Tyla told the VMAs she is amapiano, not Afrobeats, and the global charts still disagree

Tyla used the biggest platform African pop has and told it that it had the wrong name for her music.

Accepting the best Afrobeats award at the 2024 MTV VMAs, the South African singer began by celebrating the global reach of her hit single Water, saying it proved African music could be pop music. Then she turned on the category itself. There is a tendency to group all African music as Afrobeats, she said. African music is so diverse. I come from South Africa, I represent amapiano.

Months later she won the Afrobeats category again, this time at the American Music Awards.

That exchange is the spine of a piece published by The Guardian on 6 October 2026, which argues that the term Afrobeats has been applied so broadly that it now flattens African pop, dance, rap, R&B, gospel and highlife into a single marketing box. The Guardian reports that the label emerged in the early 2010s as an umbrella for contemporary dance music from west Africa, spread through European cities, and was popularised by the London-based DJ Abrantee, who added an “s” to Fela Kuti’s Afrobeat to give radio and a growing streaming market a catch-all name.

When the UK Official Charts Company introduced a chart for African pop in 2020, it was named Afrobeats.

The Guardian’s reporting is accurate on the mechanics of how the term travelled, and its central complaint is not a small one. Tyla is not the only artist to push back. Tems has described her music as a mix of Afro, R&B, soul and alternative elements. Burna Boy prefers Afrofusion. Wizkid, Ckay, King Promise and Davido have all objected to the label at various points, and it has persisted anyway.

What a South African reader brings to that argument is the clearest available test case, because amapiano did not need the west to name it.

The genre emerged in South Africa around the same time the Guardian says Mr Eazi’s banku music was taking hold in west Africa. Banku music, the piece records, had the characteristics of a genre in its own right, a laid-back tempo and a distinctive four-stroke kick-drum pattern, and it drew artists such as Runtown and Tekno to adopt its sound. It was not marketed to the west or contextualised locally as a distinct form, and it faded. Amapiano took the other road. It was named here, danced here, and built a domestic audience, a DJ circuit and a production culture before it travelled.

By the time Water was winning international awards, amapiano was already a South African export with its own vocabulary, its own dance moves and its own stars, not a subcategory of somebody else’s genre. That is why Tyla’s correction was not a quibble about billing. It was a statement about ownership.

The Guardian also reports that the Afrobeats category was dropped from this year’s MTV VMAs, but not because the term was limiting. There is now no African music category at all. That is the practical consequence a South African artist feels: not a better label, but an empty slot.

The piece quotes the Nigerian producer and singer Bloody Civilian, who tours with Tyla in October, calling the label deeply limiting and saying she finds it confusing that westerners continue to box the numerous ways Africans experiment with sound. Culture journalist Tiléwa Kazeem argues that Afrobeats has not just obscured other genres but affected their documentation, and that international publications often treat emerging styles as esoteric. Culture writer Dennis Ade Peter points to what he calls a paradox: artists and stakeholders rail against the term while still marketing their music as Afrobeats and validating awards and events that describe it that way. Dolapo Amusat, founder of the Nigerian music and creative network WeTalkSound, says a sound needs enough documentation, enough lore and enough intentionality around it to take hold the way grunge or hyperpop did in the west.

Those are arguments South African musicians and labels will recognise, because the same tension runs through this market. An artist can be booked internationally under a west African genre name, paid on the strength of it, and still be asked on stage to explain that the sound is not that. The incentive cuts against correcting the record.

The Guardian’s conclusion is that the responsibility sits with those marketing African music in the west, with artists, and with the African music and media industries. On the South African side of that ledger, amapiano is the evidence that the second path works. A genre that was documented, named and built at home did not need an imported umbrella to reach the world.

The question the Guardian raises and does not settle is what happens to the next one. Afro adura and mara are named in the piece as emerging styles. Whether they get the amapiano treatment or the banku music treatment will be decided by who documents them, and where.

Source: The Guardian, The west has a blinkered view of African music, and it’s hurting the whole continent’s culture