Africa Is a Country

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

Colonize then, deport now

Trump’s deportation regime revives a colonial blueprint first drafted by the American Colonization Society, when Black lives were exiled to Africa to safeguard a white republic.

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.