Stogie T: ‘It’s all broken’

Listening to Stogie T’s aNomy, one never knows how to feel. Are we celebrating, mourning or numbing? Most times, it feels like all three, folded into a single verse. 

A line about a two-toned Rolex could be setting you up for a poignant apartheid metaphor. He raps “Victory is ours” on Sankara’s Grief, “but stray bullets kill brave men and miss cowards”. 

This stream of plot twists is delivered with his usual sharpness and a relatable weariness. 

“SA is in flux,” Stogie T says. “It’s almost like a Rubik’s Cube. Like, red. No, blue…” With lines like “Begin with a prayer, end with a toast” on Grande Vita and “What’s a diamond in Lingala? / Brussels sprouts and pink salmon / Cut your arms, call it stigmata” on Leopold II, pain and pleasure coil around each other. 

Stogie T isn’t one to resolve the contradiction; he forces the listener to sit inside it. A familiar feeling in that listening to aNomy feels like the experience of living in South Africa, where time seems to be pressed into one pressure cooker. Traces of every regime linger in plain sight, so normalised that no one questions why everyone working in the fancy Melrose Arch restaurant where he and I speak is black. And, you know, without even seeing them, who’s in charge. 

None of this is random. It was engineered and remains in place. In a country that is constantly fighting battles from a conflict that’s centuries old, everyone tries to hold on to whatever hope their hearts harbour. In such a climate, aNomy is a cynical body of work, and when I share that assessment after a week of listening, he nods. “Last number cynical,” he says. “Like… it’s all broken. I was cynical on [my last album] Shallow, but this is last number.”

aNomy

Nowhere does this cynicism gather more force than on the title track which features Thandiswa Mazwai and Maglera Doe Boy. “It’s heavy,” he says. “Mazwai is like, ‘take me to a place where there is living, where there’s lights, because out here, fam’…” Thandiswa’s hook sounds like a collective plea. As if the nation is confessing its tiredness through her voice. 

Musically, it’s the kind of moment that resonates more with people who remember a different musical era. As we chat, however, two weeks before the album drops, SA hip-hop Twitter is making bets on the album’s closing song, Four Horsemen, a generational collaboration featuring Maggz, A-Reece and Nasty C that will break streaming records, pulling in the biggest first-day streams for any South African hip-hop song on Spotify, according to the chart-update X account @2022AFRICA. aNomy will become Stogie T’s biggest first-day debut. 

But, sitting here before the storm, we are both surprised the King Tha feature isn’t garnering as much anticipatory hype. For me, it’s typical, unreasonable 1K music snobbery. Perhaps it’s the same thing for him, but it’s also personal. This is a collaboration Stogie T has tried to secure for years. 

“I had to send a heartfelt VN,” he says, “like, my sister, ‘I might not ask you again, but this is what it would mean for me’.” He pauses a little. “It means so much. It represents a thing I’ve always wanted to say with my work.”

He frames it as lineage. “I just wanted to make a good record with her, to say I belong in a lineage of people who have written about this part of the world. I feel like Maglera Doe Boy does that in his own super hood, super gutter way. And how beautiful to have Mazwai soften and punctuate that.”

aNomy is the kind of song you only find on a Stogie T project — effortless Pan-African texture, 808s thwacking beneath layered choral samples, and a sensibility that never panders. An educated ear can pick up the signature of Canadian producer Fred Herschy, who is one of the few producers Stogie T has retained since the 2000s. Years ago, Stogie T said Herschy was one of the few producers who had an equal understanding of both hip-hop and vintage African sonics. But his biggest secret is the ability to blend it while keeping it hip-hop. 

Since 2006’s Music From My Good Eye, Stogie T has been a curator with unusual instincts. His albums have always brought unlikely worlds together. aNomy stands comfortably in that lineage in an album that features FLVME and Malian singer Fatoumata Diawara. “It ticks a lot of boxes,” he says of the title song. “There’s the passing-the-torch thing, the Pan-African thing, the lyrical thing…”

His verse pulls us into a house broken by addiction: “Grandmama stove finally broke / the irony shows / the last standing thing in her home my cousin ain’t smoke.” Then Maglera Doe Boy answers with an echo from another angle: “Grandma stove, inner parts from the chicken in bowls / the mad black man, the township was never my home.” 

Stogie T shares the memory of the session where he witnessed MDB do his voice switches, stitching together what is one of the best verses of his career. “His recording process is crazy, he recorded that verse for three hours.” The result is a dialogue across two generations, each inheriting a different side of the same wound.

If the title track is the emotional heart, Leopold II is its historical anchor. Stogie T excavates one of the darkest chapters in African and European history: the Congo Free State (1885–1908), a kingdom “drenched in rubber, blood and empire.” The first verse reconstructs that world with chilling precision. A king who never set foot in the Congo pulling strings “like a banjo”, half the population dying under rubber quotas, edicts issued like scripture, mutilations treated as paperwork.

Stogie T draws a deliberate parallel between the “drone pilot [who] don’t know violence / from his own silo” and the European monarch who ordered atrocities from a distant chateau. Both enact violence through detachment. Both kill without proximity. Modern warfare mirrors colonial rule. Different machinery, same distance.

The second verse widens the lens. Empire doesn’t end when the king dies, it mutates. After Leopold’s regime collapsed in 1908, formal Belgian colonial rule (1908–1960) simply inherited the machinery. “You get Mobutu,” he says — Mobutu Sese Seko’s dictatorship (1965–1997) emerging from the same borders, foreign interests and extractive contracts that Leopold put in place.

“The hills have eyes” because surveillance replaces shackles, while diamond pipelines become information pipelines. He concludes the song with the line “Can’t treat a wound with the knife still lodged?” The thesis is unmistakable. Leopold’s case files are still open, he reminds us. “The past is neither dead nor settled,” he says.

In four minutes, Stogie T turns luxury into indictment, history into present tense, and Congo into a mirror reflecting a world where extraction simply updates its tools, never its appetite.

A moment captured

The album, he says, is a meditation on “moral drift”, the collapse of shared values, the corrosion of meaning beneath endless performance. He writes in the album’s liner notes: “Some songs are the old me fighting the new me; some are lament; some are rebuke.” You hear that tension everywhere. This is a man whose outlook captures the nation’s. “We laugh and we tease each other, we MacG our way through,” he says, “but we are going through heavy shit.”

“[South Africa] is marred in contradiction,” he continues, “and, as I said, it’s in flux, but the only thing I can offer people is the thing that gives me hope.” And here he pivots. Not to politics or philosophy, but to God. Not the philosophical God of his youth, but the one he now speaks about with certainty, the God who loved the world enough to send His son, born of the Virgin Mary, crucified for our sins, risen on the third day.

A life spent scrutinising systems, passing through Islam, having a stint with rationalism, and shaped by the struggle against apartheid, has brought him here. These mini-transitions make it clear why the music never stays in one place. The man behind it hasn’t either. Sometimes the evolution is slow, as with aNomy, it’s so fast the album becomes a snapshot of a version of him already disappearing. “I’m not as cynical,” he says. Why? The God who so loved the world.

Which brings us to the song I heard once but will never get to stream, and, out of respect, can never quote. What I can say is that it sounded like two rappers aligned spiritually, a stark contrast to the sharp braggadocio of their long collaborations: Victory Lap Remix, Dat’s Wassup, StarSigns. If there’s a song that reflects where Stogie T currently is, it’s the one that didn’t make the album. The track features a reflective verse from the late AKA.

The song was meant to complete a long creative history between the two rappers. Stogie T appeared on three of AKA’s albums (Altar Ego, Levels, Touch My Blood). 

AKA appeared on Stogie T’s Return of the King and Stogie T. But this time, the family wasn’t ready for the release, a boundary that needs no debate. And, to Stogie T, it means something else. “That’s typified my journey so far,” he says. “Things like that, God saying to me, ‘No, this song is not the crowning glory of your relationship, I am. The fact that both of you said ‘Jesus is king’ before you passed. Forget your classic album. Forget your moment…’”

If aNomy is a document of fracture, it is also a document of faith, rebuilding slowly and honestly in the rubble of a broken world.

aNomy is out now.