AfricaIs aCountry

Music Break

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

Music Break

By
Sean Jacobs

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U5s-FUbcE9o&w=500&h=307&rel=0]

This is not really a music video I know, but it’s worth your time. Trust me. Artist Hanifah Walidah interviews New York City-based director Patricia McGregor and musician, Greg Tate about their creative process in making “Burnt Sugar presents The JB Songbook,” happen. “The JB Songbook” is a performance centered around the life and music of James Brown. (The show was staged in early October this year at the Apollo Soundstage in Harlem and will be staged in January and February next year; check here for updates.) From Walidah’s site it turns out the interview is part of a creative journalism series titled Tales from the White Wall, “… about creatives and their creative process.”

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.