AfricaIs aCountry

Sierra Leone Independence Day

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

Sierra Leone Independence Day

By
Boima Tucker

Freedom Day in South Africa. Togo Independence Day. And Sierra Leone’s 51st Independence Day. That’s all today. We’ve been celebrating Freedom Day with music elsewhere today. So this post is for Sierra Leone. My current favorite song we played last week but there’s more: a Bajah and Dry Yai Crew song:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-bHOWazDJls

Refugee All Stars released an album this week:

Sierra Leoneans are active in the diaspora too. Like Janka and the Bubu Gang:

Or Shady Baby:

And a classic for an election year:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y70NmnU1kDw

You’ll tell us what your favorite Togolese tunes of the moment are in the comments.

About the Author

Boima Tucker is a music producer, DJ, writer, and cultural activist. He is the managing editor of Africa Is a Country, co-founder of Kondi Band and the founder of the INTL BLK record label.

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.