AfricaIs aCountry

Concrete Airplane

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

Concrete Airplane

By
Sean Jacobs

Vice recently carried an interesting interview with Miles Claret, whose Soundway Records label re-issues “… lost and forgotten recordings from the world’s most vibrant musical cultures.”  Among other things, Claret recounts a visit to the talented but eccentric Nigerian highlife musician, Sir Victor Uwaifo: “Then he took me into his concrete airplane he had built onto the side of his house. It was exactly like being in a real airplane–there were windows all down the sides. But in the cockpit there was a piano. He just sat in the cockpit and played for me as we sat and drank beer. It wasn’t your ordinary day.”

H/T: Naijablog.

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.