Africa Is a Country

Music Break. Friday Bonus Edition, N°1

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

Music Break. Friday Bonus Edition, N°1

By
Sean Jacobs

Girl Power is big among female West African pop singers.  Or so recent music videos suggest. We’ve featured Goldie Harvey and Lousika (Ghana) here before. Now here’s two more. First up is Ghanaian Efya with “Sexy Sassy Wahala,” from the soundtrack of 10-part Ghanaian movie “Adams Apple“:

Next up is Nigerian singer Zara Gretti:

Related: Jogyo, one half of whom is from Gabon:

Unrelated: The Congolese-American (is there a meme here?) Hugo Million is building a following back in the DRC, while mixing party and political music (not unusual to Congolese artistes, of course). Here, from a few months ago, is “Benga Nzambe,” which takes a political tone and which is appropriate given the volatile climate around elections in the DRC now:

Finally, some French rap “made in Normandy!” HVJ du Coeff & Jeune Karn with “Les égouts de l’underground’:

H/T: Okayafrica, What’s Up Africa, Tom Devriendt

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.

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.