Africa Is a Country

Billy Bang

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

Billy Bang

By
Siddhartha Mitter

Bang, was a free jazz violinist and composer, whose music reflected on his involvement as an American conscript in the Vietnam War.

Billy Bang.

I am very sad to learn that Billy Bang has died at age 63. He was a beautiful musician who struggled with mental illness and other woes from the trauma of his service in Vietnam until he processed it in his music. I was introduced to his work by Butch Morris. Two years ago I was privileged to have a long conversation with him and Yusef Komunyakaa—this is the radio edit. Condolences to all who knew him.

“The amazing Billy Bang” (Bob Travis, Flickr Creative Commons).

Further Reading

Redrawing liberation

From Gaza to Africa, colonial cartography has turned land into property and people into populations to be managed. True liberation means dismantling this order, not redrawing its lines.

Who deserves the city?

Colonial urbanism cast African neighborhoods as chaotic, unplanned, and undesirable. In postcolonial Dar es Salaam, that legacy still shapes who builds, who belongs, and what the middle class fears the city becoming.

Djinns in Berlin

At the 13th Berlin Biennale, works from Zambia and beyond summon unseen forces to ask whether solidarity can withstand the gaze of surveillance.

Colonize then, deport now

Trump’s deportation regime revives a colonial blueprint first drafted by the American Colonization Society, when Black lives were exiled to Africa to safeguard a white republic.

On Safari

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The battle over the frame

As Hollywood recycles pro-war propaganda for Gen Z, Youssef Chahine’s ‘Djamila, the Algerian’ reminds us that anti-colonial cinema once turned imperial film language against its makers—and still can.

Fictions of freedom

K. Sello Duiker’s ‘The Quiet Violence of Dreams’ still haunts Cape Town, a city whose beauty masks its brutal exclusions. Two decades later, in the shadow of Amazon’s new development, its truths are more urgent than ever.

When things fall apart

Against a backdrop of global collapse, one exhibition used Chinua Achebe’s classic to hold space for voices from the Global South—and asked who gets to imagine the future.

The General sleeps

As former Nigerian president Muhammadu Buhari’s death is mourned with official reverence, a generation remembers the eight years that drove them out.