Africa Is a Country

Akon’s Africa

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

Akon’s Africa

By
Sean Jacobs

The Senegalese-American crooner's uninspiring "Oh Africa" reminds of bubblegum South African pop from the 1980s.

Akon and Keri Hilson in a still from the music video for Akon's "Oh Africa" song.

The R&B singer, Akon has released his own 2010 World Cup song with the original title “Africa.”  Akon is the second R&B or rap artist in the last who has a song that is World Cup related. The other, K’naan, saw his song about refugees and war commandeered by Coca Cola. We are still waiting to see how Coca Cola’s desire to sell a lot of sugary drinks (with little regard to the health consequences like diabetes, obesity) will clash with K’naan’s lyrics.

As for Akon, he is joined by the singer, Keri Hilson, dressed in a zebra top (it’s Africa, remember).  In the music vodeo, two world class footballers (Didier Drogba and Fernando Torres) kicked balloon balls that explode into splashes of paint which, magically, morph into portraits of other soccer stars (Messi, Kaka, etcetera). This may be enough to excite some people, but  the song sounds a lot of like the stuff South African singer P J Powers or the apartheid Ministry of Information would come up with during the Info era.

I’ll take a pass.

Further Reading

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.

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.