AfricaIs aCountry

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

The people want to breathe

In Tunisia’s coastal city of Gabès, residents live in the shadow of the phosphate industry. As pollution deepens and repression returns, a new generation revives the struggle for life itself.

After Paul Biya

Cameroon’s president has ruled for over four decades by silence and survival. Now, with dynastic succession looming and no clear exit strategy, the country teeters between inertia and implosion.

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.

The king of Kinshasa

Across five decades, Chéri Samba has chronicled the politics and poetry of everyday Congolese life, insisting that art belongs to the people who live it.

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.