Africa Is a Country

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

Who deserves the city?

Colonial urbanism cast African neighborhoods as chaotic, unplanned, and undesirable. In postcolonial Dar es Salaam, that legacy still shapes who builds, who belongs, and what the middle class fears the city becoming.

Djinns in Berlin

At the 13th Berlin Biennale, works from Zambia and beyond summon unseen forces to ask whether solidarity can withstand the gaze of surveillance.

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.