When Tendai Maraire broke down his Chimurenga Renaissance mixtape for us last year, he said about “It’s Time For You To Go”, a song inspired by a family visit to Zimbabwe (“driving down the street bumping Biggie’s ‘Juicy’”): “Young Maraire Boys being crazy at home.”

Toronto, Canada-based Zambian artist Chansa recently released his debut single, titled “Immigrant”, and has a video for it too:

Simba, Milton Gulli and Zubz’s “Scenario”, a first single taken off their Tribute To A Tribe Called Quest, which is a production by Mozambican arts collective Grasspoppers:

We now also have images to go with Ghanaian-Swiss audio experimentalist Oy’s hair philosophy:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2ZmcAXy_7Bo

Matshidiso goes for a run in and around Johannesburg:

New soul from Sandra Nkaké who hails from Yaoundé, Cameroon but resides in France:

Anoter soul-ish one from the Mozambican lady who’s got Lusophone Africa on lock: Lizha James’ highly-stylized ode to her mother:

Jacques Vergès, Femi Falana and Thomas Sankara are but a few names who feature in this new track and video by Togolese rapper Elom 20ce (which he dedicates to Gouyano Sinandare, the 12-year-old who got murdered by the police during the student protests earlier this year):

Bajah (from Sierra Leone) recorded a Last.FM session with Prince Polo at The Kennel Studios in Brooklyn:

And Oliver Mtukudzi and the Black Spirits played an almost 30-minute set on Seattle radio station KEXP:

* The photo of Sandra Nkaké by Claire Vinson.

Further Reading

Who deserves the city?

Colonial urbanism cast African neighborhoods as chaotic, unplanned, and undesirable. In postcolonial Dar es Salaam, that legacy still shapes who builds, who belongs, and what the middle class fears the city becoming.

Djinns in Berlin

At the 13th Berlin Biennale, works from Zambia and beyond summon unseen forces to ask whether solidarity can withstand the gaze of surveillance.

Colonize then, deport now

Trump’s deportation regime revives a colonial blueprint first drafted by the American Colonization Society, when Black lives were exiled to Africa to safeguard a white republic.

On Safari

On our annual publishing break, Gaza’s genocide continues to unfold in real time yet slips from public grasp. This is not just a crisis of politics, but of how reality is mediated—and why we must build spaces where meaning can still take root.

The battle over the frame

As Hollywood recycles pro-war propaganda for Gen Z, Youssef Chahine’s ‘Djamila, the Algerian’ reminds us that anti-colonial cinema once turned imperial film language against its makers—and still can.

Fictions of freedom

K. Sello Duiker’s ‘The Quiet Violence of Dreams’ still haunts Cape Town, a city whose beauty masks its brutal exclusions. Two decades later, in the shadow of Amazon’s new development, its truths are more urgent than ever.

When things fall apart

Against a backdrop of global collapse, one exhibition used Chinua Achebe’s classic to hold space for voices from the Global South—and asked who gets to imagine the future.

The General sleeps

As former Nigerian president Muhammadu Buhari’s death is mourned with official reverence, a generation remembers the eight years that drove them out.