How the ‘Zed Beats’ music movement give Zambians back their voice

Zed Beats is a music movement that evolved in the late 1980s when young producers started using computers to blend western music with local languages and flavour. Today it’s an umbrella term for popular urban music in Zambia.

Musician and academic Mathew Tembo is a Zed Beats specialist. His PhD is on its history, production and musical labour from 1986 to 2024. We asked him to tell us about the music and how it shapes the country.

What is Zed Beats?

Zed Beats takes its name from the “Z” in “Zambia”. It’s a blend of indigenous musical elements with influences drawn from R&B, reggae, rap, Jamaican dancehall, hip-hop, Afrobeats, amapiano and other urban music genres trending at the time of its production.

The music, sung mostly in Zambian languages Chinyanja and Chibemba, along with some English, is produced on digital audio workstations by self-taught producers in home studios. The use of local languages makes Zed Beats resonate with young people, whose everyday conversations are carried out in these languages.

What forces created the ‘new’ music?

During the late 1980s and 1990s, Zambia’s live music scene was devastated by the HIV/Aids epidemic, which claimed the lives of a generation of top musicians working in genres like Kalindula and Zamrock. The collapse left Zambian...

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