AfricaIs aCountry

Music Break: Gugulethu’s rooftops

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

Music Break: Gugulethu’s rooftops

By
Tom Devriendt

You’ll rarely see local rap artists, especially ones from Cape Town, on South African music video channels. But not if Driemanskap had anything to do with it.

Carsteanca via Flickr.

Ever since they started putting out records in 2007, Cape Town based label Pioneer Unit has been catching the local music scene off guard. Remember them introducing Rattex, KONFAB, Ben Sharpa and Jaak to the world. But you’ll rarely see these artists on South African music channels.

Whatever the reason for the industry’s reluctance in the past, it will be difficult for them to ignore the new song and music video for Driemanskap‘s ‘S’phum’eGugs.”

As the track title has it: they’re from Gugs, or Gugulethu, one of Cape Town’s townships (if you’ve been to Cape Town, you’ll recognize most of the landmarks) and they’re killing it. Add to that the  only female in the group, Kanyi, sure got some skills, even when finding herself balancing on one of Gugulethu’s rooftops as we can see in the raw footage for the music video:

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.