Africa Is a Country

Sunday Bonus Music Break, N°8

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

Sunday Bonus Music Break, N°8

By
Tom Devriendt

Since Friday’s Special was reserved to Sierra Leone — and for archival purposes — here’s your Sunday Bonus. First up, from the same label that brought us Baloji, Konono N°1 and Staff Benda Billili comes a new recording by Jagwa Music: ‘Live in the Streets of Dar’ (es Salaam, Tanzania).

‘Night in Tunisia’, the opening track from Hugh Masekela’s 1974 LP ‘I am not Afraid’:

Fatoumata Diawara’s ‘Kèlè’:

YaoBobby’s deceptively naïve ‘Mémoire d’un continent’:

Blood Orange’s Champagne Coast went viral this week. We can see why:

The Very Best return after a long silence with ‘Yoshua Alikuti’:

And an interesting music video filming singer Jimetta Rosa at her actual job:

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.