Five for the weekend. I haven’t done this in a while. First up Philadelphians Chill Moody (rapper) and Cody Kahmar with the music video for “My Eyes”:
Malfred‘s reggae homage to Tanzanian mothers, “Asante Mama”:
Staying in East Africa, here’s new music from Uganda’s Maurice Kirya:
The Mexican-Ethiopian rapper Gonjasufi‘s video for “The Blame”:
And finally, any week of music breaks I’m involved in won’t be complete without some Nigerian-American pop:
A redevelopment project in Nairobi’s Ngara district promises revival—but raises deeper questions about capital, memory, and who has the right to shape the city.
The Marxist historian Mohammed Harbi spent a lifetime dismantling the myths of Algeria’s national movement and warning that anticolonial victories could harden into bureaucratic rule.
A constitutional challenge over religious practice reveals the unresolved colonial and postcolonial politics of Ghana’s mission-founded secondary schools.
Long dismissed as apathetic, Kenya’s youth forced a rupture in 2024. As the 2027 election approaches, their challenge is turning digital rebellion and street protest into political power.
By placing Kwame Nkrumah at the center of a global Black political network, Howard W. French reveals how the promise of pan-African emancipation was narrowed—and what its failure still costs Africa and the diaspora.
iShowSpeed’s Africa tour is widely celebrated as respectful and refreshing, yet it operates within a long tradition of racialized spectacle that turns Africa into content and Blackness into performance.
Nigeria’s insecurity cannot be solved by foreign airstrikes or a failing state, but by rebuilding democratic, community-rooted systems of collective self-defense.
Can a festival meaningfully applaud African creativity while its sponsor profits from African death?
The shooting and prolonged detention of Serrote José de Oliveira expose how Angola’s legal order is not merely breaking down, but being deliberately replaced by a system of impunity and police power.
David Elstein’s attack on David Olusoga’s docuseries on the legacy of the British empire reveals less about historical error than about the enduring impulse to rehabilitate British colonial rule.
From colonial accounting tricks to modern tax havens, Nkrumah understood how capital escapes, and why political independence was never enough.
In Chad, domestic labor between Chinese employers and local workers unfolds in private spaces where rules are missing and conflict fills the gap.
Burna Boy’s highly publicized Lagos prison visit looked like generosity, but it also looked like content. Who was it really for?
The passing of Raila Odinga has unsettled Kenya’s political equilibrium, exposing a crowded field of veterans, opportunists, and activists, alongside a growing generational demand to reclaim power from an aging elite.
From Portuguese Goa to colonial Kampala, Mahmood Mamdani’s latest book shows how India became an instrument of empire, and a scapegoat in its aftermath.
From air travel costs and border regimes to television culture and class exclusion, the problem of attendance at AFCON is structural, not because fans lack passion.
Entre le coût du transport aérien, les régimes de visas, la culture télévisuelle et l’exclusion de classe, le problème de l’affluence à la CAN est structurel — et non le signe d’un manque de passion des supporters.
The 2025 AFCON final between Senegal and Morocco was a dramatic spectacle that tested the limits of the match and the crowd, until a defining moment held everything together.
From national redemption and continental dominance to personal legacy and political ambition, the 2025 Africa Cup of Nations final means everything to Africans.
Why focusing on attendance figures at the 2025 AFCON is the wrong way to measure the tournament.