Africa Is a Country

Doctor Mac

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

Doctor Mac

By
Hinda Talhaoui

This is number 4 in the music break series, Paris is a Continent.

A still from the music video for Mac Tyer's "Docteur So."

It’s the return of one of the best R&B artists in French. K-Reen is back with a new track called “Comme avant” (Like Before) featuring rapper Youssoupha.  She’s a veteran of French R&B and rap, having been featured on one of the first compilations of local R&B in the mid-1990s and collaborating with legends like MC Solaar. Youssoupha, whose father is a legendary Congolese rumba musician, Tabu Ley Rochereau, needs no introduction. K-Reen was born in French Guiana.  Their collaboration is another example of how Paris is a place where the black (and Arab) diasporas meet and colleraborate. K-Reen’s album should be out in March 2012.

We’ve featured Nessbeal in this series already. This time, a song from his new album, the song “La Nébuleuse des Aigles” featuring his discovery Isleym (remember her). Nessbeal (government name: Nabil Sahli) and Isleym are both of Moroccan descent.

Somebody new in this column: Mac Tyer.  The video for the track “Docteur So.”  Like most of the musicians in this post and this series, he is from the suburbs of Paris. In his case, Aubervilliers, in the northeastern part of the city. His family migrated to France from its former colony, Cameroon.

Further Reading

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.