Sampa Tembo (born 1993), known professionally as Sampa the Great, is a Zambian-born Australia-based rapper and songwriter. Her debut solo album, The Return (September 2019), peaked at No. 12 on the ARIA Albums Chart. At the ARIA Music Awards of 2019 she won Best Hip Hop Release for her second single, "Final Form". In the following year she won the same category for The Return, as well as Best Female Artist and Best Independent Release.
Sampa Tembo was born in 1993 in Zambia and was raised there and in Botswana, as the middle of five children. Her mother, a dancer, Theresa is from the Bemba people while her father, an insurance broker and some-time DJ, is from the Tumbuka. Her sister, Mwanje Tembo, is a singer. She received both piano and singing lessons and started writing poems/lyrics from the age of nine. In the early 2010s she studied music for visual media at the Academy of Art University, San Francisco, for two years and Los Angeles for a year. While in San Francisco she recorded two tracks.
Tembo moved to Sydney in 2013 and was based there until 2018, she completed a Bachelor degree in audio engineering at SAE Institute in 2015. As of 2018 she is based in Melbourne. The artist acknowledges her family and communities in both Botswana and Zambia as the foundation of her success.