I love the new single by Zambia’s Zonefam. Following hard on the heels of their number one African single ‘Contolola’ which topped both the Afribiz charts as well as the Uganda singles chart, the new track is titled ‘Sinjonjo’ – it’s a dance and here’s a link to the track on YouTube. We wish the boys the best of luck with the single – with their excellent marketing back up it’s a sure fire hit in Africa, and you never know, maybe beyond. We hope so! Not often I have an African track on repeat in the car, but I’ve had this one for a few days now! Here’s about the band.

Leading Zambia’s hip-hop wave is one of the country’s top hip-hop group known as Zone Fam. In 2009 Zone Fam burst onto the African and Zambian music scene with their first mix tape which was produced by Nigerian Producer Teck-Zilla. Duncan Sodala, Manager of the group says they have released a handful of mix tapes with their hit album ‘The Business (Foreign Exchange)’ also available on iTunes receiving good support from the Zambian Hip Hop music circles. Zone Fam is made up of four young men named: Sam Sakala aka Dope G, Jackson Banda aka Jay Rox, Reginald Mogane aka Yung Verbal and Tim Chisenga aka Thugga. Zonefam derived their name from a studio they frequented in their earlier days ‘The Zone’.The group was formed in 2007.

On the group’s origins
Dope G: We all started out as individual artistes but later me and J-Rocks met in high school at a hip-hop battle and started doing our thing. But the person that really brought all of us together is Duncan our manager, he identified our different talents and just brought us together as solo artiste recording with a studio called Zone Studios and eventually when we did some songs together as a group and worked together on songs like Pop that body. We just decided to work as Zone Fam because we realised that we sounded good together.

On the group’s initial influence and challenges
Young Verbal:
At the start, it was just the love for music, because we were all doing the same thing although at the time hip hop was not getting much of the attention in Zambia, media-wise, just in general especially English raps. So that’s how we took it upon ourselves to change that because we wanted to be heard. We tried our best to get our music out there through mixtapes, CDs. So our focus from the beginning has been to put hip-hop on the international scene.