Vth Season and UMPG Commemorate AKA’s Impact by Expanding Pan-African Music Infrastructure. This year’s “The South Speaks” songwriting camp, held in Midrand, saw Vth Season collaborate with Universal Music Publishing Group South Africa to bring together about 50 songwriters for a week of writing, producing, and skill-sharing within specialized studios.
The group assembled by Vth Season included up-and-coming artists from Botswana, Zimbabwe, and Ethiopia, and the sessions were focused on transforming musical ideas into polished, production-ready tracks.
LONG LIVE AKA, LONG LIVE SUPA MEGA. Vth Season made this message a central theme throughout the camp. A special Supa Mega Room was established to honor AKA’s vision for African hip-hop and to actively safeguard the culture he represented, providing young artists a dedicated space to innovate and collaborate.
In this creative hub, 16 young hip-hop writers and producers worked in groups to elevate local sounds and cross-border influences. The Supa Mega Room served not only as a tribute, but also as an active studio space where mentorship and hands-on learning took place, resulting in beats, hooks, and completed stems by the end of each session. This approach illustrates a method of legacy creation, turning remembrance into a supportive framework for future generations.
Vth Season also highlighted three notable artists: Moozy from Botswana, who is gaining traction with recent singles and online content; Nicole, a singer-songwriter from Zimbabwe who has been developing her skills through regional collaborations; and Blén, an Ethiopian R&B and soul musician with an emerging portfolio and presence in the industry. Each artist contributed unique regional sounds and melodies that broadened the camp’s musical diversity.
The structure of the camp was based on four fundamental goals: creating new music catalogs for artists to own, enhancing skills through collaboration with Grammy-nominated writers and producers, encouraging cross-continental musical partnerships, and exploring fresh rhythms and sounds from across Africa. These objectives were reflected in the camp’s programming, which featured specialized studios and workflows aimed at preparing songs for global markets and commercial viability.
Vth Season positioned this edition as a strategic enhancement of its Pan-African initiative, first introduced in the prior year’s camp in Rwanda. Continuity was evident with returning artists, such as Rwandan musician Boukuru, who rejoined to collaborate and create new material alongside this year’s producers. This consistency is believed by organizers to transform temporary events into lasting infrastructure.
Results are beginning to emerge. Several writers and producers, including Jordan, Nicole, and Blen, are taking session files home to finish their work, with teams preparing to release tracks that originated from camp sessions. For the participating creatives, the upcoming releases are valuable, as they come with clear ownership rights and connections to publishing and placement teams to aid in licensing and distribution.
For Vth Season, BENZA, and UMPG South Africa, this camp served as both a tribute and a roadmap. It honored AKA by dedicating a space in his name and embraced his belief in the collaborative, ambitious, and outward-looking nature of African hip-hop. Attention should be paid in the upcoming weeks as singles are released and credits reveal cross-border collaborations born from the Midrand camp, along with further proof that the development of Pan-African music infrastructure is accelerated when exchange, skill transfer, and equitable ownership are integrated from the outset.
