About Arbetarorkestern

Arbetarorkestern is a collective world-music ensemble based in Stockholm. The name — Arbetarorkestern, “the workers’ orchestra” — carries the weight of the Swedish prog and working-class ballad tradition, but the music reaches far beyond any single country: West African grooves, southern African choral traditions, Ugandan songs of exile, roots reggae, Latin American nueva trova, and Swedish folk song all share the stage.

The band centers on the singer Sathima and weaves together material from Malian desert blues, Namibian and South African call-and-response, Angolan semba, and Swedish poets such as Cornelis Vreeswijk and Mikael Wiehe. What holds it together is a shared spirit: acoustic, earthy, emotionally direct, and politically awake.

We’ve played at the Museum of Ethnography in Stockholm (a memorial concert for the Namibian musician Tauna Niingungo, September 2025) and are booked for Tidafestivalen in June 2026. We rehearse at Stora Musikhuset in Skarpnäck.

Languages in the repertoire

Swedish, English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Wolof, Bambara, Swahili, Zulu, Oshiwambo, Shona, Twi, Duala.

Themes

• Exile and longing
• Solidarity and labor
• Earth, nature, slow time
• Spiritual searching
• Freedom and resistance
• The collective voice