At home, her strict father wouldn’t allow Pongo and her sisters to have a social life, she said. Her life took an even darker turn when, at just 12, she threw herself out of a seventh-story window.

“It was a mixture of everything: the difficulty of integration, the lack of friends to talk to and the dictatorship imposed by my father,” Pongo said.

She escaped with only a broken leg, but the experience put her on a path toward music. To reach her physiotherapist across town, Pongo would get off at the train station in Queluz, a diverse neighborhood where many African immigrants lived. It was there that she saw the kuduro dance group Denon Squad performing on the street.

When her injury healed, she began dancing with the group, then rapping. “It was through music that I realized that I wanted to live,” she said.

Her participation in Denon Squad led to her discovery by Buraka Som Sistema, and she performed with the group for two years.

But things turned sour, and there was a dispute over royalties for “Wegue Wegue,” Pongo said. “After ‘Wegue’s success, they were very hard on me,” she said, adding, “I was so young that I couldn’t really understand what happened.” João Barbosa, a member of Buraka Som Sistema, said that Pongo had only ever been a guest vocalist, and that the group had decided to work with another singer, who was also a dancer.