On Sunday evening, Afrobeats megastar Burna Boy will fire up Glastonbury’s Pyramid Stage.
While he has played at the UK’s biggest festival before, this is his first time on the famous main stage, which has been Glastonbury’s focal point for decades.
Fellow Afrobeats star Ayra Starr also performed on the Pyramid Stage on Saturday, while Tems had a slot on the Other Stage.
From West Africa to the world stage, Afrobeats has risen rapidly to dominate playlists and radio.
On Spotify, the Afrobeats genre has grown by 1,200% since 2017.
But with its artists now performing at the very top of the UK’s biggest festival, it feels like another threshold has been crossed.
“It’s our time,” Starr told BBC News. “It’s been a long time coming and we deserve this.”
The genre has its roots in Nigeria and Ghana, and started rising rapidly in popularity in the 2010s, with early hits from artists like Fuse ODG and D’banj.
It is not to be confused with “Afrobeat” – minus the “s”. That is a movement created in the 1960s and 1970s by the artist and activist Fela Kuti.
Kuti’s musical style is a fusion of traditional African rhythms with funk, jazz and highlife.
Coincidentally, Kuti himself played at Glastonbury in 1984, and this year, his son Femi Kuti played on the Pyramid Stage.
But Afrobeats, with an “s”, is a completely different sound. It is generally seen as a fusion of traditional West African musical styles with Western pop, rap and dancehall.
“Afrobeat spoke to a much older audience,” said DJ Edu, who hosts BBC 1Xtra’s AfroSounds show.
“Afrobeats has been driven a lot by social media,” he said, adding that young people, travelling to different parts of the world, also helped spread the sound.
