Africa Is a Country

Independence Day: June 27th, Djibouti

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

Independence Day: June 27th, Djibouti

By
Tom Devriendt

Earlier this year, Djiboutians marched the streets of their capital (where more than half of all Djiboutian citizens live), rallying against their sitting president who changed the constitution in 2010 allowing him to run for another term. It didn’t pan out as planned, with the president (who replaced his uncle as leader of the ruling party in 1999) securing a third term in April. “I regret having no opponent,” he said. “I accuse the opposition of not having the courage to give voters the right to choose between several candidates.” But that doesn’t change the fact today is still Djibouti’s Independence Day.

Awelah Adan is the country’s latest star, singing in Somali. This video dates from a while back, but it is a classic:

Abayzid Ali, on the other hand, sings in Afar. His lyrics have a more poetic touch:

Writer Abdourahman Waberi put us on to this song by Mohammed Ali aka ‘Fourchette’ about whom he says: “It may sound weird, but it is more than that. Inspiring, poetic. He’s singing in Somali. Popular among the youth as well. His son has remixed some of his old songs”:

And finally, this song. Not quite from Djibouti, but the video was recorded there. Why? We have no idea. Neither are we sure they’re showing this on Djibouti TV. Lumidee ft. Chase Manhattan:

You’ll find more on the DjibTube video channels.

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

On our annual publishing break, Gaza’s genocide continues to unfold in real time yet slips from public grasp. This is not just a crisis of politics, but of how reality is mediated—and why we must build spaces where meaning can still take root.

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.