- Hope Ramafalo turned her dance hobby into a career, posting on her YouTube channel.
- She has since won accolades at the South African Amapiano Awards and received a platinum plaque.
- Hope and her partner Hlogi Mash have been collaborating since 2020.
A ball of energy with a sweet yet fiery personality to match, Hope Ramafalo is shaking things up in South Africa’s dance and amapiano scene.
The 26-year-old Pretoria native has always had a knack for dancing and being from a Black household, it wasn’t a skill that was necessarily harnessed, as she puts it.
Fast forward to 2024, Hope is well on her way to stardom.
Some of her accolades include winning the Best Amapiano Street Dancer award at the South African Amapiano Awards in 2021, performing with famed dancer Limpopo Boy on the global Red Bull Dance Your Style stage, achieving a platinum plaque for her viral dance challenge to Boohle and Deep London’s hit track Hamba Wena and hosting Channel O’s music variety show Groove with YFM personality Lula Odiba.
Through these achievements, Hope is a Pretoria girl at heart. She chats to TRUELOVE about how it all started.
Dance is in her DNA
Like many South Africans, dance is a natural and integral part of Hope’s upbringing.
Although she was participating in her high school’s events and theatre productions, Hope initially just saw dance as a hobby and thought she’d enter the fitness realm.
Hope ended up teaching fitness classes and aerobics that incorporated dance elements but it was during lockdown at the height of the Covid-19 pandemic when gyms were closed and the amapiano craze took over that she decided to turn her passion into a project.
“Amapiano just started taking over and I was like, ‘What is this sound? What is this?’ And then I started investing my time just learning and catching the vibe where I can and then I started my YouTube channel and in that YouTube channel I was teaching everybody how to do amapiano online and only to find that that was going to be like a huge success,” she explains.
“A lot of people just started hopping onto my page, learning amapiano, and that's how I just slowly started choreographing, listening to the music a little bit more, musicality, understanding what amapiano and what the culture really is.”
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Tapping into the culture of the birthplace of amapiano
The distinct fusion of deep house, kwaito, jazz, piano melodies and afrobeat rhythms of the amapiano genre became popularised in the 2010s.
It exploded across borders with Pretoria-raised amapiano artists like DBN Gogo, Kabza De Small and Focalistic, taking the sound to international stages like Coachella in the U.S. and London’s Boiler Room.
For Hope, being able to take centre stage on a globally recognised platform like Ballantine’s True Music’s road to 10 years of Boiler Room in Attridgeville, Pretoria, gave her the opportunity to be a part of the historical documentation of the origins of the genre.
Sharing how humbled she feels as a young girl from Pretoria to be a part of the birthplace of amapiano, Hope says, “They stay true to the culture, they stay true to the people who are from the culture … I felt at home, I felt truly grounded. I was like, it's time for Pitori to stand up.”
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When love, dance and music collide
Not only is Hope going international with tours around Europe and an upcoming one in Atlanta, but she is also venturing into music as a vocalist with Mamelodi Sundowns women’s football club player and her partner – in both the creative and romantic sense of the word – Lehlohonolo ‘Hlogi Mash’ Mashigo.
Hope and Hlogi have been an item since meeting in 2020 to film a dance collaboration after Hlogi went viral for dancing to Mr JazziQ and Moonchild Sanelly’s hit single Askies.
Since then, the couple has grown together both personally and professionally through their music and dance collaborations.
Hope describes to us how they’ve both stayed grounded in the spotlighted, saying “We just kept going and we just kept going, and we just kept creating routine after routine, looking for underground songs that feed our souls and feed our passion, and just saying, you know what, this is what we're doing.
“And we just connected so much on that level that it was so easy going on this journey because you always have somebody to remind you where we come from and what we need to do going forward.”
