If you listened to the crowd’s reaction as he made his way to the main stage at the Scorpio Kings and Friends Live concert at Loftus Stadium in South Africa’s capital, Pretoria, you’d be forgiven for mistaking the Nigerian Afrobeats star David Adedeji Adeleke (Davido) for a local. That’s because in a country where immigration discourse now turns on how carefully we tiptoe around ultranationalist anxieties—and where Afrophobia has become a social currency used to revive fading political careers—a 50,000-seat stadium doesn’t usually erupt in cheers for a Nigerian, no matter how famous. The violent history of being an African immigrant in post-apartheid South Africa certainly wouldn’t suggest such a welcome.

In the years of state failure and the disappointment that followed the country’s first democratic elections in 1994, nationalists have come to see African migrants—particularly Nigerians, navigating the chaos of South Africa’s urban inequality and deindustrialization—as the embodiment of all that’s gone wrong with the sociopolitical order. Culture has become the definitive battleground for this conflict, and as some of the most visible symbols of immigrant resilience, it was inevitable that Nigerian Afrobeats stars would become targets of South African ultranationalist ire. What really has nationalists in a knot is the suggestion that Amapiano owes its success in the West to the collaborative reach and popularity of Afrobeats artists. What began as a debate over class and regional roots (which part of South Africa gets credit for popularizing the genre) has since been overtaken by nationalism.

Yet, any sincere Amapiano fan will tell you that Adeleke, a Nigerian, has long been a North Star for the genre—one of its most consistent champions as it rises in global prominence. It made perfect sense, then, that what was dubbed “Amapiano’s biggest concert” would center on his appearance. He has embraced the genre sincerely, but unlike many of his Afrobeats contemporaries—who, on their path to Western success, often tested their sound in South African cities before reaching international resonance—there’s little to suggest that South Africa’s cultural scene was ever critical to Adeleke’s ascent. It’s only after hitting a creative ceiling in Afrobeats, following a string of underwhelming albums, that he began looking south to expand his sound.

Nationalists have tried to portray the “Lagos-to-the-West via Johannesburg” pipeline as some kind of foundational influence on West African Afrobeats. It’s true that Amapiano has left a lasting mark—some would even say it has become a vital organ of the West African sound. But Adeleke’s rise tells a different story: Afrobeats was already making headway in the West before Amapiano had even entered its infancy. In many ways, it is West African Afrobeats that has shaped the global reception of Amapiano, more than the other way around.

Scorpio Kings and Friends Live wasn’t Adeleke’s first major South African performance. He’d recently supported controversial US singer Chris Brown on the second leg of his South African tour in December last year. But Loftus was different. This time, Adeleke wasn’t a supporting act—he was central to the point the organizers were trying to make: Amapiano was now global enough to summon any star to its cause.

Part of the crisis besetting the genre since it began gaining traction in the West has been a lingering anxiety about its appeal and staying power. Can it command a following across the diaspora the way Afrobeats has? Can it stand on its own as an African sound with international authority? These questions haunt the genre’s rise. They also explain why Amapiano attracts nationalists so easily—people who have no qualms draping it in national colors, even as it stretches beyond South African borders.

That crisis is rooted in the genre’s cardinal ingredient: anarchy. Amapiano was born from the desire to rewrite the rules of South Africa’s exploitative music industry. And though it rarely offers a direct critique of the social conditions that shaped it, its stars have mastered the art of distilling the disappointments of democracy into sound. It’s the most disruptive cultural phenomenon since kwaito in the late 1990s. But as the genre goes global, growing calls for it to become more structured and professional have come to clash with the anarchic spirit at its core.

This contradiction shows up in everything from public frustration over artists missing shows or arriving late, to behind-the-scenes disarray around contracts and payments. The demand for coherence—reliability, branding, management—is in part a response to the polished success of Afrobeats. While Afrobeats stars sign lucrative deals with Western record labels and sell out stadiums abroad, Amapiano artists are still negotiating their way out of the genre’s domestic roots.

In that light, Adeleke’s appearance was more critical to the genre than many Amapiano fans might be willing to concede. His presence contradicted the creeping nationalism that now threatens to erode the genre’s anarchist ethos—and the progressive interior of its fan base. As Afrobeats has steadily claimed its place as the sound of the diaspora, Amapiano’s fans and pioneers have struggled to articulate a coherent critique of why it hasn’t matched that rise. Lacking clear answers, many have turned instead to populism and nationalism.

Nationalism may be useful as a geographical or archival marker—but it cannot explain Amapiano as a phenomenon, and it certainly can’t contain its cultural influence. What frustrates nationalists is Afrobeats’ indifference to the colonial boundaries they still hold dear. For them, the West African genre represents a dangerous idea: that immigration is an inevitable part of African life, not a crisis to be solved, but a flow to be embraced. The resentment about Afrobeats’ influence on Amapiano—and the attempts to rewrite the genre’s history through nationalist or regionalist frames—come from this discomfort. Amapiano refuses to tell the story that nationalists want to hear about post-apartheid South Africa.

They want the genre to reflect a socially coherent country, supported by a functional state. They want to plaster its success over the failures of neoliberal governance. But Amapiano insists otherwise. It is not the soundtrack of a triumphant nation—it is the exception that proves the rule. A byproduct of neglect and exploitation. A sound that exists despite the state, not because of it.

As Amapiano continues to leave its imprint on Afrobeats, nationalists have started treating it as an endangered national treasure—projecting the fantasies of the nation-state onto a genre. They see Afrobeats as a parasite threatening to absorb Amapiano whole. Because Afrobeats is more structurally advanced, they say, it will inevitably erase Amapiano’s local distinctiveness. But this isn’t a concern about artistic integrity or the exploitation of working-class musicians. It’s not even a critique of how neoliberalism commodifies and betrays cultural possibility. What nationalists fear is the loss of control over the genre’s narrative—especially if Amapiano is placed within a properly pan-African context.

And if it’s pan-Africanism they fear, then that future has already arrived—quietly, like a thief in the night. Amapiano is in the midst of an unambiguous pan-Africanist phase. Weekly collaborations between Afrobeats and Amapiano artists continue to defy nationalist arguments and deepen the genres’ mutual dependence. As I write this, Amapiano pioneer Themba Sekowe (DJ Maphorisa), Afrobeats icon Ayodeji Balogun (Wizkid), and Nigerian producer Michael Adeyinka (DJ Tunez) have just released “Money Constant” from the South Gidi EP—a collection of sounds that forcefully demonstrate the absurdity of trying to box a genre within the colonial fiction of the nation-state. On the track, South African and West African influences collide seamlessly.

Those who want to draw borders around Amapiano might accuse Sekowe and others of dragging the genre toward an abyss. But they would struggle to explain the 50,000-strong crowd at Loftus Stadium erupting as Adeleke, the living embodiment of the Afrobeats–Amapiano fusion, made his entrance. That moment may go down as the most important in the genre’s brief history. And the clearest evidence yet that Amapiano cannot be contained—by nation, region, or ideology.

Its significance had less to do with defying nationalism and more to do with what the genre makes possible. It was a celebration of what Afrophobic South Africans often vilify: Nigerian migrants carving out a life in Johannesburg. For nationalists, these migrants are not the promise of a society seeking justice beyond colonial borders. They are symptoms of a liberal state high on its own supply. They argue that South Africa, as the poster child of the post–Cold War liberal order, has paid a steep price for its commitment to human rights. But the irony is this: the very nation-state they claim is under threat is itself a product of that same liberal order they now despise.

The last time a Nigerian artist tried to sell out a South African stadium was in 2023, when Damini Ebunoluwa Ogulu (Burna Boy) was forced to cancel his scheduled FNB Stadium concert in Johannesburg. A lack of ticket sales and production issues were cited as reasons for the cancellation. But on social media, nationalists proudly claimed credit. They had actively campaigned for the concert to fail—as payback for Ogulu’s 2019 protest against Afrophobia in South Africa, where he went so far as to vow never to return until the issue was addressed.

It wasn’t naïve for Ogulu to think he could sell out a 90,000-seater stadium. More than any other Afrobeats artist, he’s enjoyed consistent success in South Africa. He was topping local charts long before Amapiano or even Afrobeats had become global mainstream genres. In 2015, it was impossible to go anywhere in South Africa without hearing “Soke” from his breakout album On a Spaceship. His popularity wasn’t an anomaly. Zimbabwean folk legend Oliver “Tuku” Mtukudzi had found similar success in the late 1990s and early 2000s, especially after the resurgence of his song “Neria,” the soundtrack to Godwin Mawuru’s 1991 film of the same name. But Ogulu miscalculated the extent to which nationalism now shapes South Africa’s cultural scene—and how unforgiving it can be when an artist refuses to play along.

Adeleke’s South African experience has been notably different. His unambiguous embrace of Amapiano has helped propel the genre’s westward march, turning him into one of its most visible champions. That embrace has made South African crowds more receptive to his music and presence. But if someone of Ogulu’s stature can be punished for speaking out against the treatment of immigrants, it would be dishonest to suggest that Adeleke’s silence—or, at best, his ambiguity—on the same issue doesn’t help endear him to South African audiences.

Some Nigerian fans see his silence as strategic. They interpret it as part of a subtle rivalry with Ogulu: that an Amapiano fan base hostile to Burna Boy ultimately benefits Davido. To them, Adeleke has compromised principles of solidarity in order to sell music and appease South African nationalists. His turn to Amapiano is not always viewed as a genuine creative move, but as a calculated reinvention. Having hit a ceiling in the saturated Western Afrobeats market—and watched his contemporaries like Ogulu eclipse him—Adeleke looked south. And in Amapiano, he found his salvation.

That salvation became Timeless, his fourth studio album—an overt pivot to Amapiano, anchored by collaborations with South African producer Musa Makamu (Musa Keys) and artist Lethabo Sebetso (Focalistic). If there’s a price for that embrace, it’s indifference—the indifference that comes when solidarity is seen as optional, not necessary.

But Afrobeats is not as vulnerable to nationalism as Amapiano is. The border is far less consequential to its identity. It’s a sound shaped by a different genealogy—where Amapiano emerges from a domestic class struggle, Afrobeats, like much of Nigeria’s cultural industry, is what filmmaker Biyi Bandele once called “the child of necessity.” Nigerian artists understand they are cultural beggars of a sort—products of a weak postcolonial state with limited support systems, making art in the belly of a hostile global empire.

South Africans have been slower to read the writing on the wall—that the curtains are slowly falling on Africa’s most industrialized economy. The attempt to draw borders around Amapiano is, in part, a refusal to confront that reality. Amapiano’s pioneers are the anarchist children of South African neoliberalism. Where Afrobeats artists see opportunity in structure, Amapiano artists see exploitation and the theft of creative freedom. As I’ve argued, nationalism might be useful as a branding tool in the genre’s pursuit of Western success—but it runs against the very spirit of Amapiano.

As Adeleke belted out the songs that made him beloved among Amapiano fans, I couldn’t shake the irony: here was a Nigerian artist commanding a sold-out South African crowd at a time of hyper-nationalism. And then there was the jacket.

On stage, Adeleke wore a custom piece by HollyAndroo—a US-based Liberian–Sierra Leonean designer—styled after the South African flag, with its five colors, and stitched with the words “Biko – Mandela” under the left breast. These are the names that immigrants in South Africa often invoke when confronted by violence: Nelson Mandela and Steve Biko, the two political figures most associated with Black solidarity and liberation.

It was a striking image. The contradictions of that moment were so glaring, I assumed it would make headlines. But Afrophobes like Gayton McKenzie—South Africa’s Minister of Arts, Sports, and Culture, who built his political profile by encouraging violence against “illegal immigrants”—said nothing. McKenzie had boasted online about the success of the concert and his ministry’s involvement. Yet he saw nothing strange, let alone subversive, in Adeleke’s performance. For nationalists, the presence of a Nigerian artist on South Africa’s biggest Amapiano stage was not a contradiction. It was confirmation. In their eyes, Adeleke was “kissing the ring.” He was proof that immigration should be measured not by solidarity or justice, but by utility: by how much labor the state can extract. The South African flag was stitched across his chest, but it was the state that ended up wearing him.