AfricaIs aCountry

Friday Bonus Music Break, N°15

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

Friday Bonus Music Break, N°15

By
Tom Devriendt

Fofo-born Shokanti released a video this week in celebration of Cape Verdean Independence (slipping in those famous words by Amílcar Cabral at the very end). Above. You’ve noticed our blogging went into holiday mode but there’s always time for music. So 9 more below. Brazilian Kamau’s 21/12 finally gets a video; not surprisingly it’s another tribute to skate life:

Warongx (from Khayelitsha) live at Tagoras (Observatory, Cape Town; H/T Sixgun Gospel):

Ghana pop for northern summers. 5Five’s ‘Bossu Kena’:

And some Pan-African pop from Ruff N Smooth:

There seems to exist a standard script for how to record a music video as a diaspora artist on a visit somewhere on the continent (in this case, Abidjan), as Soprano and R.E.D.K. confirm:

And so do Sexion D’Assaut.

Neneh Cherry knows her MF Doom classics (H/T Sarah):

Cameroonian Jovi throws Tabu Ley Rochereau’s ‘Pitié’ in the mix:

True, Youssoupha did that better.

A remix from a different kind: Brussels-based débruit “sampling lost African VHS and reinterpreting discovered African melodies and rhythms.” Seriously though, his music is a lot more exciting than the selling line suggests:

And lastly, via Ricci, “Senegal’s political hip hop for effect”. Red Black:

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.