Africa Is a Country

Soulja Boy takes on Joseph Kony

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

Soulja Boy takes on Joseph Kony

By
Sean Jacobs

It has come to this. Musicians, especially rappers, had to wade in on the American social media campaign to "Make Kony Famous."

Soulja Boy.

Like everyone else who is an instant expert on Uganda, rappers were quick to declare themselves on board with #Kony2012. (African musicians who were quick to uncritically post (their approval of) #Kony2012 were electro rapper and and a favorite of this site, Spoek Mathambo (who has since deleted his support), The Very Best (same like Spoek), and other South Africans like Gazelle and Van Coke Cartel, who still support #Kony2012.)

But some have taken it further, setting their admiration to music. They had to release songs (isn’t it too early?). You can imagine the deep thoughts that took a whole 72 hours (at best) to be formulated. It’s like a hot take. I woke up this morning to learn that Soulja Boy, who likes a fight (his last adversary was 80s rapper and now actor, Ice T), has thrown in his lot with Invisible Children and wants to “Stop Kony” (H/T: Palika Makam).

If you want to be tortured, go listen here.

Hilarious and embarrassing. This is not even a song. It’s like a monologue set to some vague drum beat. And he drops the word “swag” a few times.

Even more perplexing: why any other musician would want to rap to such dead lyrics or music. But Soulja Boy’s music has been used in the past by other musicians (yes, clearly not by him) to comment on war (that time, it was on child soldiers in Sierra Leone).

As I argued before, I don’t have much time for the phenomenon that is Soulja Boy and his nonsensical lyrics. Like in “Turn My Swag On.” But a German group, Die Orsons, took the song, slowed it down, gave it a acoustic feel, worked in some images from a short film, some CNN audio, an interview with former child soldier Ismael Beah, and made it into a protest/PR for a campaign about ending the participation of children in wars.

But back to the present.

Another rapper, Mistah F.A.B., has also made a Joseph Kony song (“Kony Freestyle”). He has better beats than Soulja, and at least his rhymes go with the music and combines it with some geopolitics  (“it’s all a Government ploy to get oil out of Uganda”). Listen here.

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.