AfricaIs aCountry

Our People

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

Our People

By
Sean Jacobs

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s0mPUpojd84&w=500&h=307&rel=0]

This past summer at least three prominent figures of the Cape Town jazz scene–the saxophone players Robbie Jansen and Ezra Ngcukana and, most recently, pianist and historian Vincent Kolbe–passed.

For me, this recent live recording of “Os se mense” (Our people) by a representative of the next generation of Cape Town jazz musicians, Kyle Shepherd Trio, is a fitting tribute to these men.

* BTW, it is worth reading the historian and photographer John Edwin Mason’s separate tributes to these three giants on his blog.  Mason also includes a link to a film of Kolbe by Rio Allen.

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.