Africa Is a Country

Y’En A Marre’s political hip-hop anthems

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

Y’En A Marre’s political hip-hop anthems

By
Tom Devriendt

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tCuKAn-T0pk&w=600&h=347]

8 of 13 Senegalese opposition candidates trying to unseat Abdoulaye Wade in the upcoming presidential elections (including three former prime ministers under Wade, and no-longer-candidate Youssou N’Dour) gathered on Obelisk Square in Dakar last Sunday. The rally went peaceful, “crowds of color-coordinated supporters awaited while listening to political hip-hop anthems in Wolof.” On Tuesday, Wade “tried to divert attention from growing street protests calling for his resignation and prove that he still had grassroots support by leading an impromptu rally through the capital,” some hours after he summoned “the U.S. ambassador to Dakar” over the ambassador’s telling local journalists that “President Wade has compromised the elections and threatened the security of the country by insisting on running for a third term in the February 26 presidential election” — a move in which “a lobbying group in Atlanta” had a hand. The anthems on Obelisk Square included the sound of Y’En A Marre.

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.