Champeta

Champeta is the Afro-Colombian music and dance culture of Cartagena and the Caribbean coast, created in the 1970s and 1980s when sailors brought Congolese soukous, highlife, mbaqanga and Afrobeat records to the city's Black working-class barrios, and local picó sound systems and singers turned them into a Spanish-language music of their own. Named for a machete-like knife of the poor, champeta layers bright African guitar figures over drum-machine and bass grooves, danced in the exaggerated perreo-adjacent style of el vacile. From criminalised barrio stigma it rose, through stars like *El Afinaito* and *Mr. Black*, to a national emblem of Afro-Colombian identity.