AfricaIs aCountry

Friday Bonus Music Break, N°7

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

Friday Bonus Music Break, N°7

By
Tom Devriendt

Nowadays we’re doing multiple #musicbreaks on Twitter and Facebook when the spirits move us. We figured we’d put the ten favorite ones up every Friday as our #BonusMusicBreak. First up, old school jazz man Pharoah Sanders is still doing it. Here’s a video (uploaded this week on Youtube; recorded last year) of him and his band playing (and him getting down):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1N3kd5NAWeM

Since we’re on the old schoolers. Here’s the video for Ebo Taylor’s ‘Ayesama’, shot in his hometown of Saltpond (Ghana):

I really like Lee Fields. You’re The Kind of Girl:

Zimbabwe celebrated its independence this week. Here’s Tendai, one half of Shabazz Palaces with “rhodZi” (the video is directed by Seattle-based filmmaker and critic Charles Mudede):

California-based Ethiopian artists Meklit Hadero, Gabriel Teodros and Burntface combine to form CopperWire (H/T: siddhmi):

‘Bang Bang’ by one of Sean’s New School students, Selena Dhillon (originally from Toronto) featuring Humble The Poet:

THEESatisfaction’s “funk-psychedelic feminista sci-fi epics”:

Nicki Minaj is selling ice water in Accra? Zongo!

http://youtu.be/Zk9_FcuX4Jk

Boima: “Yup, I’m a fan.” PR: “Sierra Leone’s Premier Rap Guy From Freetown Releases His Long Awaited Video Featuring Farda G. Shot Entirely On Location In Freetown The Vid Promises To Be Raw, Grity & Strictly Hip-Hop”:

Finally, kuduro baile from Germany; Gato Preto’s ‘Tschukudu’ (H/T: TropicalBass):

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.