Africa Is a Country

Music Break. Bonus Friday Edition

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

Music Break. Bonus Friday Edition

By
Tom Devriendt

5 for le weekend.

“Propaganda” one of a series of songs/videos made by The King’s Will –one half of the UK duo is Musa Okwonga, whose family migrated from Uganda. The song is a homage to PR and advertising pioneer Edward Bernays:

M.E.D.’s “Blaxican.” L.A. identity politics:

A scene from “Coz Ov Moni,” “the world’s first pidgen musical” by Ghanaian duo Fokn Bois. They’ve been posting clips from the film on Youtube. This is the most recent one in the last few days:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7ETwfWFX9JU

Clips one and two here and here.

A parody of rapper Drake’s “Up All Night” by Toronto-based Nigerian Femi Lawson:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H9p7UWx5NH0

Sweden and Senegal collaborate. Sousou and Maher Sissoko:

Video for “Rain On My Lips” by rapper Pepe Haze (Burundian) and singer Steph McKee (Kenyan). They’re based in Nairobi, Kenya. The video is described as “the first ever African music video that is entirely in stop motion animation.”

See you Monday.

H/T: Kweligee and Welfare State of Mind.

Further Reading

The people want to breathe

In Tunisia’s coastal city of Gabès, residents live in the shadow of the phosphate industry. As pollution deepens and repression returns, a new generation revives the struggle for life itself.

After Paul Biya

Cameroon’s president has ruled for over four decades by silence and survival. Now, with dynastic succession looming and no clear exit strategy, the country teeters between inertia and implosion.

Leapfrogging literacy?

In outsourcing the act of writing to machines trained on Western language and thought, we risk reinforcing the very hierarchies that decolonization sought to undo.

Repoliticizing a generation

Thirty-eight years after Thomas Sankara’s assassination, the struggle for justice and self-determination endures—from stalled archives and unfulfilled verdicts to new calls for pan-African renewal and a 21st-century anti-imperialist front.

Drip is temporary

The apparel brand Drip was meant to prove that South Africa’s townships could inspire global style. Instead, it revealed how easily black success stories are consumed and undone by the contradictions of neoliberal aspiration.

Energy for whom?

Behind the fanfare of the Africa Climate Summit, the East African Crude Oil Pipeline shows how neocolonial extraction still drives Africa’s energy future.