Stiff Pap

Stiff Pap is a South African electronic music duo fusing Kwaito, Gqom and Hip Hop to create their own unique sound. The duo consists of Zulu songwriter-vocalist Ayema Probllem and Red Bull Music Academy alumnus Jakinda. With Ayema’s enticing raps and Jakinda’s avant-garde production, Stiff Pap is at the forefront of African electronic music innovation - mixing a progressive global electronic sound with localised African lyrics and rhythms.

With just over two years in the music industry, Stiff Pap has performed at some of south Africa’s major music festivals, including Oppikoppi, Afropunk [Johannesburg], Red Bull Music Festival and Capsule Festival. Following a string of memorable live performances and two well-received EP’s Stiff Pap have established a growing global audience, which has enabled some milestones to be reached: opening for international artists such as Slowthai and Vince Staples as well as headlining Boiler Room Johannesburg alongside Sho Madjozi and Busiswa in 2019.
Supported by their growing following, Stiff Pap has established their own events brand under the name “Ebumnandini” which has become a platform for unearthing underground talent around South Africa. The platform is used to create opportunity for unity and collaboration within the growing alternative music scene. In 2020 Ebumnandini became one of the first recipients of the Ballantines x Boiler Room True Music Fund, in support and recognition of the role they’ve played in shaping South African club culture. This not only places the musical mavericks at the forefront of South Africa’s growing alternative music scene, but as increasingly influential tastemakers for South African youth culture as a whole. With the world’s attention turning to the eclectic future sounds of South Africa it is only a matter of time until Stiff Pap begins two spread their aound worldwide.

The identity of Stiff Pap formed pre-musically, with the birth of two individuals on the precipice of a regime of terror and at the start of a period of complicated freedom. To come into the world so full of hope and freedom in their parents eyes and yet so tied down by the lingering prejudices of Apartheid is a kind of contradiction that formed a post-Apartheid black consciousness that has defined Stiff Pap long before its musical manifestation.

Jakinda grew up in Kensington, a middle-class suburb in Johannesburg, and Ayema grew up in Umlazi, a township in Durban. Fellow South-African alternative artist Okmalumkoolkat also originates from Umlazi, and played an important role in influencing and inspiring the foundations of what would become Stiff Pap. Townships in Durban were becoming hotspots of heightened musical expression, a kind of counteraction to the socio-economic suffocation of black communities in the post-Apartheid era, and they became the birthplace of much of South Africa's most interesting dance music such as Gqom.

Geographical distinctiveness did not prevent a similar experience, however, and both Jakinda and Ayema found themselves at the University of Cape Town in a move made to assume roles and achieve dreams their families had created for them. With being the first...