New Music: Switch by Nazizi, Boity and Lioness shows off girl power

What you need to know:

  • Nazizi started rapping in 1998, making her the only female rapper across East Africa and 20 years down the road she shows no sign of slowing down.

Dar es Salaam.Coke Studio Africa has released the music video of “Switch It Up”, performed and written by fast-rising Namibian femcee Lioness, South African media personality and rapper Boity and Kenya’s Nazizi.

The video carries through the theme of the season finale of Coke Studio Africa, which celebrates women in music, and place talented females behind the scenes and in front of the cameras and mics.

 It’s an all female original composition produced by Viola Karuri with the video directed by Thandi Lottering.

Over the years Nazizi had to balance another kind of challenge: “I was trying to think back to my day, and if I had anybody to inspire me as an African female rapper.”

Nazizi started rapping in 1998, making her the only female rapper across East Africa and 20 years down the road she shows no sign of slowing down.

Nazizi adds Swahili spice to her bars, Setswana flexing Boity is a South African cover girl celeb who had only been in the game for months when this song was recorded and Lioness is surely the only Doctor and MC known in hip hop.

 Lioness not only manages the balancing act, she flourishes, making serious waves that she was invited to be on Coke Studio Africa.

 She says, “We can do what we want, we can choose what we want to do.” For her this made the whole experience even more dreamlike, “I had to be in studio and in the hospital, it was really hard for me to balance a lot of my life.”

Though as Boity said of their banger, “This track is based around women and female empowerment,”

 Boity finds it fantastic that African artists now have the freedom to show off their skills regardless of their gender.

 “At the core we are doing this without having to be ‘female MC’s, we are just being rappers.”

 And every rapper wants to kill it says Nazizi, so “It’s very important to stop making that distinction, that she’s a female MC and he’s a male MC - we are rappers full stop."