AfricaIs aCountry

100% African Rock

Africa Is a Country Podcast
African Five-a-Side Podcast

100% African Rock

By
Sean Jacobs

[vodpod id=Video.4068575&w=480&h=395&fv=]

Last month South Africans BLK JKS played the Festival Rio Loco in the south of France–for what was a South Africa focus at the festival. They invited Malian Vieux Farka Toure and his band to join them for what was billed as “100% African Rock.”  The result: one and a half hours of good music. Even better, for an encore they bring on Thandiswa Mazwai to perform a cover version of the late Brenda Fassie’s “Too Late for Mama” with the  new 100% Afrian Rock band.  — Sean Jacobs

Further Reading

The people want to breathe

In Tunisia’s coastal city of Gabès, residents live in the shadow of the phosphate industry. As pollution deepens and repression returns, a new generation revives the struggle for life itself.

After Paul Biya

Cameroon’s president has ruled for over four decades by silence and survival. Now, with dynastic succession looming and no clear exit strategy, the country teeters between inertia and implosion.

Leapfrogging literacy?

In outsourcing the act of writing to machines trained on Western language and thought, we risk reinforcing the very hierarchies that decolonization sought to undo.

Repoliticizing a generation

Thirty-eight years after Thomas Sankara’s assassination, the struggle for justice and self-determination endures—from stalled archives and unfulfilled verdicts to new calls for pan-African renewal and a 21st-century anti-imperialist front.

The king of Kinshasa

Across five decades, Chéri Samba has chronicled the politics and poetry of everyday Congolese life, insisting that art belongs to the people who live it.

Drip is temporary

The apparel brand Drip was meant to prove that South Africa’s townships could inspire global style. Instead, it revealed how easily black success stories are consumed and undone by the contradictions of neoliberal aspiration.