This year’s festival will close with an amazing performance from Makongo. They’re a musical project from Glasgow, an ensemble that blends hip-hop, afrobeats, jazz, punk funk and other influences. The group is made up of local and migrant musicians, spanning 7 different nations, who are united by the desire to create a meaningful sound.

During the Festival, Makongo will present a special concert with invited guests where they will perform songs from their debut album, Passport, with lyrics mixing Portuguese, English, Spanish, German, and Kimbundu. Confronting borders, identity and belonging, the album was released earlier this year and produced independently by the band in Glasgow. 

They are one of this year’s Arts Open awardees – an initiative which provides creatives from refugee backgrounds with funding and support to share their work with new audiences in Scotland.

We caught up with the frontman, Ngana, to hear what they have planned for the festival.

Why did you want to get involved with the festival? 

Taking part in the festival felt like the perfect partnership for both our album and our band. This festival is about togetherness, unity, and standing up for refugees, which is totally in line with our work. I couldn’t think of a better way to showcase our music. 

Your band blends so many different cultures, languages, and genres. What’s your process for creating this blend? 

We want everyone to have ownership and feel part of the project. It is a collaborative effort with a clear vision and guidance. My background is hip hop, and when you bring in this large band, the energy is much better. Sometimes have 10 people on stage bringing their own energy. 

Everyone is invited to add a little bit of their flavour, that’s what makes it so interesting.  It is not easy to get involved people from so many different backgrounds, but I wanted this project to talk about the migrant experience. You need to have diverse voices, and people from backgrounds that can bring different influences. We have people from South America, from Poland, Nigeria, Angola, Portugal, and we all add references, music and culture that add to this diverse project that is Makongo.  

How does migration shape your music and the band? 

I’m from Angola and I moved to Europe when I was 9 years old as a refugee. There was a civil war in my country, so we moved to Portugal. Even at 9 years old, I already had a lot of Angolan references, and I started to pick up all these Portuguese references, like musical references and cultural references. Then I moved to Germany after university for an internship and got exposed to even more musical references.  

Now here in Scotland, I’m bringing all of these together into this album, and so are the other band members. We’re not just bringing our different experiences and cultural references, but we’re also creating music that’s genre fluid.  

What kind of genres are you bringing together? 

There’s a lot of different genres in the album, there’s reggae, there’s spoken word, and some punk vibes too. When I came to Glasgow, I started to get into rock and more hardcore music because that was the music and the gigs that were around me, so that got added into the album too. Like I said, being a migrant gets you involved in this cultural intersection and it shapes you and your cultural output.  

Can you tell me a little bit more about the inspiration behind the album and the process of creating it? 

We were in a different band before called The Bojangles. It was already a big band, also multicultural, and it was a lot of fun. But we wanted to do something more meaningful, because The Bojangles was about having fun and doing funky things.  

We were seeing all these Reform UK, anti-migration, and pro-Trump things become more prominent. I was also at a stage in my life where it felt important to do something meaningful. We found that when you do something meaningful and authentic, you end up working better than if you just try to chase success. We decided to just focus and do something that could be truly authentic as a reflection of art, history, and could speak to how migrants and locals could coexist.  

Hip-hop is supposed to be the voice of the marginalised, to be political, rebellious, revolutionary, and poetically rich. We wanted the album to be that voice. In the album, I touch on decolonialism, scapegoatism, and tokenism, and how hard migrants need to work to send money home. These are important stories, and we’ve been lucky in being able to share them thanks to funding like Creative Scotland.  

What can people expect from your event? 

Good energy, fun, and a positive message. We believe in peace, love, unity, and togetherness, and we want to reinforce this message because people need to stand up against intolerance in our communities. 

We’re also hoping to show some new things. We’re going to play some new songs from our next project, Visa. Since it’s an addendum to our album Passport, Visa felt like a fitting name. It’s going to be a great, positive night.  

Join us at The Rum Shack to wave farewell to the Festival with a special concert by Glasgow’s Southside music collective Makongo and invited guests. Find out more.

Refugee Festival Scotland 2026 is made possible with support from the National Lottery through Creative Scotland.