How Ghana Taught the World to Dance: Azonto, Alkayida, and the Export of Ghanaian Movement

Before the global conversation about Afrobeats dance culture settled on Afrobeats, Amapiano, and the specific Nigerian and South African movements that now dominate international attention, Ghana had already sent a dance around the world.

In 2012, the Azonto made it to the London Underground, to Trafalgar Square, to PE classes in British secondary schools, and to clubs in Amsterdam and Paris. Prince William did a version of it. The amateur YouTube response videos generated more than 40 million collective views. Ghana had exported a dance to a global audience before the infrastructure for doing that at scale was fully in place.

It was not the last time.

The Azonto

Azonto is a Ghanaian social dance that emerged in Accra in the early 2010s, drawing on earlier dance traditions while developing a specific set of movements: footwork, mime-like body gestures that narrate everyday actions, and an improvisational quality that rewarded both individual expression and group participation.

The dance spread nationally in Ghana first, attached to the wave of hiplife and afropop music coming out of Accra. It became global when Fuse ODG’s “Antenna” provided an international delivery mechanism. The music video used Azonto choreography.

British audiences encountered the dance through the video and through the live performances that followed the song’s chart success. The dance challenge format that would later become a standard feature of social media music marketing did not exist in its current form in 2012, but the response behavior of audiences making their own Azonto videos on YouTube prefigured it.

Ghana’s Azonto was doing what TikTok dance challenges now do systematically, a decade before TikTok existed.

Fuse ODG’s Role

Nana Richard Abiona is the single person most responsible for the Azonto’s international reach. His decision to build his UK music career around Ghanaian dance culture rather than around the sounds that British Afrobeats was gravitating toward at the time was specific and deliberate. “Antenna” was not a generic afropop record. It was a dance record built around a Ghanaian movement that he brought into the UK singles chart and kept there.

His follow-up, “Dangerous Love” (number three in the UK in 2014), extended his UK mainstream credibility but did not rely on the Azonto as specifically. By that point he had done what he needed to do: established Ghana’s dance culture as a visible presence in British pop without it being filtered through Nigerian or South African intermediaries.

The Alkayida

Alkayida followed the Azonto. It emerged from Ghana’s hip-hop and afropop scene as a more technically demanding dance, with complex footwork, side-to-side movement patterns, and a freestyling emphasis that made it harder to learn and slower to spread than the Azonto had been.

Kwamz and Flava’s “Go Mad” became the song most associated with the Alkayida internationally, and The Fader covered the dance in 2015 as a cultural export worth attention. The Alkayida did not reach the same global penetration as the Azonto, partly because the technical requirements made casual participation harder and partly because the social media infrastructure for amplifying dance challenges was still developing in 2013 and 2014.

But it mattered. Ghana had produced two successive dance exports that reached international audiences within a few years of each other. That is not an accident. It reflects a dance culture in Ghana with the depth and creativity to keep generating movements worth exporting.

Why Ghana Produces Exportable Dance

Ghanaian dance culture has specific characteristics that make it exportable in ways that more insular traditions are not. It is improvisational and social rather than formally choreographed, which means it invites participation rather than spectatorship. It incorporates mime and narrative gesture, which makes the movements legible to people who do not share the cultural context. And it has enough variety within the tradition that new forms keep emerging rather than a single form calcifying.

The Kpanlogo, the Adowa, the Fontomfrom, and the other formal Ghanaian dance traditions have their own specific contexts and audiences. What the Azonto and Alkayida did was take the improvisational social energy of those traditions and find contemporary popular music as their context. The international export was a natural outcome of that combination.

What Came After

The global Afrobeats dance conversation of the 2020s is largely Nigerian and South African in its surface vocabulary: the Zanku, the Shaku Shaku, the Amapiano-adjacent moves that went viral across TikTok between 2020 and 2024. Ghana’s contribution to that period is smaller in terms of specific viral dance moments than its 2012 moment was.

But the infrastructure that Fuse ODG helped build, the relationship between Ghanaian music and British audiences, the awareness that Ghanaian dance culture exists and has something to offer, is part of the reason the current moment is possible. Ghana taught the world to do the Azonto. The world has not entirely forgotten the lesson.