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:
Nairobi’s cultural moment reflects both the promise of continental imagination and the anxiety of performing arrival for the world’s gaze.
Hurricane Melissa made clear what COP30 obscures: the climate crisis still follows the lines of empire.
In Tanzania, the Gen Z uprising meets a state whose old bargains have collapsed.
The death of Kenya’s most enduring opposition leader invites a reckoning—not only with his contradictions, but with what his long struggle reveals about the unfinished work of liberation.
Inside the crumbling walls of Nigeria’s Old Secretariat, echoes of colonial governance and national awakening meet the silence of decay.
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.
Far-right and pro-Israel actors are recasting Nigeria’s insecurity as sectarian extermination to distract from Palestine.
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.
Assimi Goïta’s regime has built its legitimacy on defiance of the West and promises of renewal. But with increasing internal pressure, a turn to Moscow risks deepened dependency.
When Cabo Verde qualified for the World Cup, celebrations erupted from Praia to Rotterdam. The Blue Sharks’ rise shows how a scattered people built a global team rooted in home.
As Morocco prepares to host AFCON and the 2030 World Cup, a decentralized youth movement is demanding real investment in public services over sporting spectacle.
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.
At our first workshop from our festival in Nairobi, The Elephant’s Joe Kobuthi, reflected on a year since #EndFinanceBill.
A reflection on traveling through the globalized walled city.
The passing of the pioneering South African writer and critic leaves behind a body of work that challenged racial mythologies, unsettled identity politics, and grounded transhistorical vision in the particulars of place.
The writings of Edson Sithole, Zimbabwe’s forgotten nationalist thinker, reveal both the promise and perils of pan-African politics in the independence era.
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.
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.
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.
MADEYOULOOK’s ‘Dinokana’ debuted at the 2024 Venice Biennale. Now back home, Molemo Moiloa and Nare Mokgotho reflect on sound, place, and why their work is always meant for South African audiences first.