Africa Is a Country

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

From Cape To Cairo

When two Africans—one from the south, the other from the north—set out to cross the continent, they raised the question: how easy is it for an African to move in their own land?

The road to Rafah

The ‘Sumud’ convoy from Tunis to Gaza is reviving the radical promise of pan-African solidarity and reclaiming an anticolonial tactic lost to history.

Sinners and ancestors

Ryan Coogler’s latest film is more than a vampire fable—it’s a bridge between Black American history and African audiences hungry for connection, investment, and storytelling rooted in shared struggle.