AfricaIs aCountry

Music Break. Simphiwe Dana

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

Music Break. Simphiwe Dana

By
Tom Devriendt

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=829dg3GN7aM&w=500&h=307&rel=0]

Does it matter whether we know where a music video was shot? Probably not, but watching this first clip for Simphiwe Dana’s new album Kulture Noir, I can’t help but stare at the steel barred windows of the police holding cells in the background. Daily, around that corner, you find people on the sidewalk exchanging messages with their imprisoned friends or family members.  It thus makes for a weird block party in Cape Town’s City Bowl. Fortunately, there is the music. That’s London-based South African bandleader Adam Glasser on the harmonica, by the way.

Further Reading

    After the coronation

    Tanzania’s Gen Z uprising meets a state whose old bargains—opposition, intraparty renewal, and a post-socialist social compact—have collapsed.

    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.