Africa Is a Country

Music Break. Simphiwe Dana

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

Goodbye, Piassa

The demolition of an historic district in Addis Ababa shows a central contradiction of modernization: the desire to improve the country while devaluing its people and culture.

And do not hinder them

We hardly think of children as agents of change. At the height of 1980s apartheid repression in South Africa, a group of activists did and gave them the tool of print.