AfricaIs aCountry

Friday Bonus Music Break, N°14

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

Friday Bonus Music Break, N°14

By
Tom Devriendt

Quite the mixed bag this week. ‘Disco Malapaa’ by Arusha’s Jambo Squad above; nine more below.

Like Jambo Squad, Mokoomba (from Zimbabwe) switch into Latino mode halfway in their new video:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uqZdaVNOHj0

Anbuley’s ‘Oleee’ arrives just in time for European summer:

Also based in Europe, although his latest video (like the previous one) suggests a longing for elsewhere, is Gaël Faye:

Simphiwe Dana decided to take a step back from social media a while ago and concentrate on doing what she does best: speak truth through music:

Still in South Africa, taxis and drifters:

South Africa based poppy Cameroonian Denzyl:

From Guinea, the Matoto Family:

Sierra Leone’s Refugee All Stars signed up for a cause:

And — to turn it down a notch — Ablaye Cissoko and Volker Goetze wrote a subdued lament for Haiti — quite beautifully — and recorded a video for it in Gorée:

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.