Akwaba: the AFCON 2023 official song and where to listen

On 13 January 2024, at the Stade Olympique Alassane Ouattara in Abidjan, Yemi Alade walked out with Magic System and Mohamed Ramadan to sing “Akwaba” at the opening ceremony of the Africa Cup of Nations. The Nigerian star had waited years for a night like that. “It's indeed an honor and a dream come true,” she wrote on X afterwards.

A welcome song for Côte d'Ivoire

The tournament is called AFCON 2023 even though it was played in early 2024, which is why people search for both years. Same song.

CAF presented Akwaba on 31 October 2023 as the official song of the 34th edition, a project piloted by Universal Music Africa with the producer Dany Synthé. The title comes from Baoulé, one of the main languages of Côte d'Ivoire, and means welcome. Fitting. Wikipedia lists French, English and Arabic in the lyrics, which matches the line-up: an Ivorian group, a Nigerian singer and an Egyptian rapper.

Magic System were the obvious hosts. The group formed in Abidjan in 1996 and broke through with “Premier Gaou”, a 1999 track that a Bob Sinclar remix later carried to France. Football already knew them too.

Their song “Magic in the Air” was widely played around the 2014 and 2018 World Cups, according to Wikipedia. In 2018 it became an anthem of the France national team. Their frontman, A'Salfo, is a UNESCO Goodwill Ambassador. He also founded an urban music festival in Anoumabo, the Abidjan district the group comes from. For a home tournament, they were the natural choice.

The songwriting credits on Wikipedia list the three acts and Fargyle Blax. The track runs three minutes and 43 seconds.

The official video, directed by Tony Rodriguez, went up on YouTube on 1 December 2023, according to Wikipedia.

Yemi Alade's place in it

For Nigerian listeners, Yemi Alade was the reason to care. Her voice was already familiar across the continent, and she performed the song live at the opening ceremony in Abidjan.

She told her followers she had wanted to sing at a football ceremony in a stadium since 2016, and Abidjan finally gave her that stage, in a ground built to hold 60,000 people on the opening night of a home tournament. Eight years of waiting. Worth it.

Then came the football. Nigeria went all the way to the final and met the hosts at the same stadium on 11 February 2024. William Troost-Ekong put the Super Eagles in front. Franck Kessié and Sébastien Haller then turned it round, and Côte d'Ivoire won 2-1. The song that had opened the tournament with a Nigerian voice ended it as the soundtrack to an Ivorian party.

Hard to take.

Where to listen to Akwaba legally

This page used to offer an MP3 download of the song, a file uploaded to our own servers in December 2023, and we have taken it down because we do not host music that is not ours to share. CAF said at the launch that Akwaba was available on all streaming platforms, and the official video sits on the artists' and label's channels.

If you want it on your phone, use a streaming service or buy it from an official store. It costs little, and the artists get paid. Simple.

We do not reproduce the lyrics either.

One more point on searches. People still type “AFCON 2024 song” and “Ivory Coast AFCON song”, and both point to Akwaba. The next edition, AFCON 2025 in Morocco, had its own official music, which our guide covers separately.

Our view

Tournament songs live or die by the stadium rather than the studio, and Akwaba had what many of them lack: a home crowd that already knew the band, three acts from three corners of Africa and a Nigerian voice right in the middle of it. It may not have the global reach of the World Cup anthems, but it did its job. Our guide to every AFCON official song covers the editions we could verify. The story of Austino Milado's Super Eagles songs shows how Nigerian fans make their own soundtrack.

This article was most recently revised and updated 33 seconds ago