AfricaIs aCountry

Friday Bonus Music Break, N°9

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

Friday Bonus Music Break, N°9

By
Tom Devriendt

Your weekly #musicbreak roundup. Mokobe and Oumou Sangare pray for peace in Mali:

Yasiin Bey, Dead Prez and mikeflo’s Trayvon Martin Tribute:

Finest South African hipsters Dirty Paraffin (H/T Phiona):

Optical Illusion and friends (H/T Mikko) — the video comes with a long by-line, but the track itself will do:

Finland’s Gracias:

Stephen Marley went to Africa and returned with this video:

From Namibia, not your ordinary Nam tune:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=74H6MC2XIbc

Chris Dave (H/T Okayafrica) gives Fela (and Tony Allen) the remix treatment:

http://vimeo.com/41434050

Finally, I was 13 when my taste in music took a drastic turn. R.I.P. MCA.

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.