Keypoints:
- Tyla became a target for wider anger over xenophobia
- Africa’s deeper problem is failed leadership and weak integration
- Culture is crossing borders faster than African politics
TYLA has become difficult to ignore in African pop culture.
The South African singer, songwriter and dancer has emerged as one of the continent’s most recognisable young cultural figures, blending pop, R&B and amapiano into a sound that has travelled far beyond South Africa.
Her breakout single Water, released in 2023, became an international hit and inspired a viral social media dance challenge. It reached No. 7 on the Billboard Hot 100, making Tyla the first South African solo artist in decades to break into the chart’s top 10. In 2024, the song won the inaugural Grammy Award for Best African Music Performance.
She represents something African artists have increasingly achieved with remarkable success: taking sounds born on this continent and making them global.
So when Lagos was announced as a stop on her APOP World Tour, the occasion should have been another celebration of African music’s extraordinary international moment.
Instead, it became a controversy.
When celebration turned to anger
Almost immediately, calls emerged for Nigerians to boycott Tyla’s planned Lagos concert on December 22, 2026.
The anger was rooted in something very real: painful memories of xenophobic attacks and discrimination suffered by Nigerians and other African migrants in South Africa.
The argument from some critics was straightforward. Why should a South African superstar come to Nigeria, fill an arena with Nigerian fans, earn money from Nigerians and enjoy Nigerian hospitality while Nigerians living in South Africa continue to face hostility?
Content creator Solomon Buchi publicly called for a boycott, while activist Martins Otse, popularly known as VeryDarkMan, threatened to mobilise against the concert.
Others pushed back, arguing that Tyla could not reasonably be held responsible for xenophobic violence, South Africa’s immigration policies or the failures of its government.
By July 31, the Lagos date had disappeared from Tyla’s official tour itinerary. At the time, there was no clear public explanation from Tyla, her management or the promoter for its removal.
In one sense, those demanding that she should not perform in Lagos appeared to have won.
But did they?
That is the more difficult question.
Because the entire debate over Tyla’s Lagos concert was, in my view, a debate we should never have had.
Tyla was never the real problem
That does not mean xenophobia should be minimised.
Far from it.
The mistreatment of Nigerians or any other African migrants anywhere on this continent should concern us all. Xenophobia is ugly and irrational. When Africans turn against other Africans simply because colonial borders have taught us to regard one another as foreigners, something has gone terribly wrong.
But Tyla was never the problem.
Nor, in a deeper sense, are ordinary Nigerians who reacted emotionally to reports of their compatriots being mistreated abroad.
Both are caught inside something much bigger.
The real problem is the African system.
For decades, African governments inherited political and economic structures created under colonialism and, instead of fundamentally rebuilding them around the needs and aspirations of their people, too many leaders have simply learnt how to operate them.
Many of Africa’s modern borders were drawn by colonial powers with little regard for the peoples they divided.
Many colonial African economies were structured around extraction rather than regional integration.
Independence gave Africans flags, anthems and national governments, but in too many countries it failed to reconstruct the machinery underneath.
Then came decades of poor leadership, corruption, unemployment, inequality and economic exclusion.
Eventually, frustration searches for a face.
Too often, that face belongs to another African.
How victims are turned against victims
A struggling South African sees a Nigerian shopkeeper and imagines that the Nigerian has taken something that rightfully belongs to him.
A struggling Nigerian hears that Nigerians are being attacked in South Africa and begins to see ordinary South Africans as collectively responsible.
That is how victims of broken systems are persuaded to fight one another while those systems remain largely untouched.
None of this absolves those who attack migrants of personal or criminal responsibility. Structural failure may help explain xenophobia; it can never excuse it.
The unemployed South African who attacks another African migrant is not confronting the politician who failed to create jobs.
The Nigerian threatening Tyla is not confronting those who have failed to build an Africa in which Nigerians, South Africans and other Africans can travel, work and live with dignity and security.
Instead, victim confronts victim.
Poor confronts poor.
African confronts African.
And somewhere above the noise, those responsible for decades of dysfunction continue with business as usual.
That is why Tyla’s proposed Lagos concert should have been viewed differently.
Culture is crossing borders already
Music has always possessed a remarkable ability to go where politics struggles to reach.
Politicians require visas, protocols, bilateral agreements, delegations and carefully prepared communiqués.
Music simply crosses the border.
A Ghanaian does not ask to see Rema’s passport before dancing to Calm Down.
A South African does not conduct an immigration interview before listening to Burna Boy.
Nigerians dance to amapiano. South Africans dance to Afrobeats. Artists and producers collaborate across Johannesburg, Lagos, Accra, Nairobi and beyond.
Culture has already created an Africa that politics is still struggling to imagine.
That is part of what was lost when Tyla’s Lagos date disappeared.
Perhaps, for a brief moment, some Nigerians felt South Africa had been taught a lesson.
We showed them.
We stood our ground.
We made our anger heard.
But once the adrenaline subsides, we should ask: what exactly was achieved?
Did removing Tyla from the Lagos conversation end xenophobia?
Did it make one Nigerian migrant safer in Johannesburg?
Did it reform South Africa’s immigration system?
Did it create jobs for unemployed South Africans?
Did it force African governments to confront the conditions that produce migration, resentment and hostility across the continent?
No.
Imagine a different Lagos moment
Consider another possibility.
Imagine Tyla walking onto a Lagos stage before thousands of Nigerians.
Imagine a Nigerian artist joining her.
Imagine young South Africans and Nigerians watching online as amapiano and Afrobeats meet on the same stage.
Imagine Tyla saying something as simple as: ‘Africans should never hate Africans.’
Which image would have been more powerful?
An empty stage?
Or that moment?
Sometimes protests are necessary. Sometimes boycotts work. There are moments when withdrawing economic or cultural participation becomes an important moral weapon.
But we must always ask whether we have chosen the right target.
Tyla is a musician.
She does not command the South African police. She does not determine immigration policy. She does not run the South African economy. She did not create unemployment, inequality or xenophobia.
To turn her into the embodiment of everything Nigerians resent about South Africa is to personalise a structural problem.
That may provide the emotional satisfaction of taking action without bringing us any closer to solving the problem itself.
The harder African conversation
The more difficult conversation is not about whether Tyla should sing in Lagos.
It is about why Africans continue to treat fellow Africans as foreigners on their own continent.
Why should someone born in Nigeria feel more alien in Johannesburg than someone arriving from Europe?
Why do African leaders speak endlessly about continental integration while movement between African countries remains so difficult?
Why have we built an African Union without building an African consciousness strong enough to rise above the divisions inherited from colonial rule?
Why does Nigerian, South African, Ghanaian, Kenyan or Zimbabwean so often come before African?
Those are debates worth having.
Tyla’s concert was a sideshow.
And there is another tragedy in all this.
Africa is experiencing perhaps one of its greatest cultural moments in modern history.
Afrobeats, amapiano, African fashion, film, dance and visual art are travelling confidently around the world. Young Africans are achieving through culture what generations of politicians have struggled to achieve through conferences: they are making Africa feel connected.
Tyla represents that possibility.
So do Burna Boy, Tems, Wizkid, Davido, Ayra Starr and countless other African artists.
Whether they intended to or not, these musicians have become cultural ambassadors for a more borderless African imagination.
We should be building on that.
Amapiano should feel at home in Lagos just as Afrobeats should thrive in Johannesburg. Nollywood should be welcomed in Cape Town, and South African cinema should find enthusiastic audiences in Abuja.
It should be easier for our artists to connect across borders than for our resentments to cross them.
Anger must reach the right target
Fighting xenophobia with another form of xenophobia cannot be the answer.
Exclusion makes little sense when what we are demanding is acceptance.
We cannot condemn Africans for turning against one another and then answer that injustice by finding another African to reject.
The frustration felt by Nigerians is understandable. No one should be expected to remain indifferent when fellow citizens face discrimination or violence abroad.
Governments have a responsibility to protect their citizens.
South Africa also has a fundamental duty to protect everyone within its borders — citizens and migrants alike — from violence, abuse and discrimination.
But our anger must reach the right targets.
Tyla was not one of them.
Neither is the ordinary South African struggling to survive.
Nor is the Nigerian migrant trying to build a life in Johannesburg.
The deeper failure is leadership.
It is the failure to build economies that create sufficient opportunity to prevent migrants from becoming convenient scapegoats.
It is the failure to construct continental institutions capable of protecting Africans wherever they live.
And it is the failure to transform decades of Pan-African rhetoric into an everyday reality for ordinary people.
Africa could lose more than a concert
For now, Lagos has disappeared from Tyla’s tour schedule.
Her Nigerian fans face losing the opportunity to see her perform, while the city could lose an international cultural event.
More importantly, Africa risks losing another small opportunity to turn suspicion into familiarity and resentment into shared experience.
There is an irony here.
The very music Tyla intended to bring to Lagos comes from an African culture that refuses to respect national borders.
You cannot stop a rhythm at immigration.
Amapiano has crossed borders. Afrobeats has crossed borders. Our films, fashion, food and dreams have crossed them too.
Perhaps it is time our minds followed.
The Tyla concert should never have become the battleground.
The real struggle is far larger: poor leadership, poverty, unemployment, inequality and the artificial divisions that encourage Africans to distrust one another.
We thought we were taking a stand against xenophobia.
For a moment, however, we allowed xenophobia itself to influence who should be welcomed onto an African stage.
And in that fight, all of us risk losing.
