AfricaIs aCountry

Music Break

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

Music Break

By
Sean Jacobs

I love this track, “It Would Be,” by Cape Town’s Alleycat (government name: Enslin Grootboom) featuring fellow rapper, T100. The song is Cape Town for real: riding the Jamaican riddim, the transplanted patois and the stripped-down video. (Artists in Cape Town rarely do bling unlike their Johannesburg counterpunts.) I also recognize the milieu: The music video was filmed in and around an area, Elsies River on the Cape Flats, where I spent most of my school holidays as a teen a long time ago. (My cousins still live there.) Things haven’t changed much for the city’s poor.  As for Alleycat, he’s been rapping since the mid-1980s. In an email, he describes his lyrics as “stirred by emotion – happiness, social welfare, love, fears, amusement, failures and achievements.” Bring that emotion.

Further Reading

Slow death by food

Illegal gold mining is poisoning Ghana’s soil and rivers, seeping into its crops and seafood, and turning the national food system into a long-term public health crisis.

A sick health system

The suspension of three doctors following the death of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s son has renewed scrutiny of a health-care system plagued by impunity, underfunding, and a mass exodus of medical professionals.

Afrobeats after Fela

Wizkid’s dispute with Seun Kuti and the release of his latest EP with Asake highlight the widening gap between Afrobeats’ commercial triumph and Fela Kuti’s political inheritance

Progress is exhausting

Pedro Pinho’s latest film follows a Portuguese engineer in Guinea-Bissau, exposing how empire survives through bureaucracy, intimacy, and the language of “development.”

The rubble of empire

Built by Italian Fascists in 1928, Mogadishu Cathedral was meant to symbolize “peaceful conquest.” Today its ruins force Somalis to confront the uneasy afterlife of colonial power and religious authority.

Atayese

Honored in Yorubaland as “one who repairs the world,” Jesse Jackson’s life bridged civil rights, pan-Africanism, empire, and contradiction—leaving behind a legacy as expansive as it was imperfect.

Bread or Messi?

Angola’s golden jubilee culminated in a multimillion-dollar match against Argentina. The price tag—and the secrecy around it—divided a nation already grappling with inequality.