AfricaIs aCountry

Friday Bonus Music Break, N°25

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

Friday Bonus Music Break, N°25

By
Tom Devriendt

This summer’s Fuse ODG #ANTENNADANCE competition (“one person controlling the other using azonto movements”) courtesy of the Antenna smash hit resulted in some wild entries (Google it; H/T Jacquelin Kataneksza). Above: #TeamLONDON. And more good moves in the video for Congolese artist Lexxus Legal’s ‘Petits Congolais’ (off his “music record for kids”):

Early Sages Poètes de la Rue member Zoxea, repping Benin (his dad, Jules Kodjo, used to play for the national football team):

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

A collaboration between Danay Mariney and Kobi Onyame, who grew up between Accra (where he was born) and London, now based in Scotland. Video was shot in South Africa:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Or4nw2OykQ

Tapping that London connection, here’s a dreamy video for Maka Agu (aka Ti2bs):

From Queijas (Portugal), new material by video artist, slam poet, MC and beatmaker Alexandre Francisco Diaphra (who goes by many names and claims many locations, among them Pecixe Island, Guinea-Bissau):

Promo video (interviews + outtakes) for the recently released Fangnawa Experience album, a collaboration between Burkina Faso-born Korbo (and his French music collective Fanga) and Moroccan Gnawa master Abdallah Guinéa (with his band Nasse Ejadba):

There’s also a new video for the Sierra Leonean Black Street Family, shot in Freetown. Hustling and tustling:

And to slow it all down a bit: two singer-song writers to end. A new video for South African Nomhle Nongoge’s ‘Ubuntu Bhako’ (references: soul, Eastern Cape, Simphiwe Dana, Zahara):

And Birmingham-based Laura Mvula’s live session for Hunger TV makes us look forward to hearing her debut album:

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.