6 Ugandan Musicians the Scene Relies On More Than It Admits

In 2012, two Ugandan musicians released the same song. Same title: Sikyakaaba. Same lyrics. One was Juliana Kanyomozi, one of Uganda’s biggest names. The other was the person who had written the song in the first place, a musician and songwriter named Nince Henry. A dispute over who owned the work, who had the right to release it, and what happens when a songwriter and a superstar fall out midway through a collaboration. Both put out the track. The confusion it caused told you something specific about how the scene is built: big names on the posters, other names doing the structural work underneath.

Uganda’s music conversation defaults to the artists with the biggest YouTube views and the most consistent mainstream radio presence. That is a reasonable way to read a music industry. But it leaves out a layer of people who have spent years building documented careers in specific directions: the songwriter who pens other people’s hits, the gospel voice who has shared stages with international headliners, the label owner who decided early on that his work would belong to him, the world music artist whose continental credentials don’t make it onto local entertainment pages. The six musicians below have all done something specific and verifiable in Uganda’s music landscape. Most of them don’t get the headline they’ve earned.

#6. Laika Umuhoza: Afro-Zouk From a Town Nobody in Kampala Talks About

Laika Umuhoza grew up in Munyonyo, a suburb of Kampala, but she was born in Kanungu District in Western Uganda. Her musical genre sits at the intersection of afro-zouk, afro-pop, and afro-RnB. That combination is worth pausing on: zouk is a Caribbean-influenced style that takes patience to absorb and an unusual set of production sensibilities to get right. The artists she has named as her formative inspirations are Alicia Keys, Lauryn Hill, and Beyoncé, alongside Ugandan artists including Lilian Mbabazi. That particular lineage, running from American soul and contemporary RnB into Ugandan pop, explains the sound she has built.

In a market where Afrobeats and dancehall dominate playlists, choosing to anchor your sound in afro-zouk means accepting that you are working in a lane that requires education as much as promotion. Zouk asks more from listeners than a dancehall riddim does. Laika makes that ask with the name of her home region carried alongside it: a Western Ugandan artist, from Kanungu District, working in a genre that connects Caribbean popular music to continental African pop through RnB vocal training. That specific combination does not exist anywhere else in Uganda’s current music conversation.

#5. Irene Ntale: RnB, Reggae, and Acoustic Soul Played Live

Most Ugandan musicians who record RnB do it as one lane among several. Irene Ntale is something more specific: a Ugandan singer, songwriter, and guitarist who sings RnB, reggae, and acoustic soul. The guitarist credential matters here. It means her musical identity is not built entirely on production choices made in a studio by someone else. She comes to her material as a player as well as a vocalist, which changes the relationship between the artist and the sound.

In Uganda’s entertainment landscape, where the default performing setup for most pop acts involves playback tracks and a microphone, an artist who plays their own instrument live occupies a different position. The acoustic soul and reggae influences she works with are not the dominant currencies in Uganda’s mainstream market. They require a specific kind of audience patience, and they reward that patience with a different emotional register than the harder beats that dominate the clubs and radio. Ntale has built her career at that specific intersection, consistently, without pivoting to whatever sound is dominating the chart in a given year. That kind of consistency has its own value even when it does not translate to the largest streaming numbers.

#4. Brian Lubega: The Gospel Voice Who’s Shared a Stage With Don Moen

There is a specific measure of distance in Christian music between local acclaim and international standing. Brian Lubega is a Ugandan gospel singer, songwriter, and pastor. He is known primarily for songs that are sung in Ugandan church services, which is where most gospel music in Uganda lives: in the Sunday-morning rotation of congregations rather than in the entertainment media cycle. What separates his career from many of his peers in that space is a documented external track record.

Lubega has won awards at the Royal Gospel Music Awards and the Groove Awards, two of the more recognised award platforms in African gospel music. He has also shared a stage with Don Moen. Don Moen is not a regional figure. He is one of the most widely performed gospel composers in the world, whose worship recordings have been used in churches across every continent, and whose live appearances draw audiences who have been singing his songs for decades. For a Ugandan gospel artist to appear on the same stage as Moen is a specific, verifiable credential that the local entertainment press has not given particular attention. The Royal Gospel Awards and Groove Awards wins add another data layer. Lubega’s career profile sits well above what the coverage of Ugandan gospel music usually acknowledges.

#3. David Lutalo: The Artist Who Built His Own Label Before He Had a Hit

The standard trajectory in Ugandan music runs through a label. An artist records with an established producer, signs an agreement, and builds a career inside someone else’s infrastructure until the hits are big enough to negotiate different terms. David Lutalo took a different route. He rose to fame with his hit Kapapaala in 2008, which he released under his own Record Label, Da Hares. That was his debut. He started recording music in 2008 and launched his label at the same time.

Building a record label while launching a first single is a decision that requires a specific kind of confidence in your own work. It means taking on the financial and administrative weight of running an enterprise at the same moment you are trying to establish yourself as a performer. Lutalo managed both. Kapapaala succeeded; Da Hares became his infrastructure.

The collaborations that followed put him in rooms with some of Uganda’s most established acts. He has recorded alongside Eddy Kenzo, Bebe Cool, and Goodlyfe Crew, and has collaborated with Solid Star, a Nigerian artist. That Nigerian credit extends his documented reach beyond Uganda’s borders. Most Ugandan musicians who achieve cross-border collaborations do so after years of major-label backing. Lutalo did it as the founder of his own enterprise, which he built himself from one song in 2008.

#2. Suzan Kerunen: Uganda’s World Music Ambassador on Africa’s Biggest Stages

The Kora All African Music Awards are held in Benin and recognise the best in African music across genres and countries. The artists who appear there, as nominees or performers, are drawn from the continent’s most active music markets. Suzan Kerunen is a Ugandan world music singer and songwriter who has competed at that level. She is a double Kora Award nominee, having gone up against Ethiopia’s Michaih Behaylu, Astar and Bluz, and Kenya’s Wahu in the same competition. She has also won a PAM Award, a recognition for African contemporary music.

The stages Kerunen has appeared on tell their own story. She has shared platforms with Yvonne Chaka Chaka, one of South Africa’s most enduring musical figures. She has appeared at the same venues as Mama Africa, Miriam Makeba, whose career spanned five decades of global recognition before her death in 2008. She has performed alongside Oliver Mutukudzi of Zimbabwe, Third World from Jamaica, and other diaspora artists at the KORA All African Music Awards. These are not regional conference stages. They are the platforms where continental African music has defined itself for international audiences.

Kerunen performs in the Alur-Jonam language, one of Uganda’s indigenous tongues, as well as in English and Swahili. She has been appointed Uganda’s National Tourism Ambassador to promote Cultural Tourism, a recognition that sits outside the entertainment industry entirely. Her career has been built at the intersection of indigenous language, world music production values, and the kind of continental presence that most Ugandan artists never reach. None of that is reflected in the amount of attention she receives in Uganda’s mainstream entertainment coverage.

#1. Nince Henry: The Man Writing Uganda’s Biggest Hits for Other People

In 2010, a Ugandan musician began a run that, by the time the data was settled, would see him acknowledged as Uganda’s number one songwriter. That is not an informal label. It is the description attached to Ninsiima “Nince” Henry in his documented career history, and it is specific: he rose to prominence in Uganda’s music industry after writing successful songs for musicians including Bebe Cool, Juliana Kanyomozi, Iryn Namubiru, and Bobi Wine. Read those names again: four of the most recognisable names in Ugandan popular music across a 25-year span. One songwriter contributed to all of them.

The Sikyakaaba incident, which opened this article, illustrates precisely how complicated that position can become. When Nince Henry wrote a song for Juliana Kanyomozi in 2012, something went wrong in the collaboration process. Both parties ended up releasing a song with the same title, the same lyrics, and no shared agreement on who had the right to do so. Both tracks reached audiences. The dispute made audible something the music industry usually keeps invisible: the songwriter’s role in the material that gets performed under a bigger name.

Henry is not only a writer for others. He has recorded his own singles, including Cinderella, Mali yangu, and Mpola Mpola, which formed the centrepiece of his first solo concert, the Mpola Mpola Concert, staged in 2013. He balances making music for other artists and making music for himself simultaneously, which means he operates in two modes of the industry at once. Most Ugandan acts who write for others do it before they break through as performers, or after their own careers have stalled. Henry has run both tracks in parallel, for over a decade, as the acknowledged number one in his craft. The artists on the posters get the credit. His name belongs in a different kind of conversation.

For more Ugandan musical figures who’ve built careers on specific, sustained work, the musicians who turned their art into institutions examine a related but different set of careers. The acts who were already stars before streaming changed the conversation look at how Uganda’s current music landscape grew out of an earlier era. And the eight Ugandan women who defined the country’s sound carry a related argument about range and recognition. More across every field at the Wolokoso hub.