AfricaIs aCountry

Friday Bonus Music Break, N°21

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

Friday Bonus Music Break, N°21

By
Tom Devriendt

Nigerian-Swedish pop star Dr Alban features in this new St. John’s Dance video above. Swedish-Finnish-Gambian (yeh) rapper Adam Tensta is the guy behind the group. (Tensta started with more straightforward rap, but has since found a slightly different sound, as illustrated in this Nollywood-influenced video.) Next, more common Nigerian pop:

Your weekly dose of kuduro courtesy of JD, Nagrelha and Rei Panda:

Jean Grae created this video for ‘Kill Screen’:

A Sauti Sol & Spoek Mathambo collaboration:

Via okayafrica: Octa Push’s ‘Mambowrp’.

A dramatic video for new music by Nëggus (repping for Togo) and Kungobram:

From Grahamstown, South Africa, the Wordsuntame duo:

A down-beat version of the closing song of Terakaft’s new record Kel Tamasheq (from Mali):

And a Nomadic Wax moment with Kisangani (Congo) artist Alesh:

Those Nigeria-Finland-Sweden-Gambia connections? That’s Mikko. We’re back on Monday.

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.