Op-Ed: Why AFCON’s Football Anthems Keep Failing and What Could Fix Them

Considering this remarkable cultural connection between music and football, it’s a little concerning that the biggest tournament in African football has yet to have a true, widely beloved anthem. A lot of that colorful connection showed up in 2010, when South Africa hosted the men’s FIFA World Cup, which had multiple Hall of Fame World Cup anthems. Colombian singer Shakira spun the up-tempo banger, “Waka Waka” — with fringe contributions by South African group Freshlyground — a joyous celebration of the mundial touching down in Africa for the first time.

In addition to Shakira’s official tournament anthem, the Soweto Spiritual Singers brought some Isicathamiya flavor to “Sign of a Victory,” while Somali rap artist K’naan had released “Waving Flag” a year prior, before it was chosen as Coca Cola’s promotional anthem, which brought the song to global ubiquity around the World Cup period – and even beyond.

Official anthems are a way to capture the unifying spirit that World Cups aim to promote. Multiple cultures from dozens of countries and several continents land at the competition, supporters come with their chants and dances, but the competition’s anthem attempts to fold everyone — including those from countries not at the World Cup — under one massive umbrella. In the process, some of them become bona fide hits, like Ricky Martin’s “La Copa de la Vida” from the 1998 World Cup in France, and Anastacia’s “Boom” was popular all over the world during and after the South Korea-Japan finals. “Waka Waka” and “Waving Flag” are in that category.

Over the past six editions of AFCON, there has been an official song selected by the continent’s footballing body, CAF. At the risk of sounding harsh, none of them has crossed into anthemic ubiquity. The closest one so far is “Akwaba,” a booming collaboration between the iconic Ivorian group Magic System, Grammy-nominated Nigerian singer Yemi Alade, and Egyptian artist Mohamed Ramadan. It was released for the 2023 AFCON, which was played in Côte d’Ivoire in early 2024.

However, on the streets of Abidjan and other cities in Francophone Africa, Tam Sir’s “Coup du Marteau” was better associated with the competition, and it was one of the biggest African songs of that year.

There’s a key difference between “Akwaba” and “Coup du Marteau” that’s indicative of why one was more popular: the latter is a deliriously fun song. It’s not that “Akwaba” is a tedious song to listen to – in fact, it has some catchy elements, like its wordless chant that comprises a bulk of the chorus to the slithering guitar line that accents the electronic, Coupé-Décalé-inspired beat. Its general messaging, though, fails to distinguish itself from the giddy proselytizing of previous AFCON anthems.

Beyond the Official: Finding True African Football Anthems

AFCON anthems have either been on-the-nose welcome songs (2017’s “L’Afrique au Gabon”) or literal declarations of African unity (2019’s “Together”). There has been a severe lack of profundity, not necessarily in the themes of choice, but definitely in their execution. Some of it comes from throwing multiple — or in some cases a litany of — artists on these songs, which means there’s not much breathing space for a unique expression of what AFCON could mean. Even a song that tries to be uplifting, like 2021’s “We Stand for Africa,” comes off as painfully generic because it feels like the artists are reading from a generic script with little to no heart.

Tam Sir’s “Coup du Marteau” has multiple artists crammed into its three minutes, but there’s an evident sense of freedom. A lot of the fun also comes from the production, a bubbly zouglou beat with a delightful herky-jerk groove. By contrast, the music on the AFCON songs is usually electronic-heavy, sometimes to the point of brittleness.

Similar to local chants, many African countries have shown that it’s possible to create classic anthems around tournaments. Iconic Cameroonian artist Manu Dibango made “Soul Makossa,” now a global dance music touchstone, as a soundtrack for the 1972 AFCON hosted in his country, an endeavor that was commissioned by then-President Ahmadou Ahidjo. Ghanaian sibling duo Tagoe Sisters delivered an eternal victory song for Ghana’s Black Stars with “Yedi Nkunim,” while Rabah Driassa’s “Mabrouk ‘alina” was released at a time Algeria qualified for two successive World Cups in the 1980s, and it remains an evergreen song.

It remains to be seen if and when an AFCON anthem will translate into a song that will be beloved by a wide section of music listeners on the continent. Ideally, it should be sooner rather than later, at a time when there’s a myriad of popular music styles across Africa. A continent that has so much variety and an abundance of talented stars should be able to reflect that cultural power on its biggest football stage.