Africa Is a Country

Friday Music Bonus Edition

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

Friday Music Bonus Edition

By
Tom Devriendt

Our weekly round-up of new (and a little less new) music videos. First, this great video for ‘I Am An African,’ the first single of Dutch-Ghanaian artist Papa Ghana’s EP ‘I Am An African.’ (The song came out last year).

The video for Nigerian singer Nneka’s latest single, ‘Shining Star’ shot on the Canary Islands in Spain:

Harlem, New York based emcee Rugz D. Brewler‘s race conscious anthem, ‘Cuz I’m Black’:

Yasiin Bey (the former Mos Def) performed N.I.P. at Radio Nova in Paris this week (remember that track, including the line: “Prince William ain’t do it right if you asked me, if I was him I’d put some black up in the family”). He also did this new ‘Sunshine Screwface’:

A music video for ‘Past, Present and Future’ off “The Extraordinaires” by the Zambian-Canadian collaboration, The Holstar and Teck-Zilla. It includes a cameo by Zone Fam:

And Sean is taking a group of New School students to Cape Town this summer. He plans to make this music video compulsory as a language lesson:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UAOJ4VL9Xg4&

Further Reading

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.

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.