Meet Prince Zimboo, Borat's Hip-Hop Brother

An up-and-coming player in the genre of “hipster world music,” Prince Zimboo Abakunamabooba is an African hip-hopper with 999 wives—or is he? Zimboo, who has been performing “deliriously funny music” since at least 2007, “is something like the African Borat,” writes Jonah Weiner for Slate, “a character who exemplifies and satirizes stereotypes of Otherness for laughs.” And since teaming with one of MIA’s producers, Zimboo is gaining notoriety.

Zimboo, who might be the alter ego of a Jamaican producer, will be featured on the upcoming Major Lazer reggae project. The video he’s released in advance of that “captures several of his central, if contradictory, leitmotifs: the virtues of clean living, the pleasures of polygamy, the piteousness of those who masturbate,” Weiner writes. “It’s hard to say precisely what he’s up to,” but he is “worth caring about.” (More Borat stories.)