Sampa The Great: The African Voice Of Australian Rap

This distinction allows for a spectrum of emotions from braggadocio, triumph, a tenderness for the familiar and a reckoning with displacement. That’s the thesis of Sampa The Great’s debut album, The Return.

Sampa Tembo, the 26-year-old rapper originally from Zambia, has taken her once conflicting identities and attempted to reconcile them. “It’s about spiritually going home to yourself, to the most you, you’ve ever been,” she says over the phone from Melbourne, her home since 2018, where the sun is beginning to shine after a characteristically cool winter.