi, shaped by Belgian colonial history and long exposure to French-language music, had different entry points.
For Rwandan producer and artist Element Eleéeh, that connection goes back to the music he heard at home growing up. Asked about the Konpa feel in recent hits like “Tombé,” he traces it to childhood influences and a desire to make music that fuses different genres together.
“Maybe it’s Konpa mixed with Zouk, mixed with Afrobeat,” he told OkayAfrica in an interview earlier this year. “My music is not directly full Konpa, not full Afrobeat.”
Tanzania, too, had been edging toward the sound through Bongo Flava’s romantic tradition and artists such as Zuchu, Jay Melody, Mbosso, Alikiba, and Mocco Genius.
Joseph Magnus Mbano, a Tanzanian dancer and instructor who performs as Credor Dancer, first heard Konpa on TikTok in 2023. He soon noticed that Tanzanian artists were already releasing songs that reminded him of Konpa, even without naming the influence.
“At the moment, Konpa is loved by many people but not known by many people,” he explains. “They always connect themselves with the melodies and rhythm of the songs and enjoy them that way.”
That gap between feeling the sound and naming it is where dance communities have been important.
Before the Songs, There Was the Dance
In Kenya, Konpa first took root in dance spaces before becoming visible in the music scene. For years, it appeared mainly at Afro-Latin socials alongside salsa, bachata, and kizomba, often as only one or two songs in a night.
Lennart “Lenny” Fleck, a Kenya-based co-founder of Kite’l Mache, says the platform and event series were created to give Konpa its own space while keeping its Haitian roots visible on occasions like Haitian Flag Day. Kite’l Mache hosts Konpa Nights two to three times a year in Nairobi, with its most recent event drawing 400 people.
The name Kite’l Mache, Fleck explains, is a phrase often heard in Konpa songs that means something close to “let it go.” For him, it captures the emotional release at the center of the music.
DJs also helped the sound spread. DJ Ricks, who is also a radio personality on a local station, began making Konpa mixes on YouTube in 2023 and quickly realized there was a ready audience. Part of the appeal came from his blending of popular Kenyan songs into Konpa rhythms.
He remembers attending a Kite’l Mache event after they discovered his mixes. When he arrived, what surprised him was how ready the crowd already was. “They were so good at dancing Konpa, you’d feel like you’re in another country,” he says.
On the coast, Collins Otieno of Konpa Mombasa — one of several Konpa communities popping up around the country — describes the appeal more simply. “Konpa is not just music,” he says. “It is a feeling.”
Dance communities helped make Konpa social before it became mainstream, creating spaces where listeners could hear the music repeatedly and eventually recognize its influence in their own songs.
The Haitian Connection Becomes Direct
That was the groundwork Paska found when he landed in Kenya last November. He tells OkayAfrica that he was initially invited by Kite’l Mache and Baxx Entertainment Africa to perform in Kenya for the first time. The plan was also to connect him with Okello Max, whose hit “Taya” had caught his team’s attention for the way it naturally incorporated Konpa influences.
“What stood out immediately was that ‘Taya’ felt honest,” Paska says. “There was something in the rhythm and emotion that reminded us of the feeling Konpa gives: smooth, warm, emotional, but still modern.”
The original idea was for Paska to record with Okello Max. But once he got to the studio, the session expanded. Magak invited members of Kodongklan to join, turning what could have been a one-on-one collaboration into something much bigger. “We got in the room and immediately started vibing,” he says. “Twelve hours later, we had ‘Your Body.’”
The song became one of the clearest examples of what a direct Haiti-Kenya collaboration could sound like. For Paska, what stood out was the openness. “Nobody came in trying to protect a sound or to prove something,” he says. “We all brought our different authenticity to the table.”
That kind of collaboration matters as East African Konpa becomes more visible. The genre’s growth is exciting, but it also raises the question of how to expand a sound without erasing its origins. Paska says respectful collaboration starts with learning where the sound comes from, making space for Haitian voices and rhythms, creating with East African artists, and giving proper credit.
“Music is meant to travel,” he says. “Music has no limits. I want people to build with us.”
While the sound is still hot, the artists who helped push it into the mainstream are not done with it. Savara says that now that Konpa is making waves, he plans to make more songs in that lane. Magak says to expect more Konpa-influenced records from the Kodongklan circle, too.
But he is also skeptical about whether it has staying power. “[Kenyans] have a tendency of learning things from people, making the best of them quickly and dropping them out.”
That is the difference between Konpa as a trend and Konpa as a bridge. If the sound is only treated as a new flavor, it may pass quickly. But if East Africa keeps building relationships with Haitian musicians and culture bearers, it can become something deeper.
For Paska, that possibility is already there. The goal, he says, is for people to hear it and say: “This Haiti and Kenya sound is special; sounds like the future.”
