África Negra

For the past 40 years, África Negra has undoubtedly been the main ambassador of music from São Tomé & Príncipe. The band is beloved for their own inimitable soukous style and well known in Portuguese-speaking countries and their diaspora. This style is a mixture of the heavenly, sultry São Tomé rumba or soukous with blissful shoots of highlife. So on 8 March, they will definitely make it a party at GROUNDS!

Africa Negra still partially uses their old instruments and vintage guitar effect processors, so their distinctive original sound from the 1980s is still going strong. The band went through many line-up changes throughout the past decades, leaving Leonidio Barros, the groundbreaking guitarist who helped in defining the band’s sound, the only original band member since the 70s. But also with this new line up, the band still sounds as fresh and festive as 50 years ago.

In 2019, they released a new album called Alia Cu Omali, their first in over 20 years, which comprises a series of old classics that were never properly recorded, just “materialized” in live concerts in the 80’s, and were now recorded in studio between Lisbon and São Tomé. In April 2022, a compilation called Antologia Vol. 1 was released by the Swiss label Bongo Joe Records that highlights twelve of the band’s key tracks, followed by the second volume in August 2024.