What exactly is AfroGospel?

It sounds like a straightforward question until you actually try to answer it.

Is it gospel music with an Afrobeats beat?

Is it any Christian song made by an African artist?

If a traditional Yoruba gospel song has African drums, is it AfroGospel?

What about a gospel song with amapiano production?

And if an artist sings about God over an Afrobeats instrumental, does that automatically make the song AfroGospel?

The short answer is that things get a little complicated when you try to define exactly what Afrogospel means as a genre.

Let’s start With Afrobeat

Before we get to AfroGospel, we need to understand where some of the terminology comes from.

Afrobeat and Afrobeats are not the same thing.

Afrobeat refers to the musical style pioneered by Fela Kuti in Nigeria in the 1960s, drawing from West African music, jazz, funk, and other influences. Afrobeats, with an “s”, is a much broader contemporary umbrella that developed largely through Nigerian, Ghanaian and diaspora popular music from the 2000s onwards.

Afrobeats itself is difficult to pin down to one exact sound because it has absorbed influences from highlife, hip-hop, R&B, dancehall, fuji, juju, and other African and global styles.

Now let’s add ‘gospel’ into the conversation.

AfroGospel generally refers to contemporary Christian music that combines gospel themes with African rhythms and modern African popular music.

That can include Afrobeats, but it does not have to sound exactly like whatever happens to be dominating the Afrobeats charts at the moment.

The genre can borrow from Afropop, amapiano, highlife, hip-hop, R&B and other sounds while keeping its Christian message at the center. Music references commonly describe AfroGospel as sitting at the intersection of African rhythmic traditions, contemporary production and gospel songwriting.

So is every African gospel song afrogospel?

African gospel existed long before the word afrogospel became popular.

There are Yoruba gospel songs, Igbo gospel songs, South African gospel songs, Ghanaian gospel songs, and countless other forms of African Christian music that developed within their own cultural and church traditions.

The term AfroGospel is generally used more specifically for the contemporary movement that combines Christian expression with modern African popular sounds and aesthetics.

That means a traditional Yoruba worship song and a Greatman Takit record can both be African gospel without necessarily sounding like the same genre.

So, What Makes a Song Afrogospel?

There probably is not one checklist that every artist, listener or music journalist will agree on.

But if we had to explain it simply, we would look at three things: the Christian message, the African musical or cultural influence, and the contemporary approach to making and presenting the music.

The genre is still developing. Artists are experimenting with new sounds every year, and listeners are discovering new ways to describe what they hear.