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African ChillZone III

Forty-four tracks and a title that tells you the brief: this is the volume that moves. Deep house from Johannesburg, afrobeats from Lagos, and the beginnings of amapiano.

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African ChillZone III — Move!!!

The third volume is the most South African of the series, and that focus is what makes it valuable as a document. Assembled around 2020, it catches the exact moment when amapiano stopped being a Pretoria township sound and started travelling — and it puts that transition alongside the deep house and Afro-house scene that preceded it.

If you want to understand how South African dance music got to where it is, this is a better education than any single album.

What to listen for

Master KG's "Jerusalema" in the Burna Boy remix opens, and its global success in 2020 remains one of the strangest chart stories of the decade — a gospel-inflected house record in Zulu, spread by a dance video from Angola.

Sha Sha's "Tender Love" with DJ Maphorisa and Kabza De Small is the amapiano record that broke the genre internationally, and Sha Sha — Zimbabwean, working in Johannesburg — deserves far more credit for that than she receives.

Sun-El Musician appears twice, and "Ntaba ezikude" with Simmy is the most beautiful thing on the list.

DJ Kent's "Falling" appears in two mixes, which is a deliberate choice: it lets you hear how much a South African house producer's club mix differs from the radio version.

Drake's "Get It Together" is here because it is built on Black Coffee's "Superman" — the clearest single example of the traffic between Johannesburg and North American pop.

Mafikizolo's "Reunited" and Heavy-K's "Sweetie" are the older Afro-pop foundations, and Niniola's "Bana" is the Nigerian artist who most explicitly borrowed the South African template.

Ralf Gum and Monique Bingham's "Take Me to My Love" is the deep-house connoisseur's pick.

Go deeper

Sun-El Musician's Africa to the World and Black Coffee's Subconsciously are the two albums to own from this scene.

Then play this volume directly against the fourth in the series. III is a set of scenes sitting next to each other; IV is those scenes having merged. Eight months separate them.

Why it matters as a document: playlists rarely capture a transition this precisely. Assembled just as amapiano was breaking out of South Africa, this set still has the older Afro-house and Afro-pop sitting alongside it as equals rather than as ancestors, which is exactly how it sounded at the time and not at all how the story is usually told afterwards.

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