Vth Season And UMPG Honour AKA’s Legacy By Growing Pan-African Music Infrastructure
Vth Season And UMPG Honour AKA’s Legacy By Growing Pan-African Music Infrastructure. Vth Season teamed up with Universal Music Publishing Group South Africa to take part in this year’s “The South Speaks” songwriting camp in Midrand, a weeklong programme that brought roughly 50 songwriters together to write, produce and trade skills inside purpose-built studios.
The delegation that Vth Season helped assemble included emerging talents from Botswana, Zimbabwe and Ethiopia, and the sessions were designed to move songs from idea to finished production-ready tracks.
LONG LIVE AKA, LONG LIVE SUPA MEGA. Vth Season made the sentiment central to the camp’s spirit. The team created a dedicated Supa Mega Room to honour AKA’s vision for African hip hop and to actively preserve the culture he championed by giving young creators a visible, named space to test ideas and collaborate.
Inside that room, 16 young hip hop songwriters and producers worked in focused groups to push local styles and cross-continental flows. The Supa Mega Room was not a memorial only, it was a working studio where mentorship, experimentation and career-building happened in real time, with beats, hooks and finished stems emerging by the end of each session. These sessions reflect an emerging model of intentional legacy work, where remembrance becomes tangible infrastructure for the next generation.
Vth Season also brought three standout voices to the table: Moozy, who represents Botswana and is building momentum with singles and reels across social platforms; Nicole, a Zimbabwean singer-songwriter who has been active in the region’s scene and is sharpening her craft through cross-border collaborations; and Blén, an Ethiopian R&B and soul artist with a growing catalogue and industry profile. Each artist added region-specific rhythms and melodic ideas that expanded the camp’s sonic palette and helped producers think beyond familiar templates.
The camp’s design rested on four core pillars: create new music catalogues that artists can own, develop artists’ skills by working alongside Grammy-winning writers and producers, facilitate cross-continental musical collaboration, and explore fresh rhythms and sounds drawn from across Africa. These pillars were reflected in the programming, which included themed studios and industry workflows intended to prepare songs for global placement and commercial exploitation.
Vth Season framed this edition as a deliberate expansion of the Pan-African approach it began last year when the camp visited Rwanda. Returning talent was part of the continuity: Rwandan artist Boukuru, who participated in last year’s sessions, came back to collaborate again and track new material with producers from this year’s camp. That continuity is what organisers say turns one-off sessions into durable infrastructure.
Outcomes are already unfolding. A handful of writers and producers, including Jordan, Nicole and Blen, are taking stems and session files home to finish production, and the teams are preparing releases that grew directly from camp collaborations. For creatives, the value is immediate, because the songs come with clear ownership structures and connections into publishing and placement teams that can help with sync, licensing and distribution.
For the Vth Season, BENZA and UMPG South Africa, this camp was both a tribute and a blueprint. It honoured AKA by naming a space after his outlook, and it acted on his belief that African hip hop should be collaborative, ambitious and outward-looking. Keep an eye on the coming weeks for single drops and credits that list cross-border pairings born in Midrand, and for more evidence that Pan-African musical infrastructure grows fastest when exchange, skills transfer and fair ownership are built into the process from day one.
