Africa Is a Country

Friday Bonus Music Break, N°14

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

Friday Bonus Music Break, N°14

By
Tom Devriendt

Quite the mixed bag this week. ‘Disco Malapaa’ by Arusha’s Jambo Squad above; nine more below.

Like Jambo Squad, Mokoomba (from Zimbabwe) switch into Latino mode halfway in their new video:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uqZdaVNOHj0

Anbuley’s ‘Oleee’ arrives just in time for European summer:

Also based in Europe, although his latest video (like the previous one) suggests a longing for elsewhere, is Gaël Faye:

Simphiwe Dana decided to take a step back from social media a while ago and concentrate on doing what she does best: speak truth through music:

Still in South Africa, taxis and drifters:

South Africa based poppy Cameroonian Denzyl:

From Guinea, the Matoto Family:

Sierra Leone’s Refugee All Stars signed up for a cause:

And — to turn it down a notch — Ablaye Cissoko and Volker Goetze wrote a subdued lament for Haiti — quite beautifully — and recorded a video for it in Gorée:

Further Reading

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.

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.

Energy for whom?

Behind the fanfare of the Africa Climate Summit, the East African Crude Oil Pipeline shows how neocolonial extraction still drives Africa’s energy future.