Africa Is a Country

Africans in New York City

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

Africans in New York City

By
Boima Tucker

"Afro-Spectacle," a music and film event by DJ collective, Dutty Artz, explores the working class African immigrant experiences in the city.

A promotional image from "God's Own Country."

The film, “God’s Own Country,” by director Femi Agbayewa, presents the story of a young Nigerian lawyer who immigrates to New York City only to discover that life in America is not what he hoped.  A mix between an American hip hop gangster flick and a Nollywood drama, the film is a great initiation into the West African film industry for an American audience unfamiliar it.

A public screening of the film is happening on February 1st, at the Spectacle Theater in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. It will form part of “Afro-Spectacle,” hosted by my Dutty Artz brethren, DJ Rupture and Lamin Fofana. Before the screening, they will host a special 2-hour live radio show around these themes. African music videos purchased in the corner stores of New York City, will be projected throughout the show for those present.  The broadcast will also be carried live on WFMU, the  East Orange, New Jersey, community radio station.

The theme of the night dovetails nicely with my own project, African in New York, which is out due out February 21st.

Femi Agbayewa is currently in London developing his television series “Brooklyn Shakara,” so he won’t be able to make it in person.  The space is limited, and it’s first come first serve. If you can’t make it, check us out live, or listen back to the archived show on Lamin’s The Embassy and Rupture’s Mudd Up pages.

Further Reading

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.

Kagame’s hidden war

Rwanda’s military deployments in Mozambique and its shadowy ties to M23 rebels in eastern Congo are not isolated interventions, rather part of a broader geopolitical strategy to expand its regional influence.

After the coups

Without institutional foundations or credible partners, the Alliance of Sahel States risks becoming the latest failed experiment in regional integration.