Music Break

By: Sean Jacobs

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GA23GnvAXWQ&w=500&h=307&rel=0]

Yuri Da Cunha is a household name in Angola,and is on his way to becoming an international star. He has taken the older Angolan genre of semba music, and modernized its appeal to urban youth. His lingering vocals combined with his fluid dance style has captured fans from Angola to Portugal. His combination of dance styles from the Congo, Brazil and the United States can only be described in one word: Fresh.

Via The Bright Continent.

Empty riddles

Bárbara Rousseaux

Drawing on his forced migration from Rwanda, Serge Alain Nitegeka reflects on the forms, fragments, and unsettled histories behind his latest exhibition in Johannesburg.

Culture

11.25.2025

Heritage on horseback

Emmanuel Solate

A photo essay on Nigeria’s Durbars and the power of royal pageantry.

Politics

11.24.2025

When Moscow looked to the horn

Moustafa Ahmad

Half a century after the Soviets built their base on the Gulf of Aden, the same strategic coastline is once more drawing in foreign powers, old and new.

Culture

11.21.2025

How much does a Nigerian intellectual cost?

Efe Paul-Azino

The country that once produced some of Africa’s fiercest moral voices now struggles to sustain independent thought.

Culture

11.20.2025

The sound of what remains

Eliel Peterson

Jean Maxime Baptiste’s latest film listens to how grief and history reverberate across generations in French Guiana.

Politics

11.19.2025

The coup kids are in charge now

Faisal Ali

Across the continent’s new coup belt, young officers are stepping into power, casting themselves as guardians against corrupt civilian elites.

Culture

11.18.2025

Who cares about African heritage?

Ngaire Blankenberg

While the world debates restitution, Africa’s own heritage institutions are collapsing. The question is no longer who took our past, but who is keeping it alive.

Politics

11.17.2025

Life after aid cuts

Shobana Shankar

Trump’s aid cuts have gutted HIV programs across Nigeria—forcing local women-led groups to rebuild health and dignity from below.

Politics

11.14.2025

Whose transition is it anyway?

Charlize Tomaselli

Africa’s first G20 presidency could mark a turning point for the continent—or simply another performance of green-washed extraction led by mining elites.

Politics

11.13.2025

Elimination by other means

Jwan Zreiq

From Iraq to Gaza, empire no longer needs to annihilate populations when it can dismantle the very structures that make collective life possible.

Culture

11.12.2025

The mirror and becoming

Joy Odondi Mala

In Najaax Harun’s paintings, the self confronts its own reflection—haunted, tender, and unafraid to transform.

Culture

11.11.2025

Filming what survives

Made just as Sudan descended into war, ‘Khartoum’ captures the beauty, pain, and humanity of a city shaken by violence—and the filmmakers who became refugees alongside their subjects.

Politics

11.10.2025

The invention of foreigners

Ntsika Dapo

From indirect rule to Operation Dudula, the lines dividing citizen from stranger trace back to the way empire organized identity and labor.

Politics

11.07.2025

When solidarity becomes spectacle

Ali Ridha Khan

Francesca Albanese’s visit to South Africa exposed a truth we prefer not to face: that our moral witness has hardened into ritual. We watch, we clap, we call it solidarity.

Culture

11.06.2025

Global Africa for whom?

Kang-Chun Cheng

Nairobi’s cultural moment reflects both the promise of continental imagination and the anxiety of performing arrival for the world’s gaze.

Politics

11.05.2025

The geography of a storm

Amina Adebisi Odofin

Hurricane Melissa made clear what COP30 obscures: the climate crisis still follows the lines of empire.

Politics

11.04.2025

After the coronation

Michaela Collord

In Tanzania, the Gen Z uprising meets a state whose old bargains have collapsed.

Ancestors

11.03.2025

Raila Odinga’s Kenya

The death of Kenya’s most enduring opposition leader invites a reckoning—not only with his contradictions, but with what his long struggle reveals about the unfinished work of liberation.

Culture

10.31.2025

The architecture of power

Kelechi Anabaraonye

Inside the crumbling walls of Nigeria’s Old Secretariat, echoes of colonial governance and national awakening meet the silence of decay.

Politics

10.30.2025

The people want to breathe

Shreya Parikh

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.

AfricaIs aCountry

Music Break

Music Break

Further Reading

Empty riddles

Heritage on horseback

When Moscow looked to the horn

How much does a Nigerian intellectual cost?

The sound of what remains

The coup kids are in charge now

Who cares about African heritage?

Life after aid cuts

Whose transition is it anyway?

Elimination by other means

The mirror and becoming

Filming what survives

The invention of foreigners

When solidarity becomes spectacle

Global Africa for whom?

The geography of a storm

After the coronation

Raila Odinga’s Kenya

The architecture of power

The people want to breathe