Live raid

The 2010 Fifa World Cup official anthem “Waka Waka” was meant to raise a fortune for African charities, but no money has been forthcoming since 2014. Josimar can tell where some of the missing millions have gone.

By Philippe Auclair

“Waka Waka (This Time For Africa)” is unique among “official World Cup anthems”, which are generally forgotten as soon as they’ve been played at closing ceremonies. It was a huge, bona fide global hit for its main performer, Colombian “Queen of Latin Music” Shakira, who had teamed up with American producer John Hill and South African multi-racial band Freshlyground for the occasion. “Waka Waka” went platinum in the USA, diamond in France, Brazil, Germany and Sweden, and topped the charts in another eleven countries worldwide, including Italy and Spain, where it remained numero uno for over fifteen weeks. Its video has clocked over 4.3 billion views – and counting – on YouTube. With close to one billion streams, it is Shakira’s fifth-most popular song on Spotify. 

It was all for a good cause. A joint statement published by Fifa and Sony Music on 26 April 2010 announced  that “All proceeds (our italics) from the song [would] benefit FIFA’s Official Campaign of the 2010 FIFA World Cup “20 Centers for 2010″, which “[aim] to achieve positive social change through football by building twenty Football for Hope centres for public health, education and football across Africa, and other African charities”. 

Shakira shared her delight at being picked by Fifa in those terms: “through “20 Centers for 2010” and 1GOAL, FIFA and its partners have committed to creating a lasting legacy of education for all – an issue that has been close to my heart for many years”. Then-president Sepp Blatter was just as delighted. “This song is the personification of the African rhythm and identity and sets the pace for this unique event”, he said. “I am looking forward to hearing the song throughout the tournament and watching it performed by Shakira and Freshlyground at the Final”.

Thanks to the huge sales of “Waka Waka”, those centres were built in the space of four years. Then…

The money vanished.

“Waka Waka” was still streamed, viewed, and downloaded by tens of millions of people, but the revenue that those streams, views and downloads generated disappeared without a trace. Nobody seems to be prepared to say where the royalties have gone and are still going, or what they’ve been used for over the last decade. Members of Freshlyground, who had recorded – free of charge – part of the song’s backing track for Shakira in New York put the question to Sony Music and Fifa. When neither responded, they turned to the South African business publication Currency to attract the public’s attention to the mystery. “Where did the “Waka Waka” millions go?”, the online magazine asked. They too couldn’t find out. Fifa and Sony Music acknowledged their questions, but did not respond. Neither did they respond to Josimar, but Josimar has found out where at least a significant portion of the money has gone. 

It wasn’t to charity.

The stolen chorus

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Screenshot from Shakira’s video of “Waka Waka”, 2010.

“[Waka Waka] came to me in the most unexpected way”, Shakira told the media at a press conference organised in Johannesburg on 12 July 2010, the day after she’d performed the song at the World Cup closing ceremony. “I was taking a few days off with my family in Uruguay. I walked from the barn to the house, and on that walk – boom! – it came to me. I got the music, and I got the lyrics for the entire first verse and first three chorus (sic). I ran to the house, “I got it, I got it! I know this is it!”. I recorded with just the guitar and voice, and that’s how I realised the song was strong”.

What Shakira did not mention then was that the chorus which had popped in her head as if by magic was lifted, note for note, from Cameroonian band Zangalewa’s makossa 1986 classic cut Zamina Mina. Zamina Mina had been championed by local DJs in Shakira’s native Colombia and was covered – most of the time without credit – by multiple Latin bands and artists in from the late 1980s, such as Dominican merengue band Las Chicas del Can, who quoted the tune in one their biggest hits, El Negro No Puede

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Zangalewa performing “Zamina mina”, a.k.a. “Waka Waka”, 1986.

According to the leader of Zangalewa (“Golden Voices” or “Golden Sounds”), gendarme Jean-Paul Zé-Bella, who died two years ago, the song that made them famous throughout Africa (*) was based on a military march he and his three bandmates had learnt while serving for Cameroon’s presidential guard. The video Cameroonian state TV channel CRTV did of Zé-Bella’s arrangement of the tune, mixing footage from martial parades with the band’s goofy dancing, went viral in all of Western Africa. 

This explains why, nearly a quarter of a century later, the release of Shakira’s “Waka Waka” was met with outrage in French-speaking Africa, where everybody knew how the famous chorus went: “Zamina mina éé waka waka éh éh zamina mina zangalewa a nawa ah ah!” All Shakira had done was to replace a nawa ah ah with “this time for Africa“, but Zangalewa was not acknowledged in the credits. According to Sony Music, Shakira herself had “written and co-produced” (with John Hill) “Waka Waka”. Zangalewa’s manager Didier Edo’s efforts to come to some kind of understanding with Shakira and her publisher and Fifa associate Sony Music were fruitless to start with; but the media pressure built up to such an extent, including in France, that an agreement was found in May 2010, when it looked like Shakira’s appropriation of Zangalewa’s music could lead to court action before the World Cup had even started. It would be a major embarrassment for Fifa if the non-African artist they’d picked for the anthem to the first World Cup held in Africa was exposed as a musical magpie who’d “borrowed” a genuine African song from genuine African musicians.

The terms of the agreement were kept confidential at the time. The Zangawela band members and their manager held a press conference in Douala, at which they were at pains to explain that they bore no resentment towards Shakira, who had only “re-adapted”, not stolen, their song. Reports circulated in Cameroon that Zé-Bella’s band had been offered a settlement of 400,000 dollars, which would count as an advance against future publishing revenue generated by “Waka Waka”. Josimar can reveal that Zangalewa were awarded 33.33 percent of the song’s publishing income, to be shared equally between Zé-Bella and his bandmates Eugene Victor Doo Belley and Emile Kojidie, now living in the USA, and who was apparently the first person to realise what had happened. A small share (4 percent) was allocated to the seven musicians of Freshlyground, equating to an individual stake of 0.57 percent. Producer John Hill would be entitled to 23.33 percent of the money. The lion’s share – 39.34 percent – would go to Shakira.

But wait a minute, weren’t “all proceeds” supposed to go to African charities?

A twist in the tale
Josimar has spoken to two members of Freshlyground, bassist Josh Hawke and flautist, saxophonist and keyboard player Simon Attwell, who is also the newly-reformed band’s manager. In the spring of 2010, the band had already released three successful albums in South Africa, the second of which, Nomvula, had been a big success at home, thanks to one of its songs, Doo Be Doo, being put on heavy rotation on South African radio stations. They’d gone to New York to put the finishing touches to their fourth album, Radio Africa, booking some time with French producer Fabrice Dupont, who’d mixed Jennifer Lopez’s album Brave in 2008. John Hill happened to be working in the basement of the same East Village studio. Having heard that South African musicians were in the building too, Hill went to visit them, said he liked what he heard, and told the band that he was pitching for the 2010 World Cup song with Shakira. “Do you guys want to play on it?”, he asked. With Shakira? For charity? You bet! Attwell remembers how the band was presented with a Memorandum of Understanding which laid out some of the conditions of their collaboration with Shakira, which was supposed to lead to a proper contract. That contract never materialised.

What Hill hadn’t told Freshlyground was that Fifa had made it obligatory for acts pitching for the 2010 WC anthem to either be African themselves or collaborate with African musicians. Freshlyground were a gift from Heaven for the “alternative” American producer. They were just a couple of floors away in the same New York studio. They were young, hip, talented. They were African. Hill sent two of his assistants upstairs, who plugged hard drives into the desk. Freshlyground started jamming on top of the track, focusing on the bridge section, some of which ended in the final mix. Hill didn’t turn up at the session. As to Shakira, Freshlyground only saw her when the time came to perform “Waka Waka” on the day of the World Cup final. She first wanted to shake Freshlyground off the gig and perform backed by her own musicians – until the organisers of the tournament insisted that the African musicians who had been playing on the record should be involved in the show; which they were in the end.

Where did the money go?
The members of Freshlyground Josimar spoke to insist that they have no particular axe to grind with either Hill or Shakira. Maybe it could have been different, but it was what it was. What intrigues them – what they want to know – is what happened to the rest of the money. They didn’t have a say about which charities it went to: they were told it was to be “charities picked by Shakira”. Fine. Then they found out it was Fifa’s “20 Centers for 2010″. They didn’t mind that either; what they minded, and still do mind, was that, post 2014, nothing has been accounted for, be it by Sony Music or by Fifa, despite their repeated requests for some transparency.

Contrary to what the Sony-Fifa statement from April 2010 claimed, not “all proceeds” of “Waka Waka” went to charitable causes. Having spoken to industry sources, Josimar estimates that, unknown to the general public, a significant share of the income generated  by the song ended up in the pockets of Shakira and her producer John Hill.

Recordings generate income for artists in two ways. On one hand, the “master rights” reward the performers of the song (the artists or band contracted to the record company) by giving them a percentage of the recommended retail price price, which rarely exceeds 15 percent. On the other, the “publishing rights” go to the individuals registered as writers of the composition and their publishers.

The catch is that “master rights” are only paid out after recording and sometimes promotional expenses are deducted from the gross revenue. In the case of “Waka Waka”, those costs would also have included the money spent on shooting the video of the song in Los Angeles (*). “Publishing rights” are paid from the first sale onwards to the writers of the work in question, lyricist(s), composer(s) and sometimes arranger(s), regardless of how much the recording might have cost to produce. Owning part of the publishing rights is the only surefire way musicians can expect to be paid for their work on recordings from day one, which is why managers of famous acts, such as Elvis Presley’s “Colonel” Tom Parker, insisted they should be given a share of the publishing when a songwriter pitched a song to them, a practice which is still commonplace in the industry in 2025.

Unlike Bob Geldof and Midge Ure, who gave away all of their rights to Band Aid’s Do They Know It’s Christmas in 1984, Josimar understands that John Hill and Shakira held on to their publishing rights and earned money from the moment the very first copy of their “charity record” was sold. Both made millions from “Waka Waka”, a song remembered for a chorus that neither of them had a hand in writing, appropriated from African musicians and which they could only pitch to Fifa after securing the collaboration of an African band who were brought in to tick a box and then more or less ignored.

Most of the “master rights” generated by “Waka Waka” would have been collected and distributed shortly after the song became a worldwide hit, as income from physical sales and downloads will have declined within a year of the release date or so; but performance and streaming rights have kept on accruing up to this day. How much exactly? Currency suggests 9 million dollars in their article. Only Fifa and Sony Music, which collects all of the revenue, know whether this figure is correct or not. One thing is certain. Shakira still performs “Waka Waka” on her tours. Every time she sings it, more dollars end up in her bank account, as every time the song is featured in a playlist or a compilation. The”African charities” are but a distant memory. They don’t matter anymore. Did they ever?

Josimar contacted the management teams of Shakira and John Hill, as well as Sony Music and Fifa. This article will be updated if and when they respond. Josimar is still trying to contact the surviving members of Zangalewa.

(*) the LP it was featured in was also voted “African album of the year” in Kenya.

(*) This video was choreographed by Hi-Hat and shot by Marcus Raboy. It is during that shoot that Shakira met her future partner and father of two of her children Gérard Piqué.

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