AfricaIs aCountry

Africa Unsigned

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

Africa Unsigned

By
Sean Jacobs

Africa Unsigned, an Amsterdam-based website uses crowd-funding–a method which allow people to pool their money online–to raise money for African and Africa diaspora musicians that you cannot  be found inrecord stores, commercial radio or local versions of MTV. Here’s a link to a report by Voice of America producer Ricci Shryock with Rina Mushonga, a Dutch-Zimbabwean singer, and Pim Betist, the site’s founder. Most of the site’s visitors are from Europe and America, but now Africa Unsigned is targeting the continent. They’re targeting mobile phone users. Kenya is the first target.

* While you’re at it check out Ricci’s photography.

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.