Ms Gideon Opens Up: Namibia’s First Sony Music Africa Signing Tells Her Story
When Panduleni Gideon, known to her growing audience as Ms Gideon, describes the day she was signed to Sony Music Africa, she reaches not for polish but for plain honesty. “I’m so stuck in my head, I can’t explain it,” she told The Southern African Times’s Nyasha Matanda, in an interview conducted at Sony Music Studios in London, recalling a call that arrived on an otherwise ordinary day and reordered the trajectory of her career within hours.
The signing, confirmed in January 2026 through a partnership between Sony Music Africa and ERA Music Group, made the twenty-year-old Windhoek-born singer the first Namibian artist to join Sony’s global roster, and the first Namibian woman to secure a major recording contract of any kind. It is a milestone she is careful not to treat lightly. “It’s such a huge responsibility, taking into account that I’m the first Namibian artist to be signed like ever,” she said. “I don’t take it for granted.”
Her route to that studio call was neither sudden nor accidental. Ms Gideon began performing in school choirs and posting cover songs online before winning the Next Narrative Africa talent competition in 2024, a victory that earned her a performance at New York’s Apollo Theatre alongside Adekunle Gold and Patoranking. Her breakout single, Home, went on to become the fastest Namibian song to reach a million views on YouTube, a marker that first signalled to the wider region that something distinctive was emerging from Windhoek. Under her new deal, she released her debut single as a Sony Music Africa artist, Tiki Tak Tak, on 27 February 2026, with a follow-up, All My Love, featuring the artist Notesie, arriving this southern hemisphere winter.
Asked to describe her sound, she resists easy categorisation, noting that even her own brother struggles to place it within an existing genre. She has taken to calling it, with some amusement, “the Giddys”, after her own name, a half-joke that nonetheless captures something true about an artist who moves comfortably between soul, Afrobeats and hip-hop without settling into any single lane. That refusal to be boxed in echoes a broader theme in her public remarks elsewhere, where she has spoken of Namibian artists needing to work harder to be taken seriously by major labels precisely because assumptions are made about the kind of music the country can produce.
The pressure of being first, she acknowledges, has shifted her relationship with her own craft. Music that began as an outlet for passion now carries the weight of expectation, since, as she has put it in previous interviews, everyone now assumes anything she releases from this point forward ought to be flawless. Yet she remains unwilling to let that pressure dictate who she is. Her advice to young people across the region chasing their own breakthroughs was delivered without hesitation: never forget who you are, how you started or why you are where you are, because there is nobody else quite like you.
There is also a quieter thread running through the interview, one that speaks to a wider continental moment rather than to Ms Gideon alone. She is representing a country that, as she noted with evident pride, is led by a female head of state, and she frames her own ascent within that same register of women moving into spaces long closed to them. Her label mates within Sony Music Africa’s expanding roster, spanning artists from Kenya, South Africa and beyond, suggest a continental music industry increasingly willing to invest directly in African talent rather than treating the continent as a market to be serviced from elsewhere. For a publication committed to centring African agency in African stories, Ms Gideon’s trajectory, from a school choir in Windhoek to a Sony Music contract negotiated on her own continent’s terms, is as much a story about institutional change in African music as it is about one young woman’s rise.
Interview conducted by Nyasha Matanda for The Southern African Times
