I have sung the song countless times. In 2010, and for many years after. What I was singing, I had no idea. Nor does it seem anyone else did. ‘Tsamina mina eh eh, Waka waka eh eh’—hundreds of millions across the globe memorized this single line, yet no one felt the urge to discover what it meant. Neither did I.
Once you learn the history behind the song, you can never listen to it the same way again.
In the Fang language, ‘Tsamina mina’ means Come. ‘Waka waka’ means Do it, get the job done. And ‘Zangaléwa’ means: Who called you? Who sent you here?
The answer is tucked inside the song itself: ‘Anawam’. Me. I sent myself.
That means those packed football stands, those hundreds of millions watching televisions, that entire summer month—what everyone was belting out at the top of their lungs was not a song of celebration at all. It was the challenge of a night sentry. A guard stationed at a midnight gate halting someone emerging from the shadows to demand: Who sent you? For an entire month, the whole planet sang the interrogative of a military checkpoint. And not a single soul paused to answer.
The song was born in 1986 in Cameroon, the year Maradona conquered the world. The band was called Golden Sounds. Its members were not professional recording artists; they were active-duty soldiers of Cameroon’s Presidential Guard. The President’s personal bodyguards. A handful of musicians emerging from the orchestra of the Republican Guard: Jean Paul Zé Bella, Dooh Belley, Luc Eyambe, and Emile Kojidie.
In other words, the very men whose profession was to interrogate ‘Who sent you?’ turned that question into a song. And they hurled the question squarely at their own uniforms.
The lyrics are the raw grievances of an ordinary recruit: wretched rations, pennies for pay, brutal drills. And that potbellied officer who munches on beignets while barking threats to shave your head and toss you into the brig. Beignets: those fried sweet dough pastries beloved across West and Central Africa, a culinary relic left behind by the French.
Yet the real satire lay not in the lyrics, but in the costumes.
In 1986, a music video was produced for ‘Zangaléwa’—just as music videos were beginning to sweep across Africa. In that video, the members of Golden Sounds stuffed pillows under their tunics to inflate absurd potbellies and bulging buttocks. On their heads: pith helmets. In their hands: swagger sticks. And half of each face painted chalk-white. The video was shot by keying the band against blue screens over authentic archival footage of Cameroonian military parades.
The pith helmet, the swagger stick, the white face paint: not a single one of these belonged to the Cameroon military itself.
The pith helmet was that rigid, pale sun-hat European colonial powers strapped onto their soldiers before dispatching them to ‘the tropics.’ The quintessential artifact of empire. The swagger stick was that short baton Napoleon considered indispensable, which nearly vanished after the First World War, lingering only in the grips of certain strutting generals.
And painting half the face white was the cruellest jest of all. It meant: this man is African, but only halfway. The other half belongs to the master whose rifle he carries.
In Yoruba mythology, there is a deity named Eshu: god of the crossroads, messenger, and an incorrigible trickster. The most famous fable about him tells of Eshu walking down the road between two lifelong friends wearing a hat that was white on one side and black on the other. From that day on, the two companions became bitter enemies, each swearing on his life that he had seen the true color.
Golden Sounds painted that very hat across their own faces.
Of course, donning the master’s garments to caricature the master was not their invention. In 1955, French anthropologist Jean Rouch directed the documentary Les Maîtres Fous (‘The Mad Masters’), documenting how the Hauka movement of Niger entered possession rituals to channel colonial administrators, mimicking their exaggerated strides, barking their imperious commands. And what sat upon their heads? Pith helmets.
Mimicking the master to the letter is one of Africa’s oldest strategies of resistance. For once you can parody someone with flawless precision, they cease to be your god.
Now let us speak of the melody, for an entire saga is nested there as well.
‘Zangaléwa’ is a Makossa tune. Makossa is the urban soundtrack of Douala, Cameroon, derived from a folk dance called kossa. The bassline is the engine—horns flaring above, an unrelenting four-on-the-floor pulse driving below. Music engineered purely for the dancefloor.
The most famous Makossa anthem on earth is ‘Soul Makossa’. Composed in 1972 by the Cameroonian saxophonist Manu Dibango, written specifically for that year’s Africa Cup of Nations. For a football tournament.
Cameroon crashed out of the tournament. The song endured.
Embedded in the track was an incantatory chant in the Douala tongue: ‘Mama-ko, mama-sa, mako-mako-ssa’. A New York DJ unearthed the 45 rpm vinyl in a West Indian record shop in Brooklyn, and from that groove, it swept the globe.
Then, in 1983, Michael Jackson lifted that very chant for ‘Wanna Be Startin’ Somethin” on his Thriller album. Dibango sued; an out-of-court settlement was reached. In 2007, Rihanna sought to sample the line for ‘Don’t Stop the Music’; she asked Jackson for permission. Jackson granted it. No one bothered to consult Dibango.
In February 2009, past the age of seventy-five, Manu Dibango stood before a Paris court for the second time, demanding the return of his ten stolen syllables. The court deemed his petition inadmissible.
Exactly one year later, in February 2010, another Cameroonian chorus was being tracked inside a Manhattan recording studio.
And here begins the most lyrical migration of the story: the song crossed an ocean.
In the 1980s, along the Caribbean coastline of Colombia, through the working-class barrios of Cartagena and Barranquilla, the streets were ruled by the picó—colossal, neon-painted, handcrafted sound systems. They blasted all night long, and their sonic diet consisted predominantly of African vinyl: soukous from the Congo, makossa from Cameroon, highlife from Nigeria, mbaqanga from South Africa. Languages of which the Colombian dancers didn’t understand a single syllable.
Rivalry among the picoteros was fierce: prestige belonged to whoever possessed the rarest, most exclusive wax. To protect their monopoly, DJs scraped the labels off the records with razor blades so competitors could never identify the title or artist. Then they christened the tracks with invented local titles.
In Colombia, ‘Zangaléwa’ became known simply as ‘El Militar’. No artist, no title, no country of origin. As though the song’s passport had been torn to shreds.
Soon, local musicians recorded their own cover: ‘El Negro No Puede’ (‘The Black Man Cannot’). A song about an insomniac Black man. In the music video, there were no soldiers. No pith helmets. Merely women dancing in lingerie. An anti-colonial satire had mutated in a matter of years into an innocuous tropical party track. Nobody even noticed.
In Akan folklore from West Africa, there lives Anansi the spider, the owner of all stories on earth. Trapped aboard slave ships, Anansi crossed the Atlantic too; in the Caribbean, his name shifted to Aunt Nancy or Anansi. Deities survive by shedding their names. Songs do the same.
Shakira was born in Barranquilla. In that very city where the picós roar. Whether she heard the song as a child, no one can say for sure. She later told reporters that the opening melody struck her while strolling across a farm in Uruguay. Where the chorus came from, she didn’t mention that day.
The sacred emblem of the Akan people is the Sankofa: a mythical bird flying forward while craning its neck completely backward to retrieve an egg from its own spine. It symbolizes: It is no shame to return and fetch that which was left behind.
Twenty-four years later, this song returned to Africa. It returned through the vocal cords of a Colombian woman of Lebanese ancestry whose Arabic name signifies ‘grateful’. Accompanied by the South African Afro-fusion band Freshlyground singing in isiXhosa—who had been recruited purely by chance while recording their own album in the same New York studio building.
South Africa was not entirely thrilled. A coalition of roughly five hundred local artists called for a boycott of Shakira’s performance. Why, they demanded, should a foreigner front the anthem of Africa’s first World Cup?
Why was the song co-opted with such effortless fluidity? That answer too is embedded in the musical anatomy itself.
‘Zangaléwa’ is not a conventional song. It is a call-and-response. In the original version, a soloist chants a line, and the ensemble roars back: ‘Éwo’. One call, many voices. This musical architecture is known as a marching cadence. It is the exact method every army on earth uses to synchronize the boots of its infantry.
And a cadence obeys an entirely distinct law of nature. A cadence is not designed for contemplation; it is designed for marching. That ‘eh eh’ is not a lyric—it is an empty pocket of time where a combat boot strikes the dirt. That is why the song can be sung entirely devoid of meaning. That is why hundreds of millions of people could belt out a question in Fang for a whole month without ever comprehending it.
A stadium, after all, is merely an infantry formation. Eighty thousand spectators cannot be taught complex melody on the fly, but they can answer a call. If a cadence can align the boots of recruits in a barracks, why wouldn’t it unite eighty thousand throats in the stands?
This song was not composed for the World Cup; yet twenty-four years before the tournament arrived, it was already waiting for it.
Zolani Mahola, lead singer of Freshlyground, captured this exact nuance in an interview. The song, she noted, was fundamentally a challenge—like the taunt of a marching band, an assertive statement of defiance. She was perhaps the only person involved in the entire project who truly understood what the song was. And she said it in an interview virtually no one read.
What I will say now about the 2010 arrangement is purely my own reading. It may resonate, or it may not. In the original recording, the rhythm belonged to heavy boots slamming into the earth. In John Hill’s polished pop production, those boots were transformed into celebratory handclaps. The buoyant sway of soca, the bright brass stabs, and floating above it all, the microtonal arabesques of Shakira’s vocal runs. The martial discipline remains nestled in the groove, but it no longer weighs upon your feet. Three minutes and twenty-two seconds spanning four languages: Fang, isiXhosa, Spanish, and English. Journeying from Cameroon through Colombia to South Africa.
While everyone squabbled over the artist’s passport, the profound subversion unfolded silently inside the lyrics.
The original song was a private’s lament. The grunt’s protest. Bad grub, nonexistent wages, an officer who is a beast.
And the 2010 anthem opens with this line: You’re a good soldier. Then: You’re on the front line. When you fall get up, oh oh, and if you fall get up, eh eh…
The very song that once interrogated ‘Who sent you?’ returned by rendering the question completely superfluous. The question remained, but cloaked in Fang, which nobody understood. And in English—the lingua franca of global commerce—there remained only marching orders.
From grievance to command. From lamentation to a marching order.
This is where I see the song from an entirely different vantage point. And my suspicion is that neither Shakira nor her producer John Hill ever conceived of it this way.
In 2010, FIFA descended upon Africa. Stadiums were erected, informal settlements cleared, fortunes poured in, and fortunes flowed right back out. And throughout that entire spectacle, across every arena, every television set, every car speaker, the same question was thundering. One of the most frequently sung interrogatives in human history:
Who sent you?
The question was right there in the living room. In the right place, at the right moment, in the right cadence, upon the right continent. Only, no one recognized it as a question anymore. Because by then, it had been rebranded as the soundtrack of football delirium.
And the song had already provided the answer: Anawam. Me. I invited myself.
Zé Bella didn’t even know his song was echoing across the grandest stage on earth until an acquaintance called him from France with the news. Eventually, an agreement was reached, and Golden Sounds were credited as songwriters. Complaints regarding royalties and compensation lingered, and to this day the arithmetic remains murky. Many have written about that. My fascination lies elsewhere.
I wonder how a jest manages to survive.
If resistance is beautiful enough, it eventually becomes a song. And if a song is beautiful enough, it eventually sheds its own meaning. That is the price of survival. Whatever rises to the lips of the multitude ceases to have anything personal left to say.
‘Zangaléwa’ losing its meaning was no accident. The song was engineered from day one to operate without requiring understanding. For a song that synchronizes footsteps requires no comprehension. That is its supreme strength; that is its curse.
Four bodyguards sat in a barracks in Cameroon poking fun at their own uniforms. That joke will outlive them all. Three hundred years from now, some child will hum the melody under their breath. Only that child will have no idea that they are reciting an official letter of complaint.
Nowadays, I listen to the song for an entirely different reason. When the chorus arrives, I pause. And I ask myself:
Who sent me here?
The answer is tucked inside the song itself:
Anawam.
