The compilation is called A Dancefloor in Ndola because Ndola is where Kampire grew up: a town in Zambia a long way from the Nile festival that made her name. She was born in Kenya to Ugandan parents. Her father kept records. At seventeen she did not, by her own account, pick up on them. She does now; she collects them, and in 2024 she put thirteen of the songs she grew up around on a double album for Strut and wrote the liner notes herself.
That is the shape of the story. A DJ known for bass, for the hard, fast, new end of East African club music, whose own record is 1980s township bubblegum from South Africa, guitar-led Zambian kalindula, and Congolese rumba and soukous, with a deliberate weight on the women who sang it: Pembey Sheiro, Feza Shamamba, Princesse Mansia M'bila, V-Mash, Di Groovy Girls. "It is important for me to continually reference Africa's own musical history", she said when the record was announced. The sets below are where you hear her do it.
Nyege Nyege, from the start
Resident Advisor's note on her 2025 podcast calls her Kampala-based and a core Nyege Nyege member since the label's inception. Her RA biography fills in the climb: Mixmag's Top Ten Breakthrough DJs of 2018; a Rinse FM residency used to put East African artists on London radio, Hibotep, Faizal Mostrixx and Catu Diosis among them; mixes for Resident Advisor, Dekmantel and Fact, one of which Pitchfork and Fact put in their best-of-2019 lists; a 2019 that took her to four continents, European festivals and a US debut headlining a Nyege Nyege showcase at Red Bull Music Festival New York. The same biography calls her Boiler Room broadcast from the Nyege Nyege festival an internet moment; that film, from 2019, is further down. Start with the Mixmag hour below.
Kampire, The Mix 029
Mixmag, 2024, 65 min
Our Pulse note records that she frames the hour as the past and future of African dance music. It plays right here while you read.
Away from the decks she co-founded Salooni, an art installation on black hair as science, culture and art, which has travelled to festivals and residencies in Uganda, Ghana, Kenya, the UK, Rwanda, Burkina Faso and São Tomé and Príncipe. In November 2025 the Daily Monitor introduced her as one of East Africa's top DJs and said plainly where the reputation came from: sets at the Nyege Nyege Festival over the past decade, spanning African music from the 1970s and 1980s to now. She was on the festival's tenth-anniversary bill in 2025 and played Boiler Room x Ballantine's True Music in Johannesburg in May 2024, back to back with Coco Em.
The record
Kampire Presents: A Dancefloor in Ndola came out on Strut on 2 August 2024, thirteen tracks on double vinyl and digital, part of the label's twenty-fifth anniversary. The Quietus noted her own edit of Di Groovy Girls' Ririmi Rotsombela and V-Mash's Naughty Boy among the tracks. She told DJ Mag's Martin Guttridge-Hewitt that she loves "that feeling of shared nostalgia" when a crowd hears a song it knows, and that the older music "is part of what makes us ourselves". It is a crate-digger's record and a DJ's record at once: the songs are the ones she reaches for at the front of a set to tell a room where the new music came from.
“I love that feeling of shared nostalgia.”
Kampire, to DJ Mag, May 2024
Then there is the RA podcast, RA.995, published on 29 June 2025: a double-sided mix at nearly two hours, with DJ TOBZY's Lagos side first (the young mainland sound known as cruise, freebeat or mara beat, recorded in Brussels) and Kampire's side second. Play it after the Mixmag hour and you have the two speeds of the continent's club music in one sitting.
Amani to Africa Bass Culture (2017)
Kampire's own SoundCloud
The early one, from her own account. Bass first.
Where to hear her
The home ground is Nyege Nyege itself, 19 to 22 November 2026 at Kalagala Falls, which is this issue's Trip of the Month; the practical page has the routes from Entebbe, Kampala, Nairobi and Kigali and the box of what the festival has and has not published. Between festivals she tours, and the dates are on her Resident Advisor page. In Kampala the scene around her, Nyege Nyege Tapes, Hakuna Kulala, Boutiq Studio and the collectives that orbit them, is mapped on Pulse, with Don Zilla and Authentically Plastic as the two names to hear next.
Featured in this piece
The rooms and the people
Every place and artist in this piece has its own page in the atlas or on Pulse, with sources folded underneath.
FAQ
Questions people ask
Who is Kampire?
A DJ based in Kampala, Uganda, and a core member of the Nyege Nyege collective since its label began. Born in Kenya to Ugandan parents and raised in Ndola, Zambia, she was named in Mixmag's Top Ten Breakthrough DJs of 2018, holds a Rinse FM residency, and curated the 2024 Strut compilation Kampire Presents: A Dancefloor in Ndola.
Where can I hear Kampire's sets?
Three play on this page through the artists' own hosts: her Mixmag mix (The Mix 029, 2024), her Boiler Room set filmed at Nyege Nyege Festival in 2019, and her 2017 Amani to Africa Bass Culture mix on SoundCloud. Her RA podcast, RA.995 (June 2025), is on Resident Advisor.
What is A Dancefloor in Ndola?
A thirteen-track compilation Kampire curated for Strut Records, released on 2 August 2024, named after the Zambian town where she grew up. It gathers 1980s South African township bubblegum, Zambian kalindula and Congolese rumba and soukous, with an emphasis on women artists of the period, drawn from the records her father kept.
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Sources (9)
- Resident Advisor, Kampire biography
- Resident Advisor, RA.995: DJ TOBZY and Kampire, 29 Jun 2025
- DJ Mag, Martin Guttridge-Hewitt, Kampire curates East and Southern African music compilation, 16 May 2024
- The Quietus, Christian Eede, Kampire explores classic East and Southern African music on new compilation, 17 May 2024
- Kampire on Bandcamp, releases
- Daily Monitor, Bamuturaki Musinguzi, East Africa top DJ speaks out on bass-heavy music, 29 Nov 2025
- Sonic Paths Pulse, Kampire (sources folded on the page), 20 Oct 2026
- Boiler Room, Kampire at Nyege Nyege Festival 2019 (YouTube)
- Mixmag, The Mix 029: Kampire (SoundCloud)
Every fact in this piece comes from one of these, read on 20 October 2026.
