Why MTV Shuga Hit Soundtrack Makes the Case for Originals in African TV and Film

When Kenyan producer SoFresh received the call to return to MTV Shuga Mashariki for its second season, he quickly realized this would be a bigger task than anything he’d worked on before. He had already helped shape the sound of the Kenyan reboot’s first season as composer and music supervisor, creating the sonic world of the long-running edutainment franchise from the MTV Staying Alive Foundation. As the foundation’s flagship program, MTV Shuga integrates health messaging into storylines that reflect the lives and experiences of young Africans.

The 2025 reboot was an instant hit, pulling over 2.8 million YouTube views and was quickly renewed for a second season with SoFresh still in charge of the music. But this time, the ask came with a twist: instead of curating and placing existing tracks around the series, SoFresh would lead the creation of an original soundtrack album built for the show. 

“It was my first time handling a project of this magnitude, and I knew it was my chance to show people what I can actually do,” he tells OkayAfrica.

The result was Mashariki 25Flow — a nod to Kenya’s country code, 254 — a blistering 12-track album that became the first fully original, standalone soundtrack in the MTV Shuga franchise. Designed not just to support the series, the project was built to carry the impact of the show far beyond the screen.

That ambition also meant turning away from the safer, more familiar route of licensing songs, which remains common across Africa and was also the model that shaped Season 1. For Season 2, the MTV Shuga team wanted something more deliberate. 

“With this soundtrack, it’s two things,” says Jeff Wamwaki of MTV Staying Alive Foundation. “It’s creating a path for young people to break into the music space, but it’s also using music as another way to talk about relationships, agency, autonomy… all the things we care about. You don’t get that by just licensing existing songs. Doing it this way gives us the flexibility to actually write into the areas we want to focus on.”

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A Continent With Few Soundtracks

And that is what makes Mashariki 25Flow so unusual. Across much of African television and film, music is often treated as an afterthought. You will find a licensed hit picked for familiarity, a library cue selected to drive mood, an original theme song created for the opening credits…then there’s little else. Mbithi, one of the songwriters selected to support Mashariki 25Flow, tells OkayAfrica that he is often hired to create original theme songs or extra cues tailored to specific scenes and storylines. 

SoFresh is blunt about why that remains the norm. “It’s costly doing such a project. That’s the number one factor,” he says. In Kenya, he adds, the idea of a full soundtrack is still “very foreign.”

That gap in original music surfaced almost immediately in interviews for this article. When asked to name an African original soundtrack, most pointed to South Africa’s Sarafina!. Created by the late Mbongeni Ngema with additional music by Hugh Masekela, the musical was first performed in 1987 and later adapted into the 1992 Hollywood film. The fact that so many people still reach for it so quickly highlights that there are still very few African TV or film projects willing to trust original music at a soundtrack level as part of their production.

Dina Mwende of She Moves Africa Films understands why. She had already been part of the MTV Shuga Mashariki production team for the first season before returning as the main producer for Season 2, which gave her a clear view of how quickly music stops being just a creative choice.

“That experience exposed a deeper production reality that music in the world of filmmaking and making of shows is not just a creative element," she tells OkayAfrica. "It's also a structural element. It's also a legal element. It's also a time sensitive element and a resources element."

In Season 1, the show relied heavily on licensed and library tracks, apart from the original commissioned song “Haina Pressure” written for Nikita Kering. Licensed songs are budget friendly, but they also create additional pressures. Scenes had to be re-shaped around available songs, delayed licensing slowed things down, and some tracks had to be replaced when clearance did not come through in time for broadcast.

Mwende understands why productions default to licensed music. It is safer. But, she argues, that safety comes with a creative cost. “With library music, you lose that specificity of culture…It lacks the authenticity,” she says. “It doesn’t know Nairobi, or East Africa. It doesn’t know the youth and what they are working with at the moment.” 

Season 2 tried to change that by building music from inside the story itself. Instead of working backward from what was available, the team started with character journeys and emotional arcs such as what a character was feeling, what tone a scene needed, what message it was trying to carry. 

From there, Mwende says, “we were able to build.”

Choosing The Right Voices

Nowhere is that clearer than in one of Mashariki 25Flow’s most emotional songs, “Zile Vitu Ulifanya” (“The Things You Did” in Kiswahili), which traces the aftermath of a rape and its ripple effects through the fictional Enkare University community. The storyline takes on rape culture directly, from victim-blaming to the silence that protects offenders. Performed by Itha, 28, the song follows the emotional arc of surviving what happened and trying to name it. 

This explains why the MTV Staying Alive Foundation built Mashariki 25Flow around young Kenyan talent. If the TV show wanted audiences to feel its world, then the soundtrack had to come from artists who understood its terrain. Through a nationwide open call that drew more than 200 submissions, the project selected five young Kenyan artists, Itha, Hassano, HR the Messenger, Rouwa, and Tilly, to give the album its voice.

Together with SoFresh and songwriters Mbithi, Nasibi, Modest Chabari, the five artists spent a week in a Nairobi writing camp. They worked together to turn story briefs into songs that could live both inside the show and beyond it. 

For Tilly, a 28-year-old rapper born and raised in Nairobi, 25Flow felt like both recognition and arrival. On “This Is Nairobi,” she captures the city’s grind, swagger, and instability with the authority of someone who knows it from the inside. That rootedness matters to her. She has argued that if a story is set in Nairobi or Kenya, then the music should come from artists who understand that world, otherwise “there’ll be a huge disconnect.” But the biggest impact of the project was professional. 

“Bragging rights,” she says. “Come on. On my CV portfolio, you see MTV Shuga… I was there.” The soundtrack, she adds, “really validated a lot of things.”

Ownership mattered, too. The music rights were co-shared between MTV Shuga and the artists, so the album also helped raise their profiles. Each artist can release, perform, and promote the songs beyond the show, SoFresh says. An album launch event last month pushed that even further as they were able to perform the music live for the first time.

For Itha, the 28-year-old singer-songwriter, that structure was part of what made the project feel so meaningful. She strategically timed the rollout of her own EP, Let’s Draw, to ride the momentum of the Mashariki 25Flow promotion. Original soundtrack work is still undervalued in African film and television, she says, but projects like Mashariki 25Flow can begin to change how artists are seen. 

“Of course, it opens a lot of doors,” she tells OkayAfrica. “It does give you a lot more credibility. People want to listen to you more.”

Now that the season is over and the album is out, Mwende sees that one of the enduring problems in African TV and film productions is that film and music have too often operated in separate silos, even though sound is fundamental to how stories are understood on screen.

“We didn’t just make a show here, we built a world where you could almost touch the world of music,” she says. “We didn’t just want people to watch. We also wanted them to experience it, to feel it… and music was that bridge.”