Uncle Waffles Joins Nine In God We Trust Tour Dates

Asake, whose In God We Trust tour hands nine North American arena dates to amapiano.

There is a version of the African music export story where each scene travels alone: Afrobeats to one arena, amapiano to another, both playing to audiences that overlap without ever quite meeting. Asake’s current run is the argument against that version.

The In God We Trust tour is a thirteen-date trek behind his fourth album, and nine of those dates carry Uncle Waffles as support. That is not a token slot on a couple of shows. It is most of the North American leg, in rooms the size of Barclays Center and the Toyota Center, handed to a DJ whose sound comes from a different corner of the continent entirely.

The Dates and Who Is on Them

According to the tour routing published by Exclaim, the run opened at Afro Nation in Portimao, Portugal on 4 July, then picked up in North America with Chicago’s Credit Union 1 Arena on 20 August.

From there the Uncle Waffles dates begin and barely stop: Toronto’s Scotiabank Arena on 22 August, Place Bell in Laval on 23 August, Barclays Center in Brooklyn on 26 August, the Tsongas Center at UMass Lowell on 27 August, Merriweather Post Pavilion in Columbia on 28 August, State Farm Arena in Atlanta on 30 August, the James L. Knight Center in Miami on 2 September, Houston’s Toyota Center on 4 September and the Greek Theatre in Los Angeles on 6 September.

The run then crosses the Atlantic for The O2 in London on 15 October and the Accor Arena in Paris on 24 October. Count them and the shape is clear: the amapiano billing is concentrated exactly where the tour is doing its heaviest arena work.

Why Pairing These Two Sounds Is Not Obvious

Afrobeats and amapiano get filed together as “African music” by people who do not listen closely, but they are built differently. Asake’s music runs on fuji inflections, Yoruba phrasing and the kind of massed vocal hook that turns an arena into a choir. Amapiano is a South African dance form: log drum, patient builds, a groove designed to stretch across a long set rather than resolve in three minutes.

Putting them on the same stage means asking a crowd to move between two rhythmic logics in one night. It works because the audience for both has already merged online, and because Asake’s own record does not treat the boundary as real either.

The Album Behind the Run

M$NEY, released on 1 May, is Asake’s fourth studio album and the second under his own imprint, GIRAN Republic, in partnership with EMPIRE, following his departure from YBNL Nation. Its thirteen tracks include “WHY LOVE”, “BADMAN GANGSTA” with Tiakola and “WORSHIP” with DJ Snake.

It also features Kabza De Small — which is the detail that makes the touring bill read as design rather than convenience. The amapiano presence on this tour is not an add-on to sell tickets in a second market; it is already inside the record, so the support slot is a live extension of what the album does.

The commercial response was immediate. As reported by BellaNaija, the album took the most first-week streams of any album on Spotify Nigeria, with 42.2 million.

Who Uncle Waffles Is and Why This Booking Registers

Born Lungelihle Zwane in Eswatini, she was raised by a single mother as the middle child of seven, and moved to Johannesburg after high school to study information technology at the University of KwaZulu-Natal. In a DJ Mag feature on her rise, she describes learning to mix during the COVID-19 lockdown while working as a broadcasting intern at Studio One on Eswatini TV, where she interviewed a DJ who offered to teach her. “It went from just a live conversation to the next day, I’m doing a few classes with him, to eight months later, spending nine hours a day,” she said.

The turn came in October 2021. A thirty-second clip from a Soweto set — her dancing while playing Young Stunna, Kabza De Small and DJ Maphorisa’s “Adiwele” — passed 100,000 views overnight and three million inside two days. She was fully booked within a month.

What that clip captured is also what makes her a workable arena support act: the set is a performance, not just a selection. “I wanted to make sure that people get the amapiano experience,” she told DJ Mag. “People always understand dance because it’s a universal language.” A DJ who dances reads from the back of an arena in a way that a DJ behind a laptop does not.

The venue history matters too. She played Coachella in 2023 as one of the first amapiano acts on that bill, sold out the O2 Academy Brixton and Brooklyn Steel in New York, and in August 2024 became the first Black woman to headline The Brooklyn Mirage. Brooklyn Steel holds about a fifth of what Barclays Center does. Returning to the same city on an arena bill is a measurable step up rather than a lateral move.

What a Support Slot at This Scale Actually Buys

Nine arena dates is a different proposition from a festival booking. A festival crowd is there for the day and arrives in shifts. An arena support slot plays to a seated, ticketed room that has already committed to the headliner, and it plays to that room every night for two weeks.

For a DJ, the format is unusual in a second way. Amapiano is built for club time, where a set can breathe for two hours. Compressing that into a support window in front of an audience waiting for a specific headliner is a genuine test of selection, and it is the kind of run that tends to change how a DJ is programmed afterwards.

It also matters where these rooms are. Atlanta, Houston, Brooklyn, Toronto and Los Angeles are the cities where African diaspora audiences are deepest and where promoters make decisions about what scales. Nine consecutive proof points across those markets is a stronger argument than any single sold-out club night.

The Wider Pattern for African Touring

The structural story here is about routing. For years the standard path for an African artist breaking internationally was the festival circuit, where the booking is one-off and the audience is borrowed. An arena headline run with a curated support act is the model that Western acts have used for decades to build a touring business, and it is now being applied end to end to an Afrobeats bill.

The pairing decision follows the same logic our coverage of album releases timed around festival dates described from the other direction: the record, the routing and the billing are being planned as one campaign rather than three.

Whether this becomes a template depends on what the next tours do. But a thirteen-date run that gives nine arena slots to a different African genre is a real bet, and it is being placed in the rooms where the answer will be visible.

Where the Run Goes Next

After Los Angeles on 6 September the North American leg closes, and the tour becomes a European proposition with London in mid-October and Paris a little over a week later. Those two dates are not listed with amapiano support, which makes the North American stretch the concentrated version of this experiment.

For anyone tracking how the African music wave actually scales, the interesting number is not the album’s streaming record. It is nine: the count of nights on which two of the continent’s biggest sounds shared the same arena stage on the same ticket.