Africa Is a Country

The Bubu King

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

The Bubu King

By
Sean Jacobs

Janka Nabay is the premier exponent of Sierra Leone's frantic and frenetic Bubu Music.

Janka Nabay.

The new video, via The Fader., for “Eh Congo” by Ahmed Janka Nabay, the premier exponent of Sierra Leone’s frantic Bubu Music. Nabay is from the rural Temne region of Sierra Leone. He also has a new album.

According to his label, Luaka Bop, “… the original ‘bubu’ is cloaked in mythology: according to Nabay, a young ‘bubu boy’ took it from witches 500 years ago and brought it to the public at large, sacrificing his own life in the process. When Islam reached Sierra Leone, bubu became a part of indigenous processionals during Ramadan; this is the music Nabay learned and perfected as a child. As Janka says: “Bubu is an old, old music, but people don’t know about it. You can add new things into the beat if you know it really well, and make your own sound out of it.”

Further Reading

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.

The grift tank

In Washington’s think tank ecosystem, Africa is treated as a low-stakes arena where performance substitutes for knowledge. The result: unqualified actors shaping policy on behalf of militarists, lobbyists, and frauds.

Kagame’s hidden war

Rwanda’s military deployments in Mozambique and its shadowy ties to M23 rebels in eastern Congo are not isolated interventions, rather part of a broader geopolitical strategy to expand its regional influence.

After the coups

Without institutional foundations or credible partners, the Alliance of Sahel States risks becoming the latest failed experiment in regional integration.