Takun J, the leading proponent of the Liberian music genre, breaks down its essence for a group of visiting journalism students from Syracuse University.

* I would also suggest reading Boima’s account of the social impact of hipco. Here’s an excerpt:

Despite Hipco’s activist potential, it has not yet been able to exploit its positive social influence to the fullest. While it is helping to define a new national identity for an entire generation of young Liberians, the economics of the industry are still entrenched in the same old patronage systems. While home studios have allowed artists to record independently, CDs and tapes still dominate the market, as opposed to Ghana, where the MP3 is the most common currency, and one company holds a monopoly on the manufacture and distribution of CDs and tapes. A political system that has traditionally kept many Liberians from forming local businesses combined with the growing problem of local piracy has made independent music a risky enterprise. Cellcom, one of the only local corporations, does sponsor events, but they seem to be the only ones doing so. Other locally operating corporations like Firestone, Chevron, and various mining companies are foreign entities, who don’t tend to have much interest in connecting with local youth. As a result, the only way for many artists to make a living is through sponsorship by politicians or foreign businesses.

Further Reading

After the uprising

Following two years of mass protest, Kenya stands at a crossroads. A new generation of organizers is confronting an old question: how do you turn revolt into lasting change? Sungu Oyoo joins the AIAC podcast to discuss the vision of Kenya’s radical left.

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.