Africa Is a Country

Africa is a Kickstarter

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

Africa is a Kickstarter

By
Boima Tucker

Two music related Kickstarter campaigns deserve your attention.

The above video is from The Nile Project, a campaign put together by Egyptian ethnomusicologist Mina Girgis, and Ethiopian-American singer Meklit Hadero. Meklit and Mina, based in San Francisco, are raising money to complete an international music collaboration based around the cultures of the Nile River. They’ve already lined up an impressive series of events including a floating band, a TED X event, and a world touring show, but they need your help to begin on their scouting trip to recruit musicians. Visit their page to donate.

Already almost funded is the Radio Tanzania project, focused on the Tanzanian Broadcasting Corporation in Dar es Salaam. In conjunction with Tanzania’s celebration of their 50th year of independence, the state radio station is digitizing their archives to preserve Tanzanian cultural and political history. The campaign will also help fund a documentary about the preservation process including interviews with historical Tanzanian cultural figures.

And if you’re still looking for something to give to, don’t forget that Sorie Kondi is still trying to get to SXSW in Austin, Texas!

Further Reading

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.

The grift tank

In Washington’s think tank ecosystem, Africa is treated as a low-stakes arena where performance substitutes for knowledge. The result: unqualified actors shaping policy on behalf of militarists, lobbyists, and frauds.